Thursday 19 August 2010
Orang-utans are not remotely like humans
Experts should know better than to claim that great apes can communicate in a similar way to human beings.
Thursday 8 July 2010
Set children free by trusting adults
We can only give kids the independence they need if we have faith in other people to look out for them.
Monday 21 June 2010
Why we are different from apes
Guest blog post, Eureka Zone, The Times
Thursday 27 May 2010
Sorry, but it can be GOOD for children to be bullied
Daily Mail
Wednesday 5 May 2010
Chimps don't mourn like humans
‘Chimps “feel death like humans”‘, the BBC reported last week. And according to Scientific American: ‘Like tool use and self-awareness, distinct grief and mourning might be just one more thing we share with our closest living relatives.‘ No it’s not, says Helene Guldberg.
Thursday 29 April 2010
Monkeys mourning? Don’t make me laugh
A handful of chimp mothers carrying around their dead babies is not evidence of ‘human-like’ qualities.
Monday 1 March 2010
The myth of racist kids
The problem with anti-bullying and anti-racist policies
Friday 26 February 2010
Racialising the playground
A brave new book challenges the introduction of anti-racist policies in British schools, arguing that they blow everyday spats out of proportion and split kids along ethnic lines.
Tuesday 4 August 2009
Let the Children Play
Adults’ fears and mistrust are the reason our youngsters can no longer enjoy free-roaming summer holidays, says Helene Guldberg in The Independent
Wednesday 29 July 2009
Bullying the public
The latest NSPCC/ChildLine initiative on bullied children presents both adults and kids as toxic beings.
Friday 26 June 2009
Restating the case for human uniqueness
A brilliant new book cuts through all the media-oriented research about ‘clever chimps’ using tools, doing maths and feeling human emotions, and reminds us that, in truth, there is nothing remotely human about primates.
Friday 24 April 2009
It’s time to move beyond the nature/nurture divide
In advising parents to ignore hectoring experts, Judith Rich Harris’s book still packs a punch 10 years on. But its use of evolutionary theory and social psychology to explain how people are ‘shaped’ leaves much to be desired.
Thursday 19 March 2009
Chimps are like humans? Stop monkeying around
This week it was revealed that chimps use sticks to smash open beehives. But there’s nothing remotely ‘human-like’ in such behaviour.
Monday 2 February 2009
The mother of all interventions
We should roundly reject the new UK report which argues that time-stretched parents are producing damaged children.
Monday 29 December 2008
‘Autistic children are now seen as a burden’
Dr Michael Fitzpatrick, author of Defeating Autism, talks to Helene Guldberg about how raising a child with autism can be made infinitely harder – emotionally, financially and practically – by the charlatanic ‘war on autism’.
Monday 17 November 2008
Don’t outlaw boisterous
banter in the playground
As Britain launches another Anti-Bullying Week, the author of Reclaiming Childhood says demonising teasing can do more harm than good.
Wednesday 27 August 2008
The shame of Salman Rushdie’s
secular fatwa
In using England’s archaic libel laws to have books pulped, the former free speech martyr puts himself in the same camp as censorious mullahs.
Wednesday 6 August 2008
Don't blame parents for
'cotton-wool kids'
Today is Playday, a celebration of children’s ‘right to play’ - and an ideal time to have a kickabout with the culture of fear that imprisons our kids.
Thursday 26 June 2008
No defender of liberty should use the libel laws
England’s law of defamation is the enemy of free speech. So why did the head of Liberty threaten a minister with a writ?
Thursday 28 February 2008
Heart disease: we need medicine
not moralism
Fear of rising heart deaths is unfounded. And if we’re serious about lowering the death rate even further, we need better treatment not lifestyle lectures.
Friday 18 January 2008
Humanity, thou art sick
Shyness is now ‘social phobia’, and dissent is ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’. How did everyday emotions come to be seen as illnesses?
Thursday 3 January 2008
Shooting down the feminist Thought Police?
The UK government says adults should chill out and let boys play with toy guns. But who made us so uptight about kids’ play in the first place?
Wednesday 14 November 2007
A playground tumble can do you good
More experts recognise that a scraped knee can be a positive experience for a child. Let’s hope they now relax about other ‘dangers’ in kids’ lives.
Tuesday 16 October 2007
The myth of stressed and depressed schoolkids
If we’re not careful, claims that young people can’t cope with the ‘intense pressure’ of exams could become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Friday 24 August 2007
A childish panic about the next generation
Many of those fretting over the state of contemporary childhood, concerned that kids are passive, cooped up and sedentary, are motivated by naked nostalgia - sometimes even by snobbery.
Monday 11 June 2007
Are children being held hostage by parental fears?
A new report calls on parents to let their kids venture out unsupervised. That might be easier if scaremongering officials put a sock in it.
Monday 19 March 2007
A tick-box attitude to toddlers
When even infants are expected to achieve ‘69 early learning goals’, you know that no area of life is free from New Labour’s tyranny of targets.
Thursday 28 December 2006
A hard cell
Eve Herold on why we should take sides in the Stem Cell Wars, and cheer those scientists pushing the boundaries.
Friday 20 October 2006
'There's no such thing as "stress"'
Angela Patmore has been branded a ‘heartless bitch’ for her attack on the stress management industry. Calm down and get a life, she tells her critics.
Tuesday 8 August 2006
A hairy moment for free speech
Tommy Sheridan’s libel win over the News of the World was no ‘victory’ for the working class. It was a victory for an archaic law over open debate.
Thursday 22 June 2006
Stop weeping over whaling
The attack on Japan for continuing to hunt whales is cultural imperialism dressed up in PC lingo.
Friday 2 June 2006
'Animals are less valuable than human beings'
Leading researcher John Martin tells Helene Guldberg why it is morally justifiable to cause heart attacks in rats - and why he isn’t scared of animal rights extremists.
Friday 26 May 2006
Stop celebrating Tourette’s
From TV documentaries to Big Brother, why has a neurological disorder become so fashionably fascinating?
Monday 30 January 2006
Chemical stories can make you blind
A new report washes away some of the myths about ‘potentially deadly’ chemicals.
Monday 16 January 2006
'This is like a badly written Greek tragedy'
Stephen Minger of King’s Stem Cell Biology Laboratory on the fall from grace of South Korean scientist Woo Suk Hwang.
Thursday 3 November 2005
Man is more than a beast
The primatologist Frans de Waal says we should get in touch with ‘our inner ape’. Speak for yourself.
Friday 29 July 2005
Singer on 'speciesism': a specious argument
In his new book In Defense of Animals, Peter Singer reduces the value of human life to a tick-list of capabilities.
Monday 25 July 2005
Why Roman picked London for his libel trial
How does a film director based in France who is a fugitive from the USA sue a US publisher and win? By taking his case to ‘a town called Sue’.
Monday 9 May 2005
How can we halt the 'march of unreason'?
Dick Taverne on why we need to defend the Enlightenment against dodgy science and ‘dogmatic environmentalists’.
Friday 8 April 2005
All in the hormones?
Vivienne Parry, author of The Truth About Hormones, questions whether chemicals control our destinies.
Friday 3 December 2004
Galloway 1, free speech 0
Ex-Labour MP George Galloway was defamed, but his victory under English libel law is nothing to celebrate.
Friday 26 November 2004
Stop apologising for animal experiments
We don’t need more laws against animal rights activists, but a more robust defence of animal experimentation.
Friday 30 July 2004
Keep taking the tablets
Forget the scare stories, says Diarmuid Jeffreys, author of a history of aspirin – the little white pill is ‘one of the most amazing creations in medical history’.
Tuesday 24 February 2004
Why humans are superior to apes
The fashion for equating chimps with children is based on a degraded view of humanity and an ignorance about animals.
Friday 23 May 2003
Scaring into space
A new book by Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, gives humanity a 50/50 chance of survival.
Thursday 24 January 2002
'This is a case of table pounding'
The ‘Skeptical Environmentalist’ Bjorn Lomborg tells Helene Guldberg how he has weathered the storm of reaction against him.