Gerhard Emmanuel "Gerry" Lenski, Jr. (August 13, 1924 – December 7, 2015) was an American sociologist known for contributions to the sociology of religion, social inequality, and introducing the ecological-evolutionary theory. He spent much of his career as a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he served as chair of the Department of Sociology, 1969–72, and as chair of the Division of Social Sciences, 1976–78.
Dialectical Nature: Reflections in Honor of the Twentieth Anniversary of Levins and Lewontin's 'The Dialectical Biologist' - Monthly Review
Brett Clark is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Oregon and coauthor of “Ecological Imperialism: The Curse of Capitalism,” Socialist Register 2004. Richard York teaches sociology at... READ MORE
ATProto
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~1 minute read | Published: Jun 1, 2024 | Updated: Nov 15, 2025
The Dialectical Biologist
The Dialectical Biologist is a 1985 book by the ecologist Richard Levins and the biologist Richard Lewontin, in which the authors sketch a dialectical approach to biology. They see "dialectics" more as a set of questions to ask about biological research, a weapon against dogmatism, than as a set of pre-determined answers.
Relationships
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~5 minute read | Published: Jun 18, 2025 | Updated: Jul 9, 2026
NOW
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~2 minute read | Published: Jun 15, 2024 | Updated: Aug 27, 2026
npj on Twitter / X
Schumpeter in a nut shell:— Capitalism forces “rationalization” and the rationalist worldview, which just ends in an almost nihilistic skepticism that corrodes everything traditional that it touches: in particular “family life” and the aristocracy.— The traditional… pic.twitter.com/hThnUJ6jNE— npj (@TiltingatM3) May 28, 2026
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles. The book popularized the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
Scientific Constructivism
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~4 minute read | Published: Oct 16, 2024 | Updated: Jul 21, 2026
Against Economics
Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
The End of Science? Agnosis and American Fascism
The Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) annually awards the John Desmond Bernal Prize to one or more individuals who have made distinguished contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies. Past winners have included founders of the field, along with outstanding scholars who have devoted their careers to understanding the social dimensions of science and technology. This article is the revised text of the 2025 Bernal Lecture by Paul Edwards.
Is Science a social construct? – a response to Richard Dawkins
With characteristic certainty and self-assurance, Professor Richard Dawkins recently tweeted his irritation with those who describe science as a social construct. “Science is not a social construct…
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution
Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution is a 1902 collection of anthropological essays by Russian naturalist and anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin. The essays, initially published in the English periodical The Nineteenth Century between 1890 and 1896, explore the role of mutually beneficial cooperation and reciprocity in the animal kingdom and human societies both past and present. It is an argument against theories of social Darwinism that emphasize competition and survival of the fittest, and against the romantic depictions by writers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who thought that cooperation was motivated by universal love. Instead, Kropotkin argues that mutual aid has pragmatic advantages for the survival of human and animal communities and, along with the conscience, has been promoted through natural selection.
Theorizing the Human Sciences in the Age of Absolute Disruption: Historical Criticism and Its Remainders | The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory | JCRT
Adam DJ Brett reads Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm’s trilogy — The Myth of Disenchantment, Metamodernism, and The Genealogy of Genealogy — as one project asking whether a thing exists, how it arose, what grounds our claims
Small Web
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~5 minute read | Published: Apr 21, 2024 | Updated: Jul 19, 2026
Why do people trust physicists and biologists more than economists or sociologists? In a new paper out in Public Understanding of Science, @hugoreasoning.bsky.social and I argue that it has to do with perceived precision and consensus. doi.org/10.1177/09636625261471051
Sciences perceived as precise and consensual are more trusted - Jan Pfänder, Hugo Mercier, 2026
doi.orgRationalist Cults
Articles on rationalist-adjacent cults: the Zizians, Leverage Research, and the darker outgrowths of the rationalist / LessWrong-derived / Aella polycule scene that is behind "AI Safety" in Silicon Valley. Working thesis: MIRI and CFAR read as high-control groups (cults) who believe in P(DOOM) and use sex (and power) maliciously — yet they are unfortunately the ones who have captured the framing of "AI Safety," which has little to do with actual safety.
The Effective Altruism Kids Aren’t Alright
My Experience with Leverage Research
What Policymakers and the Public Need to Know About the Cult of AI
banteg (@banteg)
The Techno-Religion at the Center of the A.I. Debate
SE Gyges (@segyges.bsky.social)
