Category Archives: Evolution

E.O. Wilson: THE ORIGINS OF CREATIVITY (2017)

Posted on Sunday 16 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

What is creativity? It is the innate quest for originality. The driving force is humanity’s instinctive love of novelty—the discovery of new entities and processes, the solving of old challenges and disclosure of new ones, the aesthetic surprise of unanticipated … Continue reading →

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Michael Shermer: WHY DARWIN MATTERS: The Case Against Intelligent Design (2006)

Posted on Saturday 8 January 2022 by Mark R. Kelly

This is a middle-period Shermer book, from the range that begins with WHY PEOPLE BELIEVE WEIRD THINGS in 1997 (and omitting some earlier and middle-period books on extraneous topics), and the 6th of 12 Shermer books I have on my … Continue reading →

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Extinction Debt

Posted on Thursday 23 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Henry Gee is a long-time editor of Nature, one of the two (along with Science) general interest scientific journals. Gee came to notice of the science fiction community in the 2000s (iirc) when he commissioned short science fiction stories from … Continue reading →

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Richard Dawkins: The Greatest Show on Earth (2009)

Posted on Thursday 16 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution. Free Press, Sept. 2009.

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Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution is True (2009)

Posted on Wednesday 15 December 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Jerry A. Coyne, Why Evolution is True. Viking, Feb. 2009. This is another of a dozen or so most significant books that I’ve read over the past decade or more that I’ve put off writing up on this blog simply … Continue reading →

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L&Cs: Wars on Education

Posted on Tuesday 23 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Controversies like the current one over the teaching of “critical race theory” have, of course, happened before.

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Sam Harris, LYING (2013)

Posted on Friday 5 November 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

Summary and comments about this 2011 essay and 2013 book. With an aside about my belief in Santa Claus.

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L&Cs: Christakis on COVID and Altruism

Posted on Saturday 23 October 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

A Big Picture item: what does our COVID response say about humanity’s capacity for altruism?

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Links and Comments: The Game of Life; Authoritarianism; Conservatives and the Feudal System

Posted on Saturday 2 January 2021 by Mark R. Kelly

NYT, from last week’s Tuesday Science section: The Lasting Lessons of John Conway’s Game of Life. (Print title: “Life, In All Its Glory” with subtitle “Fifty year on, a game still offers lessons about simplicity, complexity and uncertain.”) The article … Continue reading →

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The Afterlives, Part 2

Posted on Sunday 8 November 2020 by Mark R. Kelly

I read a striking insight somewhere recently, but don’t remember where it was or who said it. The insight flips inside out the standard belief (at least among Christian faiths) that living a good life gets you into heaven, so … Continue reading →

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