Lives on Earth

3.8 Billion Years

  • A Biologist Looks at Religion, the Humanities, and Our Compulsive Sociability

    At age 85, the evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson has a new book out, ambitiously titled The Meaning of Human Existence. It’s a philosophical weaving of Wilson’s themes of human and animal sociality and its consequences for humanity. Here as… Continue reading

  • Stephen Hawking, Cosmology, and Spirituality

    I recently saw the film about Stephen Hawking’s life, “The Theory of Everything,” enjoyed it very much, and decided I was overdue to read A Brief History of Time. For the first few chapters, the book was a master class… Continue reading

  • Police Brutality and the Brain

    The brutality against Michael Brown, Eric Garner, the prisoners tortured by the CIA, the inmates on Riker’s Island in New York, the noncombatants executed by the Islamic State—I find myself asking the old, naive question, how can people be this… Continue reading

  • Neil Shubin’s ‘The Universe Within’

    The full title is The Universe Within: The Deep History of the Human Body, (2013). Neil Shubin explores the connections between us and the history of not only the planet but the cosmos as well. The molecules that compose our bodies… Continue reading

  • Darwin and the Roots of Morality

    Wikipedia’s entry on “Evolution of Morality” points to the issue: “In everyday life, morality is typically associated with human behavior rather than animal behavior.our impression may ve that animals are drien soley by the drive and .. to survive and… Continue reading

  • Cooperation and Competition

    In The Origin of Species, Darwin built his argument about natural selection in part from what people already knew full well about combatting the elements and competing with other people. Competition—political, economic, social, biological—has long been one of the prominent descriptors of… Continue reading

  • The Very, Very Long View

    From yesterday’s New York Times (9/28/2014), a chart of the artist and his particles over billions of years.    Me and the Universe By ANDERS NILSEN SEPT. 24, 2014 Anders Nilsen is the author of the graphic novel “Rage of Poseidon.” Continue reading