1) Arnold Kling provides his initial thoughts about Francis Fukuyama’s latest volume, Political Order and Decay. Of note is Kling’s taxonomy of governments based on whether or not a government is good at providing public goods in an egalitarian manner.
2) A femur found in 2008 in western Siberia has led to the creation of the oldest human genome that has yet to be sequenced at 45,000 years-old. Svante Pääbo, a director over at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, has concluded “It’s almost twice as old as the next oldest genome that has been sequenced.”
3) Brian Aitken has written an article about how he came to write The Blue Tent Sky, “10 Months, 2 Bottles of Scotch, and $42,000 Later”. My review for The Blue Tent Sky is here.
4) The Economist writes about how Nigeria has controlled the spread of Ebola within its borders, and the lessons that can be learned in “Ebola in west Africa: Not necessarily a death sentence”. It’s all really about institutions and civic trust. Liberia in particular lacks those two, being a poor nation that is recovering from a brutal decades-long civil war. In Arnold Kling's taxonomy, Liberia would be a predatory government.
5) Bill Vallicella turns to the golden age of American philosophy in “Josiah Royce and the Paradox of Revelation” over at Maverick Philosophy. Oh how the state of American philosophy has fallen since the days of Royce, and the Jameses.