“Professor, that stuff you spoke of in class this morning — about the beginning of the universe…”
Articles from June 2021
Image by Pablo Carlos Budassi (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Japanese beetle (Popillia japonica) • Photo by Melissa McMasters (CC BY 2.0)
From the beetles’ point of view
A famous story in the history of science has the classical scholar Benjamin Jowett ask the biologist J. B. S. Haldane what he had learned about God from his scientific studies.
A Sudanese combatant in 2011 • Photo by Steve Evans (CC BY 2.0)
A higher kind of growing up
Nine years ago, to escape the terror and unrest of their war-torn homeland, 10,000 boys of the Dinka tribe of southern Sudan began an unaccompanied trek that would take them hundreds of miles into Ethiopia, back to Sudan, and finally to a refugee camp in Kenya.
Photo by Serafima Lazarenko on Unsplash
The sounds we hear too rarely
Maybe it’s because I don’t hear as keenly as I used to that I’ve been paying more attention to my auditory sense.
An example of decentralized self-organization in nature • Photo by Donald Macauley (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Seeking order in the natural order
It is a popular misconception that evolution is “just a theory.”
Statue honoring Charles Darwin at the Natural History Museum, London • Photo by Hulki Okan Tabak on Unsplash
Imperfect, yes, but the best we have
“In a child’s power to master the multiplication tables there is more sanctity than in all your shouted amens and holy holies and hosannas.”
Comet Hyakutake in 1996 • NASA/Bill Ingalls (Public Domain)
In the beginning there was a comet
We watched the long slide of Comet Hyakutake from the dark southeastern sky, up across the north pole, into the light of the setting sun.
A flock of red knot • Photo by Don Faulkner (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Small bird, big curve
“God loves a curved universe,” said designer and engineer Buckminster Fuller.
“The Triumph of Death” (ca. 1562) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, depicting the chaos that followed the Black Death
Spiritually homeless in the cosmos
I was recently at Grinnell College in Iowa talking with a group of talented young nature writers. They had read a couple of my books, and generally approved of the way I tried to relate science to human values. However, they took me to task for what they perceived as condescension towards astrology, crystal therapy, parapsychology, and other New Age superstitions.
Photo by Tatiana Syrikova from Pexels
It’s smarter to be born in spring?
Are people born in the spring smarter than the rest of us?