Lives on Earth

3.8 Billion Years

  • I Like Lichens

    I like lichens. So do many people. Descriptions of them are full of positive achievements: their unique partnership arrangement, their preference for unpopular environments, their huge biological success. Almost certainly you’ve seen lichens—the grey or yellow growths on rocks, bark,… Continue reading

  • Finding Meaning at Auschwitz

    Austrian psychiatrist Victor Frankl endured five months of slave labor at Auschwitz towards the end of the war. In his powerful classic about that experience, Man’s Search for Meaning, he stresses how a prisoner’s sense of purpose and meaning helped… Continue reading

  • My Million-Year-Old Back Yard

    Our back yard is filled with ancient plants and animals. It’s a mysterious garden of life forms that have mutated and evolved seemingly beyond recognition over eons. In imagining their origins I look into a Past that, like a god,… Continue reading

  • Self-Deception: Why We Fool Ourselves

    Self-deception takes place when we know that a certain thing is the case but we convince ourselves that something else is true. We know that we’ve deceived ourselves this way when, for example, a romantic relationship goes sour and we… Continue reading

  • Religion for Atheists

    In his 2012 book Religion for Atheists, Alain de Botton has this message for atheists: don’t let your outrage at religion blind you to its wisdom about suffering and its contributions to culture. Religions (in the book, mostly Christianity, some Judaism… Continue reading

  • Human Evolution, Backward and Forward

    From Dutch graphic designer Jurian Möller, here’s a striking one-minute video that shows the evolution of humans from the present backwards and then forward again. Above the image, the video tracks the number of years in the past along with… Continue reading

  • Pope Francis on the State of the World

    Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the environmental crisis may be of as much interest to non-theists and naturalists as to Catholics and other theists. Laudato si (“Praise be to you,” a phrase from St. Francis of Assisi) describes interconnections among… Continue reading