Lives on Earth

3.8 Billion Years

  • Breath: Divine Gas In a Smart Body

    The word breath most often refers to the air we pull in to and pump out of our lungs (or to the action of doing so) as in “Take a deep breath.” But we also give the same word loftier qualities… Continue reading

  • Forgiveness and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

    The Second Law of Thermodynamics has seemed depressing to me. It states that anything left to itself, without new energy to sustain its structure, will become increasingly disordered. Molecules of different gasses in a container will move around until they… Continue reading

  • Black Body and Soul

    In his book Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates often refers to himself and other black people as bodies. The central fear of blacks in America, he writes, is and has been that their bodies will be destroyed. The fear… Continue reading

  • Chet Raymo on Santa Claus, Hot Stoves, and the Blooming, Buzzing Confusion

    We cannot live without some sorts of make-believe in our lives. Without made-up maps of the world, life is a buzzing, blooming confusion. Some elements of our mental maps (Santa Claus) satisfy emotional or aesthetic inner needs; other elements of… Continue reading

  • Survivors and the Terminator

    The story of evolution recounts the ways that plants and animals have changed over time as small bodily variations have improved their odds for survival. But what about those species that fitted so successfully early on into stable environments that… Continue reading

  • Feeling Old? Envy the Lobster

    Death may be difficult to accept, but it is a clear state of affairs: when an organism no longer lives, it has died. Aging, however—wrinkling, weakening, deteriorating and the rest of the assault—seems less self-explanatory. Why does it take place?… Continue reading

  • How Language Encourages Belief in an Afterlife

    People believe in life after death for many reasons. A contributing factor, one that goes unnoticed, are certain characteristics of nouns and verbs in English and other languages. Essentially, the way nouns and verbs work help make it easy for… Continue reading