ToK Essays Nov 2024

Since 1950, global fertility rates have decreased steadily. Now. the average woman has less than 3 children on average.

There's no one agreed version of history. So how can we trust any of it?

President Joe Biden on Tuesday used stark language as he mourned one of the worst acts of racial violence in US history, marking the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

The long read: Statues of historical figures are lazy, ugly and distort history. From Cecil Rhodes to Rosa Parks, let’s get rid of them all

The five stages of grief are a overly simplistic representation of the grieving process, and one that was never intended by their creator

In science it is not only OK to be wrong, it is an unavoidable and perpetual state - depending, of course, on how you define "wrong". We lack a complete understanding of the universe, and al

So how do we untangle this potential problematic knot in our concepts?
The idea is that knowledge has both a subjective and objective element to it. That is, knowledge exists on a ‘spectrum’ – a sliding scale, if you like – of objective reason and subjective emotion; of certainty and confidence which do not always go in the same direction.

Physicists may have just made a major breakthrough in our understanding of the Universe.

Are spiritual beliefs an inevitable consequence of human evolution?

TED Talk Subtitles and Transcript: What drives society's understanding of right and wrong? In this thought-provoking talk, futurist Juan Enriquez offers a historical outlook on what humanity once deemed acceptable -- from human sacrifice and public executions to slavery and eating meat -- and makes a surprising case that exponential advances in technology leads to more ethical behavior.

The Indian Ocean provides a new way of looking at world history that has been dominated by European accounts.

Whether to kill baby Hitler might be a political firecracker, but can counterfactuals say anything deeper about the past?

There is a branch of knowledge, akin to pseudo-scientific knowledge like ‘flat Earth theory’, in which one can seem to have absolute certainty and full confidence, because the truth of that knowledge is somehow ‘guaranteed’ or ‘underwritten’ by a higher power. Faith-based knowledge.

Since the research is really about the pipeline, the xenobots are primarily intended as a demonstration of the system's potential. If you're wondering why we might want living robots, you're not alone. According to senior researcher roboticist Joshua Bongard, "It's impossible to know what th

Peterson’s claim that “medicine kills more people than it helps” is the latest in a long line of demonstrably false claims – yet his fans continue to hang off his every word

Now, consider a clichéd example when we seem to have the utmost certainty and confidence in knowledge and they both seem to be moving in the same direction: 2 + 2 = 4. On the one hand, this is something you cannot doubt, isn’t it? You know this with 100% certainty.. You might actually be very confident about you

As you dig into the definitions of these two key terms in these prompts – ‘confidence’ and ‘certainty’ – you’ll start to see that they appear to overlap in meaning. At times, you might even think they’re synonymous and can be used interchangeably. But take a step back. There is a relationship between the concepts but they are not the same.

Despite cosmology’s enormous progress in the last 50 years, we still know very little about our universe. General relativity, the theory which allowed modern cosmology to start in firs

When Charles Darwin published "Descent of Man" 150 years ago, he launched scientific investigations on human origins and evolution. This week, three leading scientists in different, but related disciplines published "Modern theories of human evolution foreshadowed by Darwin's 'Descent of Man'," in Science, in which they identify three insights from Darwin's opus on human evolution that modern science has reinforced.

From Stalinist Russia to the Spanish Civil War, the 20th century offered George Orwell a huge array of material for his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Dorian Lynskey charts the events that inspired a masterpiece

When their predictions don't come true, cults are faced with a choice: accept reality, or rationalise the failure. Which road will Qanon take?