This past Wednesday I was asked by the director of the Stonehill College Honor’s Program to talk to the students about intelligent design. The title of my talk was “Why ‘Intelligent Design’ Is Not Science — and Bad Religion.”
Articles with 2005
The web of life
On Thursday mornings I meet my two students, Greg and Bailey, at 8 AM for a walk in the woods or meadows. They see things my aging eyes are likely to miss. Together, we don’t miss much.
Rewriting history
Pity the poor Neanderthals, who had the misfortune of being discovered at the time Darwin was evoking the outrage of his contemporaries by suggesting that humans, apes, and gorillas have a common ancestry.
Retreat from reason
Is there a flight from reason in the United States?
Six impossible things
I can’t remember the first time I heard it said that there is an arm’s length of DNA in every cell of our bodies, but I am certain that I blinked with disbelief. How can an arm’s length of anything fit into a microscopically small volume?
What’s in a name?
Ireland is divided into four provinces and thirty-two counties, and these are further divided into some 60,000 townlands. Names lay thick upon this land.
On aggression
Two weeks ago [in 2005], The Sunday Times Magazine published a photo essay by the distinguished photographer Don McCullin on the tribes of the Omo valley in southern Ethiopia.
On saying “I don’t know”
When Charles and Emma Darwin bought the house that would be their family home for forty years, at Downe, sixteen miles south of London, one of Charles’ first improvements was to have the flints removed from the property’s chalky meadow.
Chasing the dragon
If the Royal Observatory at Greenwich has a royal star, it has to be Gamma Draconis, also known as Eltanin, “the dragon’s head.” Eltanin is not an especially bright star, in a constellation, Draco, the Dragon, without any bright stars. But it does have a claim to local fame: It passes directly overhead London once each day.
In search of the soul
The philosopher René Descartes insisted that body and soul are separate things. “I think, therefore I am,” he famously said. His “am” was not flesh and bone.