3.8 Billion Years
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It’s Diversity All the Way Down
“The most impressive aspect of the living world is its diversity. No two individuals in sexually reproducing populations are the same, nor are any two populations, species, or higher taxa [categories of organisms]. Wherever one looks in nature, one finds… Continue reading
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Our Actual “Eve”
She lived about 150,000 years ago in southern Africa. These days she is known as Mitochondrial Eve. The “Eve” part is a little misleading since unlike the Biblical Eve, Mitochondrial Eve wasn’t the first or only woman alive at the… Continue reading
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400 Million Years of Ferns
Ferns are all leaf, all the time—no celebrated flower, no seduction of the insect. At the tips of green sprouts, curled fiddleheads unroll while leaflets widen behind them like the wakes behind boats. My store-bought Boston fern, tended for years… Continue reading
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The Biology Of Suffering
“Where does suffering come from? Why do we suffer?” The questions open biologist Ursula Goodenough’s essay “The Biological Antecedents of Human Suffering” (in The Routledge Companion to Religion and Science (2012)). Through the ages, people have looked to religion for the… Continue reading
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Darwin and the Buddha: a Comparison
The teachings of Charles Darwin and Gautama Buddha are worlds apart. Yet their descriptions of life bear similarities to each other and even interlock in ways that expand my view of each. I’ll focus this comparison on On the Origin of… Continue reading
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Dawkins on Values and Science
Richard Dawkins has brought me up short about how easily our ordinary beliefs and value judgments can skew our views of what science has to say. In his 1997 lecture on “The Values of Science and the Science of Values”… Continue reading
Lives on Earth 