Lives on Earth

3.8 Billion Years

January 14, 2018

The Body Electric

We are juiced. From head to toe, electric signals pour into the brain from eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin as the raw data for what we see on a screen, hear across the room, feel at our fingertips. In… Continue reading
January 4, 2018

Peter Wohlleben’s “The Hidden Life of Trees”

Until recently I was quite sure that a broad difference between animals and plants was that animals, because they are mobile, readily interact with each other (flocking, pursuing, etc.) while plants, anchored to the ground, don’t do so because they… Continue reading
December 28, 2017

Winning-Streak, Everyone-Agrees-With-Me, You-Cut-Me-Off, and Other Biases of the Brain

If you’re feeling cynical about the human race, a site to stay away from is Wikipedia’s List of Cognitive Biases. It describes more than 150 ways in which our thought processes systematically deviate from objective observation and rational thinking. It’s a… Continue reading
November 12, 2017

“Damn it, it’s MY Body That’s at Stake”: Autonomy, Sociality, and Imperfect Choices

My family were swapping medical grievances one evening—flawed diagnoses, unwanted side effects, useless procedures. “Damn it, it’s my body that’s at stake” was one protest. I thought how forcefully people can stake out the inviolability of not only their health… Continue reading
November 1, 2017

Dawkins: Not One of Our Ancestors Was a Failure

Richard Dawkins’s theme is upbeat: All organisms that have ever lived—every animal and plant, all bacteria and all fungi, every creeping thing, and all readers of this book—can look back at their ancestors and make the following proud claim: Not… Continue reading
October 23, 2017

The Buddhist Body Guard

We like to think that we live in the here and now, that that is where we can find a truer reality and leave our illusion of self behind. But what about the past and future? We may not live… Continue reading
October 17, 2017

“There’s No Natural Selection For Happiness”

“Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms” (243) writes Yuval Noah Harari in Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harari takes us through early human history to note its indifference to personal well-being and its drive toward population growth—two… Continue reading