I always find it amusing when our British cousins, being a bit older and often wiser, look at the American scene and feel compelled to give us a gentle reminder or serious lecture. In this case it is a sage reminisce on the Founding Fathers, religion, and politics. The chiding was prompted by the usual [...]
Tags:American exceptionalism·Charles Darwin·Christian nation·Civil Religion·David Barton·evangelicals·founding fathers·Newt Gingrich·Republican Party·Rick Perry·Texas
Over the past decade several books and articles have appeared which purport to explain the “evolution of religion” as an adaptation, usually invoking group level selection as the source. These explanations nearly always depend on the fallacious assumption that if something evolved, it must be have been selected and therefore is adaptive. These explanations also [...]
Tags:accident·adaptation·byproduct·Charles Darwin·confirmation bias·design·evolutionary psychology·fitness·group level selection·hypothesis·Matt Rossano·methodology·Michael Ghiselin·natural selection·Panglossian·pleiotropy·storytelling·testing·theory
Although summer is nearing an end, there is still time to immerse yourself in a book that captivates and enthralls — the kind of book that rivets your attention for stretches of 8-12 hours. I just found my end of summer reading: Janet Browne’s splendidly gripping two volume biography of Charles Darwin.
The first volume is [...]
Tags:biography·Charles Darwin·Harvard·History of Science Department·Janet Browne·The Power of Place·Voyaging
While doing some background research on the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (1711-1776), I discovered that he had been much influenced by Lucretius, who lived in the first century BCE (around the time of Julius Caesar) and published a six-volume treatise titled On the Nature of Things. As if writing philosophy in narrative form were [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·atomic theory·Charles Darwin·Christianity·classics·cultural evolution·David Hume·David Sedley·Epicurean·Epicurus·evolution·Greco-Roman·Herbert Spencer·Julius Caesar·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·Nietzsche·On the Nature of Things·Plato·Platonic philosophy·prehistory·Scottish Enlightenment·skepticism·survival of the fittest·Thomas Hobbes
