I just read The Economist’s book review of Dominic Johnson‘s God is Watching You: How the Fear of God Makes Us Human. The review suggests “Belief in divine punishment may be inherent and a useful evolutionary adaptation, helping humans overcome selfishness.” But correctly assessing causation…
Today is the 206th birthday of Charles Darwin. To commemorate this Darwin Day, which also happens to fall on a (Throwback) Thursday, here is an article I wrote back in 2009 on a brain-machine interface, evolution, and the future of…
This week marked another interesting milestone in the ongoing evolution of Catholicism. Since Tuesday, media outlets across the globe have been abuzz with headlines like: Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are real and God is not ‘a…
Last Tuesday, Bill Nye (the science guy) debated Ken Ham (founder and CEO of Kentucky’s Creation Museum) on the question of whether a young-earth creation model is compatible with the theory of evolution. NPR posted a nice summary of the debate,…
We all know the Catholic Church evolves. It is not static. For example, just in my lifetime, the Catholic Church: introduced non-Latin mass translations (1963); introduced Canon Law (1983, replacing changes introduced in 1917); abolished the concept of Limbo (2007); altered…
We can choose to ignore, misrepresent, or deny the nature of reality—as the Louisiana legislators are currently demonstrating—but doing so is an act of sheer folly that will have actual, negative, and often avoidable consequences.