I’ve been researching an article about the morality of human cloning, prompted almost entirely by Brian’s article co-written with Sarah McGrath, which is a defense of the permissibility of cloning. Prior to reading McGrath and Weatherson’s paper (or more precisely, Brian’s multiple postings here when they were writing it) I had no real intuitions about the issue, but their defense prompted me to think about what might count as good reasons to prohibit cloning. I share their dismay at the weakness of the arguments most commonly presented.
But this post isn’t directly about why cloning might be prohibited.
In the course of their defense of cloning Weatherson and McGrath appeal to an interest parents have for which they make no argument; the interest in rearing children who are their biological descendents. They need, I think, to assume this interest because without it there would be no claim to assistance in reproduction except when the supply of potential adoptees had been exhausted (which, in our world, is not the case). Potential adoptees have an extremely strong interest in finding a family home, because it is better to be brought up in families than in other kinds of institutions. I have looked, rather lackadaisically, for other pro, or more-or-less-pro, cloners, and those I have found — John Robertson, Mary Warnock, and Buchanan et.al. all make this assumption, and do so without any argument.
Now, in the context of the actual debate about cloning, it is fine to make this assumption, because the anti-cloners, also, tend to share it, although it plays no role in defending their opposition to cloning (or almost no role). But is it true?
Well, obviously it is true, right? Then why does it get so little defense? I can see immediately that lots of people care a great deal about having biological offspring, and raising them. And I can also see that there might be both efficiency considerations and child-centered reasons for wanting children, other-things being equal, to be raised by their biological parents. And I am not, I promise, contemplating the idea that we should redistribute children away from their biological parents to those best suited to rearing them or anything like that. But I am having a hard time figuring out why parents have an interest in rearing children who are biologically related to them sufficiently strong that it would support, for example, a policy that would enable people to do that even at the cost that some significant number of children (potential adoptees) will be reared in orphanages rather than in family homes.
I’ve talked to lots of people about this, and what they tend to give me is just intuitions, not actual arguments. The pro-cloners insist, rightly as far as I can see, that rearing a child biologically related to oneself is a different activity (or project) than rearing a non-biologically related child. Sure it is different. But it doesn’t seem to me that it is incommensurable, nor that it is more valuable, or even that it contributes more value to the person who is doing the rearing. And much of the activity is the same (when described at what seems to me the same level of abstraction): providing for the needs, including the developmental needs, of a child, and participating in a loving relationship with that child. There doesn’t, to me, seem to be enough of a difference to play the role that the pro-cloners want it to.
Can anyone either direct me to literature that makes the case for there being a morally weighty parental interest in rearing a biologically descended child, or just give me a good argument to that effect?
The evolutionary ethics people generally put forward a good line on this one. By shifting from a person-centric conception of the benefits of child rearing to a gene-centred one, they do get a nice, neat case for why parents have an interest in raising their own. Helping your offspring to get ahead gives your genes a better chance at passing themselves on.
That is not to say that the evolutionary ethics case doesn’t have serious problems. As a purely ethical claim, it substitutes ought for will. Even if we accept their arguments completely, it might explain why parents do express a greater interest in their biological offspring but doesn’t say that it is right for them to. It also fails to explain the copious number of parents who do not express such an interest - various forms of child neglect or abandonment - nor the people who adopt despite already having biologically related offspring.
Still, it’s the gene-centred view of reproduction that’s put forward the most developped arguments I can think of.
I would imagine that if a child has all of your genes - instead of half - you should under their scheme have an even greater interest in your offspring. On the other hand, sexual reproduction - mixing genes - has reasonably demonstrable value in the propagation of the species.
There might be an argument against cloning there: Having children by cloning is a free-rider problem the same way that refusing to get your child vaccinated is. If one child isn’t vaccinated, but everyone else is, that child avoids the medical risks involved in vaccination and has little of catching a communicable disease. If many children aren’t vaccinated, then the whole group is at risk. Same for cloning: one clone raises your genes chances of survival. Too many people clone, and genetic diversity declines, putting the whole species at risk.
I haven’t followed cloning arguments closely, so I haven’t given it any real thought.
Well, your genes cheat. They stack the deck. The biological imperative is very powerful. The nine months of carrying the baby are laden with emotion for both parents, as is childbirth. This exists to prepare the emotional conditions in the parents conducive to caring for the child. As an adoptive parent you don’t get this.
Both my wife and I are adopted children. In our family histories, we can both find examples where our parents were completely mystified by our behavior or characteristics.
At least, with our children, who are biological, when they do wierd stuff, we can trace it back to a familiar characteristic in one of us. Our parents had no such reference for my introversion or her hyperactivity.
In the end, the decision to have children at all doesn’t seem rational. As best I can tell, it’s an act of self-esteem, THE act of self-esteem, saying you want more people in the world like you.
But a biological child is going to be MORE like you than an adopted child, isn’t it?
To be honest, I think that asking for arguments for this one is rather like trying to calculate the second derivative of a plate of cabbage - it’s something approaching a category mistake.
I yield to nobody on the entire internet when it comes to hostility to evolutionary psychology, but this strikes me as one of the cases where, as Mary Midgely suggests, it is entirely correct to recognise the existence of primal drives, and indeed that it is impossible to give much purpose to ethics unless one does so … this sounds rather convoluted … oh go on, I’ll pop down to the bog and get the reference …
“1. Innate tendencies are extremely important in the formation of human behaviour.
2. Recognition of these innate tendencies is not in the least inimical to human freedom. On the contrary, if there were no such tendencies, the concept of freedom would be unintelligible
3. Careful and informed comparison with the behaviour of other species can illuminate human behaviour […]
[…] However, that makes it all the more necessary to dissociate these leigitmate, familiar, general ways of thinking from certain quite unnecessary excrescences which belong peculiarly to sociobiology; the mindless fatalism, the bad genetics, the casual, distorted, slapdash treatment of the psychology of motive [… so Dawkins can fuck off -DD]”
“Gene-juggling”, in “Sociobiology Examined” ed Ashley Montagu.
In the case of a lot of people, who won’t otherwise have genetically related children, cloning actually INCREASES the diversity of the gene pool. Anyway, I find it ironic that many of the same people who’d oppose cloning as a reduction of genetic diversity, would oppose germ line genetic engineering, an obvious way of enhancing genetic diversity.
Trust you, Daniel, to put my scholarship to shame.
I see Midgley’s point. In the particular context, though, I don’t know how much weight to give it. The context is this: we are deciding whether to develop/permit access to/provide reproductive technologies to help people who otherwise would not be able to have biologically related children to get them. If we don’t then they have to choose between not having children or providing a home for an adoptive child. Note that most people who adopt do so only after having tried to reproduce, and many succeed in reproducing as well (after the adoption). These people report (when I, incredibly rudely, ask them) no difference in their feelings toward/sense of joy about/etc the biologically connected and non-biologically connected children.
Of course, they are a self-selecting bunch, and that’s why I mention the child-centered reasons for wanting biological parents. But I wonder how much of the pervasive desire for biological connection is really primal (some, sure, at least some), and how much of it is not.
So I see this gives a reason to think there’s an interest. Thanks. The question in my context then is how much weight to place on it.
(Full disclosure — both my kids are my biological offspring, though they seem to have inherited none of my faults).
As father to a child not biologically related to myself or to my wife, I do not see any qualitative differences between my experience of parenting and my friends’ experiences who are adoptive or biological fathers. I don’t think it is a “different experience” to raise a child who is the fruit of your own loins, than to raise a child whom you have invited into your household. Or rather — naturally every parent-child pair is unique and there will be aspects of every parent’s experience that are unique; but there is no line to be drawn between “adoptive parenting” on the one hand and “gestative parenting” on the other.
Sorry; quoted “different experience” in the comment above based on my remembered reading of Harry’s post; his phrase was “different activity (or project)” — my exception to this language stands.
In “The Truth About Cinderella,” evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson found that a child is 100 times more likely to be abused or killed by a stepparent, who has no genetic stake in the child, than by a genetic parent, who does. This statistic is enough to convince me that the benefits of a genetic link between parent and child shouldn’t be ignored.
Joe — Harry was enquiring about benefits to the parents, not to the child.
Joe O - two things — one is that if they are right that gives a child-centered reason for wanting the link, not a parent-centered reason. The potential adoptees, furthermore, simply don’t have the option of being reared by a biological parent.
But, second, my understanding is that a new book about to be published by MIT Press (can’t remember author’s name) decisively refutes the finding. I’ll try to find out more about that though.
Jeremy — I take your comments as friendly to me. I’d like to hear more. All my instincts are on your side of this, not the side I’m looking for.
Naturally, I don’t refer to any present company, but one of the most irritating things about evolutionary smalltalk (and its subsets in science journalism and bestsellers) is the smalltalkers’ typically monocultural context. It reminds me for all the world of sixteenth and seventeenth century assumptions about whose side God was on. I’m not an anthropologist, but even in written history I’ve encountered cultures in which children are normally not raised by their biological parents. (One might even make a case for the last few centuries of upper class Europe as an example.) Would we call such cultures “evolutionarily unfit”?
If we want to explain our (unusually?) high valuation of direct blood ties (which would certainly have statistical influence on the behavior of stepparents), we have to do so culturally instead of “purely” biologically.
Joe: It doesn’t make sense to me to take results from studies of stepchildren and apply them to cases of adopted children. In fact (wanders to bookcase) the Daly-Wilson study actually found that adopted children suffered much lower levels of neglect and abuse than children living with both parents, which is a problem for the whole “genetic investment” thesis that they never really dealt with; it appears that even Hackney Social Services does a better job of protecting children than Darwinian adaptation.
Ray is on to something here, I think; the biological drive is very much to have children which are biologically one’s own, rather than to necessarily go through the rigamarole of raising them. I know a couple of unmarried chaps who have made anonymous donations to sperm banks for this reason; psychologically, it seems to me that there is a profound desire to maintain some form of investment in the future and the root of the desire is more the fear of death rather than the sex drive, but I might be wrong.
One would assume that in order to adequately study the issue, you’d need to control for the parents’ inclinations, and study parents like mine.
My mother suffered secondary infertility after I was born, and subsequently adopted my little sister.
A. On the one hand, my sister has been given at least as much love and attention and resources as I have, and probably more. I am sure that any type of study that studies whatever types of variable would show that there was no statistical indicator that would show which child was biological and which was adopted. But:
B. The reason I say “probably more” resources is that my sister is a “special needs” child (now adult), having been diagnosed somewhere between the ages of 6 and 10 as having “Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.” By the time all the resources are taken into account, I’m sure that the additional funds spent on her needs will more than make up for the one-shot expense of paying for my college education. Assumedly, a parent who adopts has a much higher risk of adopting a child with that type of problem, since the parent has no control over the entire gestation process.
I believe that your answer to “Why don’t people want to adopt” will turn out to be identical to the question “Why dno’t people want to buy a used car when it’s so much cheaper than a new one, and only a little older?” When you buy it new, you know everything that happened to it. When you adopt, you don’t.
I know a couple of unmarried chaps who have made anonymous donations to sperm banks….
This pinpoints another evolutionary misfire in want of glib sociobiological explanation. Why don’t the sperm banks hold televised deathmatches on cable TV to raise money, the survivor’s prize being the right to make such anonymous donations?
If Haldane, famously, would jump into a raging flood to save two siblings (or eight cousins), wouldn’t it follow that your unmarried chums should be auditioning with flamethrowers for the right to reap a hundredfold? Or is this a two-cultures thing, where the ones without girlfriends also can’t do the math?
Harry — I’ve been thinking about this all day and am not sure quite where to go with it. I have no data, am not by instinct a statistician or a scientist. So I’m not sure I have any useful input for you. All I can offer is my observation of myself and other fathers in my social milieu, most of whom are gestative parents — my observation is that there is almost no difference in our experiences which is attributable to my daughter’s not being the product of my and my wife’s gametes. Any such difference is dwarfed by other, easily discerned differences in our situations — age of parents, financial security, amount of free time, etc. So take that for what it’s worth…
I agree we don’t have an argument for this in the paper, but I’m not altogether sure we need one, or at least that we need a good one. That is, we don’t need any kind of argument that rests on any relatively deep moral principles.
For a lot of people, they have a very strong desire to have children that are biologically related to them. And this is the kind of desire that, if it is satisfied, they will regard as being a central part of what gives their life meaning and value. (These are empirical claims, and I haven’t done any research to check them, but I’m pretty confident they’re true.) I’m inclined to think that’s just enough to give them an interest in having biologically related children.
So I don’t care, for instance, why they have this desire, or even whether having different desires (or not satisfying these desires) would make them better off in some respects. They have the desires, they are (especially if satisfied) central to the conception of the kind of life they want to live, and that’s enough.
Of course, that’s no argument as to why such a subjectively determined interest should outweigh the interest potential adoptees have in acquiring parents. (Or any other kind of interests that are at play here, such as the interests of people who would otherwise benefit if medical research was differently directed.) I possibly need a stronger argument there, or at least a justification for the kind of subjectivism about welfare that’s implicit in my view.
Why don’t the sperm banks hold televised deathmatches on cable TV to raise money, the survivor’s prize being the right to make such anonymous donations?
A while back I read of a fertility doctor who had the habit of substuting his own sperm for that of the ostensible donors’. He went to prison and all, but he did manage to sire hundreds of sprogs, so in Darwinian terms he is a raging success.
If I recall the doctor’s photo correctly, he was fat and unattractive, so the sociobiologist in me must conclude that his sleight-of-hand with the vials was adaptive. It would probably be falling into the naturalistic fallacy, though, to encourage such behaviour.
I think you need to take account of the nasty fact that the market for potential adoptees is very unequal indeed. In white-majority countries, healthy white infants are snapped up, coloured ones after that, and disabled ones find it hard to be placed. So the question needs to be restated. Do parents have an interest in raising a healthy child? Sure. Biological parents will accept bad luck, but taking on an unrelated disabled child is heroic. On the other hand, the disabled child has an even stronger interest in being parented. Skin colour: I believe adoption agencies accept that adopters have a right to specify this, because biological parents do. This also changes the interests equation. If white childless parents turn down a sole offer of a non-white adoptee, this does not invalidate their interest in raising a white child, though their conduct may not be admirable.
Maybe the argument should rely on the fact that since the government is not going to interfere in some objectionable way (e.g. “redistributing children away from their biological parents to those best suited to rearing them”) there will be an overwhelmingly strong link between having children and having biologically related children. So the acknowledged interest in having children simpliciter gets translated into an interest in having biologically related children, because if the government refused to interpret the former interest as potentially involving the latter, that would constitute illegitimate government interference into private life.
That might seem to beg the question in favour of cloning, but I take it that it’s an essentially liberal idea that governments don’t impose their own conceptions of the good life on people. Whilst there is consensus that there is an interest in having children, there is no consensus in there being an interest in having biological related children. But any attempt by the government to interpret the former interest so as not to recongnise the latter would be to impose a particular conception of the good life. Thus the governments should do what they actually do: allow individuals to interpret their interest in having children themselves, so that it may and may not involve an interest in having biologically related children.
If I recall the doctor’s photo correctly, he was fat and unattractive, so the sociobiologist in me must conclude that his sleight-of-hand with the vials was adaptive. It would probably be falling into the naturalistic fallacy, though, to encourage such behaviour.
I suppose it’s true that the circus encouraged early Xianity, but that was neither the Pareto-optimal outcome nor the imperial intent. The goal of spermbank deathmatches would be to drive a heat engine off the marginal propensity to procreate, which evolution should otherwise drive to infinity when the market absorbs the news that sperm banks are even supplying the cup. The challenge for the sociobiologists is to explain what’s siphoning off all that prostatic back-pressure today.
(The Internet, presumably. You have to put your pants on and actually go outside to a physical sperm bank before they’ll let you donate.)
It looks to me that what you’re trying to do is get some kind of moral calculus where you can weigh the satisfactions parents get from alternatives to adopting against the satisfaction the child gets from being adopted. And you’re assuming the parents’ satisfactions arise from their child being biologically related. As you point out, it’s a widespread assumption that such satisfactions are justifiable. You question that assumption, without questioning the underlying assumption that that’s why couples prefer not to adopt. But that may not be the case.
It’s an empirical question which used to be difficult to answer, but now there are a number of “infertility blogs” around, all apparently written by women, many of whom talk through their motivations for embarking on ART or deciding to adopt. What seems clear from these blogs is that for these women, at least, and we have no reason to believe them atypical, biological relatedness is not the most significant factor in their decision, in many not a factor at all.
The fundamental desire is to create a family. Couples look for the most efficient manner of accomplishing this desire. Clearly the simplest and most efficient process is the “natural” process where sex (either as desire prompts or deliberately engaged in at the most propitious time in the woman’s cycle) leads uncomplicatedly to pregnancy. It turns out that adoption is the most costly, both in financial terms and in terms of control, though, for the infertile, it is also the most likely to result in a child. The simpler forms of ART (e.g. IUI) are much cheaper and as much under the couple’s control as sex was. REs regard themselves as empowering their patients. Even IVF is cheaper. It is not until one reaches really complicated forms of ART, for example the use of donor eggs or gestational surrogacy, that financial costs begin to approach the costs of adoption. Even then, although now a third person is involved, the couple retains considerable control over the process. There is no equivalent to the adoption application or, worse, the dreaded homestudy. There is no third person who considers him/herself as representing interests which may be oppposed to the interests of the couple. The total cost of ART from the time one starts it to the time one emerges with a child (if one does) may well be larger than the costs of adoption, but for any given cycle, the previous failures represent a sunk cost. The decision, at any particular time, is based on the cost (financial, emotional, physical—ART takes a physical toll on the woman) of the next cycle. ART is typically abandoned for adoption (or childlessness accepted) when either the next cycle is medically infeasible or the couple decides the emotional costs of another failed cycle will be unbearable.
It is likely that cloning (if it ever becomes feasible) will take its place somewhere in the spectrum of ART, perhaps after IVF with a woman’s own eggs has definitively failed, but before one tries using donor eggs.
So the satisfactions whose moral status needs to be weighed stem from a couple’s desire to create their family at as little expense as possible and to keep creation of their family as private as possible and as much as possible under their own control. Privacy and personal autonomy, at least, have long been regarded as morally justifiable desires. The moral status of wanting to spend as little as possible is more debatable, but there are many who would argue for it.
Jam — that is an interesting take on it. We considered fertility treatment briefly but everything pointed toward it being much more expensive and time-consuming and out of our control than adoption.
YEs, jam, very interesting and useful. Could you give some links to the blogs?
thanks, H
Start with A Little Pregnant. She has a long list of infertility blogs she’s collected.
Chez Miscarriage is well written.
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