Commentaries
We were so young. We were told we had to stop communist governments from taking over all of Asia by defeating them in what was then South Vietnam. China supported the communist North Vietnamese government. The United States supported the capitalist South. I spent the...
Commentaries
Evolution is often understood as life-and-death competition between and among organisms where the “fittest” ones survive. That way of thinking rings true in a profound way, but it often creates a misunderstanding of how evolution actually works. We don’t survive and...
Commentaries
Evolution may have a difficult time finding its rightful place in school curricula in the United States, but it certainly has established its presence in the commercial marketplace. Retail stores use iconic evolutionary concepts like these to attract customers. At gut...
Commentaries
In a moment that would surely rankle Mormon Senator Mitt Romney, one of the fictional elders in the smash hit Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, exclaims, “We’re not Christians. We’re Mormons!” But the point of the play is not simply to ridicule the Mormon faith,...
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Björk and Biophilia Björk has created a performance project—Biophilia—(the idea that there is an instinctive bond between humans and other living systems) that is truly one of the most amazing and important cultural events you could ever imagine. She began a world...
Commentaries
This symbol represents the “Not of this World” subculture of religious fanatics who take it upon themselves to announce to commoners like us they are just a bit too good for life on Earth. They’re going to heaven and you probably aren’t. Meanwhile, many of the rest of...
Commentaries
Understood correctly, social Darwinism refers as much to cooperation and community as it does to individuals looking out only for their immediate self-interest. Our hominid ancestors learned to cooperate in order to hunt and raise families successfully. It’s true of...
Commentaries
A belief system becomes influential when it is communicated persuasively to others. In the case of religious communication, grand narratives passed from generation to generation turn the abstract God into particular beliefs and cultural practices that bridge the gap...
Commentaries
Religion gives people a sense of community. That communal feeling is particularly comforting because we survive in groups. And not just us. Over time, advanced species of all kinds form groups to insure the safety and security of individual members. That’s one...
Commentaries
The blockbuster film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes continues the brilliant story begun in Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011. In the earlier film, a chimpanzee named Caesar leads a revolution of apes kept in cages and abused as experimental subjects. In the...
Commentaries
On his trip around the world in the 1830s as a naturalist aboard the HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin was particularly impressed by what he saw in the southernmost region of South America, the area known as Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. I traveled much of the same...
Commentaries
The last line of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species goes like this: “From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.” Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution revolutionized natural science. Only the most...
