Lives on Earth

natural selection

  • “We Are All Mutants”

    In The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution (2016), Richard Dawkins writes: The word ‘mutation’ conjures up images of grotesquely distorted creatures, perhaps generated by unscrupulous experimenters, or springing up as a consequence of some radioactive catastrophe. The truth… Continue reading

  • 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

  • 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

  • “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

  • “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

  • Spirituality and Evolution

    My wrestling with various late-life questions that might be called “spiritual” has taken me to a fuller appreciation of evolution and our biological history. The sequence here, the process—or so it has seemed to me—is that I’ve been looking for… Continue reading

  • Beavers, Humans, and Evolution

    Despite the links of many kinds between us and our animal ancestors, the obvious ways in which we are unique remain striking. Unlike any other species, we talk a lot, we learn by listening, we hold meetings, we make plans,… Continue reading