You’ve probably seen variants of this question in popular magazines and books over the years: is there a “God gene” that explains why human beings tend toward belief in the supernatural? Can the human impulse to search for the divine be traced to a specific, biological imperative?
Perhaps it’s slightly heavy reading for the day after [...]

I’m not a schoolteacher, but I’ve always imagined that teaching high school biology must be a bit like walking through a minefield: say the wrong thing about evolution here and outraged parents mob you; say the wrong thing about creation there and… angry parents mob you. It’s probably not quite that dramatic in real life, [...]

It’s rare that I have a chance to expose my truly geeky interests here on TC, so when something semi-relevant crosses my RSS reader (like the old Klingon version of the Bible chestnut), you’ll have to forgive me for indulging. So file this under strange but interesting:
If you read a lot of science fiction, you [...]

In talking about the upcoming Ben Stein movie, John Derbyshire made a provocative comment yesterday about creationists, intelligent design, and the theory that intelligent design is a backhanded way of promoting creationism without playing the religion card:
[It’s something] I’ve said before here, and repeated as politely as I could in panel discussions with creationists: they’re [...]

This entire article from Newsweek is well worth reading. It has me thinking quite hard about medication and our emotional states. Here are a few excerpts:
Students tell him [NYU professor, Jerome Wakefield] that their parents are pressuring them to seek counseling and other medical intervention—”some Zoloft, dear?”—for their sadness, and the kids want [...]

Just watched an extremely compelling trailer for a documentary called Expelled.

You can watch additional trailers here.
It seems he’s not trying to prove a point either way about origin issues, but rather drawing attention to the lack of free speech in scientific academia.
Interested in seeing it? I know I am. Has anyone in academia [...]

Stumbled across an interesting juxtaposition of vernacular on the creation vs. evolution debate this morning called Duelity. The site has an animated retelling of the origin of man from the two viewpoints. The creationist viewpoint is told using the imagery and language of science and the evolutionist viewpoint using the imagery and language [...]

Noah’s Ark found! The Garden of Eden has been located! Jesus’ Lost Tomb has been unearthed! Stories like this crop up every year or so, stick around long enough to spawn breathless media attention and maybe a TV special, and then fade from the headlines before they can be subjected to serious scholarly scrutiny. I’m [...]

Someone shot me a link to the World Clock, a fascinating collection of significant national and world stats illustrated in an operable clock. Instead of just time, it also shows how many…
birthsdeathsdiseases (from cancer to HIV)abortionscars producedprison population
Like I said, a fascinating collection. Who knows if any of it is true, but it seems to [...]

Here’s something I didn’t know: CS Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke conducted a friendly correspondence/debate about the moral significance of space travel. Clarke apparently first wrote to Lewis in 1943 to object to Lewis’ characterization of space-travel scientists in the Silent Planet series. Lewis responded, and the two exchanged brief letters on the subject over [...]