Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

THE BLACK SWAN:      THE IMPACT OF THE HIGHLY    IMPROBABLE By  Nassim Nicholas Taleb Reviewed by    Geoffrey W. Sutton Currently, we are experiencing a Black Swan event. Covid-19, a coronavirus, is raging from nation to nation knowing people down with flu symptoms and sending others to hospitals or to their grave. All of a sudden, when the virus began to spread, world financial markets plunged wiping out trillions of dollars worth of savings and financial assets. Black Swan events are those unpredictable events that are so unique that they cannot be predicted using traditional statistical modeling. Black Swan events are statistical outliers that most scientists would remove from a dataset to avoid skewed distributions. But you do not need to understand statistics to know, that scientists and business leaders can miss events that are so rare. Nassim Nicholas Taleb published The Black Swan in 2007 and my academic review was published the next year. The book was as

WHY DARWIN MATTERS:  THE CASE AGAINST INTELLIGENT DESIGN By    Michael Shermer Reviewed by    Geoffrey W. Sutton My answer to Shermer's book title framed as a question, Why Darwin Matters? , is that it matters a great deal. Psychological scientists often refer to evolutionary theory in their articles and textbooks thus psychologists, and those in similar professions, need to know the basics of evolutionary theory to understand and critique the way the theory is employed in the understanding of human behaviour. Shermer begins his work with a biographical event. "I became a creationist shortly after I became a born-again evangelical Christian in high school ..." (p. xx).  Those interested in the integration of Christian faith and science will find this book a quick and useful review of the major points involved in the evolution-intelligent design (ID) controversy that has primarily involved biologists perhaps because the evolutionary psychology section