Tag Archives: Charles Darwin

Charles Darwin vs. Thomas Aquinas: What Follows from Our Nature?

Posted on November 23, 2014 by

At his blog recently, Thomist philosopher Edward Feser wrote the following: “For Aquinas, what is good for us is necessarily good for us because it follows from our nature. As such, even God couldn’t change it, any more than he … Continue reading →

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Fossilized Republican Found in Georgia?

Posted on October 18, 2013 by

Responding to the discovery in the Republic of Georgia of a 1.8-million-year-old Homo erectus skull (possessing about one-third the volume of the average human skull), a wag from Seattle under the moniker of “1west,” commenting this morning in the thread … Continue reading →

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Charles Darwin Gets the Hook to Jane Austen on British Currency!

Posted on July 26, 2013 by

__________ Charles Darwin has been on the ten pound bank-note for over a decade, but now The Guardian reports that Jane Austen is about to take a turn there: Austen will take her place on the £10 note in 2017, … Continue reading →

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Why Do Grandmas (Post-Menopausal Women) Exist?

Posted on March 17, 2013 by

Judith Shulevitz at The New Republic homes in on two theories: the “stopping-early hypothesis” and the “grandmother hypothesis”: In 1957, the evolutionary biologist George Williams proposed what is called the “stopping-early” hypothesis: Middle-age women need baby-free time to usher their youngest children into … Continue reading →

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A Great Stephen Gould Quote on Evolution

Posted on February 28, 2013 by

What appears below can be found at the beginning of Dinosaur in a Haystack (1995). It’s hard to contrast the West’s religious era with its secular era more clearly. So much is implied in the way Gould has put this: … Continue reading →

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Beauty Explained

Posted on February 22, 2013 by

Sounds right to me. ___________ A quick thought: what if the very things that move us in landscape paintings (water in the distance, grassy fields, etc.) are the very same stimulants that our ancestors followed out of Africa 60,000 years … Continue reading →

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The Human Lowdown

Posted on January 31, 2013 by

Here’s our basic human story based on genetics. 60,000 years ago there was drought in Africa brought on by an ice age to its north. The human species lived only in Africa and had dwindled to perhaps 2,000 individuals. They looked like … Continue reading →

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Definition and Origin of the Phrase “The Whole Nine Yards”

Posted on December 31, 2012 by

Blaise Pascal once wrote someone the following: “I have made this letter longer, because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” Today we might say that Pascal gave his reader, not the short version of his thought, … Continue reading →

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Would Nietzsche Have Liked the New Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas?

Posted on December 1, 2012 by

Look at this quote from Friedrich Nietzsche’s essay, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873). It is Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian forces that lurk beneath our artistic and “illusory consciousness” (our Apollonian dreams of coherence and control; the … Continue reading →

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Are Scientists Part of a Grand Conspiracy to Deny God’s Existence?

Posted on October 12, 2012 by

As part of a conspiracy series for British television, the BBC took five young earth creationists on a road trip to meet some prominent American scientists, including biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago and anthropologist Tim White of Berkeley. Were the … Continue reading →

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Evolution vs. Intelligent Design Watch: Junk DNA is Not Junk

Posted on September 6, 2012 by

This is in the New York Times today: The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles … Continue reading →

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What’s the Difference Between an Environmentalist and a Free Market Conservative?

Posted on July 25, 2012 by

Actually, not that much.  Both are children of the Romantic tradition, but whereas one is enamored of nature, the other is enamored of capitalism. One posits leaving nature (with its natural selections) alone; the other posits leaving the market (with … Continue reading →

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Correlation-Causation Fallacies and the Origin of Religion

Posted on April 3, 2012 by

In the below video, a pigeon—let’s call it Shirley—engages in a correlation-causation fallacy. Shirley clearly presumes—insofar as pigeons can presume anything at all—that the machine is releasing food to her because she’s making a half-turn to the left. In reality, of … Continue reading →

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NYC Seeks Ban on “Dinosaur” and “Evolution” in Standardized Tests. Sam Wineburg Has a Wonderful Retort.

Posted on April 3, 2012 by

When CNN reported last week on the fifty words that the New York City Department of Education seeks to ban from its standardized tests, the list was discovered to include “dinosaur” and “evolution.” Fundamentalist Christian, Orthodox Jewish, Mormon, Jehovah Witness, … Continue reading →

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Evolution for Evangelicals: Biologos Recently Held a Conference in NYC

Posted on March 30, 2012 by

Here’s a bit of what Christianity Today reported about it: The most sobering moment for attendees of the Biologos “Theology of Celebration” conference in New York City, March 20–22 [2012], came when David Kinnaman of Barna Research presented findings on … Continue reading →

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40,000 Years B.C.: Four Human Types, One Earth

Posted on January 30, 2012 by

If you were to get in a time machine and go back to 40,000 years B.C., you would find at least four types of humans on Earth. That, at any rate, is what is reported in the New York Times today in … Continue reading →

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Shopping Rage: Black Friday’s Competitive Shopping Road Rage

Posted on November 25, 2011 by

From the Los Angeles Times today comes this disturbing little item worthy of a scene from Dante’s Inferno: In Porter Ranch, a woman pepper sprayed customers at a Wal-Mart in what authorities say was a deliberate attempt to get more “door … Continue reading →

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On Evolution, Women Scientists Weigh In

Posted on November 24, 2011 by
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Naturalism, Supernaturalism, and Motivated Reasoning

Posted on October 19, 2011 by

At the ID website, Uncommon Descent, a person who goes by the name of “Mirrortothesun” makes the following thread comment: Here’s the problem with every single post on this site, including this one. They are all examples of motivated reasoning. … Continue reading →

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Charles Darwin’s Thinking Path

Posted on October 4, 2011 by

I love this image from Wikipedia Commons. It’s the path that Charles Darwin frequently trod at the grounds of Down House, his home. Darwin called this his “Thinking Path.”

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