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...
Commentaries
Cave Art – Earliest Symbolic Communication Our ancestors immigrated to Europe from Africa more than 50,000 years ago. They created some of our species’ earliest symbolic art on the walls of caves throughout the continent. Much of that remarkable art was...
