It isn’t easy to draw the boundaries between reason and superstition, Voltaire observed. One person’s dogma is another person’s nonsense.
Articles from March 2022
Photo by Gantas Vaičiulėnas from Pexels
Photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash
Keeping an eye on purveyors of genetically engineered food
Humanity stands on the brink of an agricultural revolution potentially as great as the one that occurred when our ancestors gave up a hunter-gatherer way of life and settled down as farmers.
Photo by Elliott Engelmann on Unsplash
Doomsday apparently will be dark and quiet
We have been bombarded lately with doomsday predictions for the end of the world. Y2K came and went with hardly a blip. The so-called Earth-shattering planetary alignment of May passed without a ripple. And, of course, various fundamentalist cults still wait patiently for the long anticipated Rapture.
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
‘Normal science’ needs to study awareness
In 1905, Albert Einstein published a paper in which he proposed that all observers will measure the same velocity for light, regardless of any motion of the observer or the source of light.
Photo by Mauro Tandoi on Unsplash
Bee boy showed how nature explains itself
Gilbert White’s “The Natural History of Selborne” was published in the year of the French Revolution and not long after Britain lost her 13 colonies in America. You’ll find none of these earthshaking events in the book.
Los Alamos, New Mexico • Photo by Daniel Schwen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In ideal town, bomb’s toll lingers
Until the fires hit last week [in May 2000], this town slumbered in post-atomic anonymity, stuck away on a quiet, wooded plateau on a shoulder of the Jemez Mountains, 30 miles northwest of Santa Fe.
Photo by AMIT RANJAN on Unsplash
Did language drive society or vice versa?
“A challenge for evolutionary biology, therefore, is to provide a detailed mathematical account of how natural selection can enable the emergence of human language from animal communication.”
Caenorhabditis elegans • Image by Bob Goldstein, UNC Chapel Hill (CC BY-SA 3.0)
In this worm, the being pulls itself into being
“How do you make a worm?”
Photo by Sourabh Panari on Unsplash
Earth’s big fix is in the bacteria
It’s planting time. Rototilling. Hoeing. Sticking in the seeds. Onions. Radishes. Lettuce. Beans. No real need to do it. We can buy our veggies at the store for a lot less money than we send to Smith & Hawken for all those upscale garden tools.
John J. Audubon's illustration of the pinnated grouse, of which the heath hen is an extinct subspecies
Noting of species is a human pastime
Most of us have heard of the passenger pigeon, a bird that once darkened the skies of North America in its teeming numbers, and now is no more. The last passenger pigeon, named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on Sept. 1, 1914.