Posted 22 Jun 2014 / 0
Rebecca Price and Tessa Andrews have a clever way of assessing the understanding of students who harbor creationist beliefs in evolutionary biology courses. Rather than force them to state answers to questions that assert a factual claim about the way the actual world work, ask them to take the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. Questions can start Read More
A Minor Post, Assessment Methods, Conferences, Creationism, Evolution Education, Society for the Study of Evolution, Teaching
Posted 02 Feb 2014 / 0
On Being “Reimagining the Cosmos” I always find myself stuck on the fence when it comes to the confrontation between physics and philosophy (and by extension religion). This episode effectively captures my ambivalence. On the one hand, I like that Brian Greene really sticks to his guns on the “sensation of free will”. If there Read More
A Minor Post, Adaptation, Behavior, Belief, Consciousness, Emotion, Ethics, Evolutionary Psychology, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physics, Psychological Adaptation, Psychology, Radio & Podcasts, Religion
Posted 26 Jan 2014 / 0
On Being “Teilhard de Chardin on The “Planetary Mind” and Our Spiritual Evolution” We often give credit to Richard Dawkins — who is undeniably the inventor of the term “memetics” — for introducing an evolutionary approach to cultural change. But as this piece makes clear, de Chardin was already thinking on far more large scales about Read More
A Minor Post, Biography, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ecosystem Ecology, Evolution, Geology, Homo species, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Memetic Fitness, Radio & Podcasts, Religion, The WmD Project
Posted 07 Jan 2014 / 0
NPR Morning Edition “Sunday Assembly: A Church For The Godless Picks Up Steam” It is interesting to see people explicitly seeking out the benefits of religious community whilst trying to maintain their objective understanding of the material world. Conventional wisdom is that “god” is needed to make religions work, but perhaps just a collective intention Read More
A Minor Post, Belief, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Group Selection, Radio & Podcasts, Religion
Posted 17 Aug 2013 / 0
Times Higher Education “What’s God got to do with evolution?” It is really interesting to see that Coakley, a theologian, is collaborating with Martin Nowak. This is not entirely surprising: after all, the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics that Nowak heads is funded in part by the Templeton Foundation, which likes to support work at the interface of religion Read More
A Minor Post, Ethics, Religion, Web
Posted 16 Mar 2013 / 0
College of the Holy Cross “Harvard Scientist to Lecture at Holy Cross on God and Evolution” It is amazing to hear someone like Nowak say “God uses evolution to unfold the living world around us”. This is radical stuff for a theorist to say, as we generally try to understand properties and dynamics of systems Read More
A Minor Post, Cooperation, Evolution, Religion
Posted 18 Jan 2013 / 1
In a recent short opinion piece (Scientific American “Creation, Evolution and Indisputable Facts“), Jacob Tanenbaum argues that selectively rejecting evolutionary biology is dangerous to the scientific culture of America. He rightly points out that our populace does not reject science as a whole, but instead picks and chooses what science to doubt and what science Read More
A Major Post, Adaptation, Altruism, Articles, Belief, Cooperation, Evolution, Gene-Culture Coevolution, Human Evolution, Human Uniqueness, Religion, System Stability
Posted 31 Oct 2012 / 0
Slate “The Russian Anarchist Prince Who Challenged Evolution” I really appreciate the fact that Dugatkin uses Kropotkin to bring to light that Darwinian evolution has been — even in the time and work of Darwin — a process that was imagined to involve both competition and cooperation. Only in recent times has evolution become synonymous Read More
A Minor Post, Altruism, Articles, Behavior, Biography, Coevolution, Competition, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Ethics, Evolution, Mutualism, Political Science, Predation, Religion, Taiga (Boreal Forest), Tundra, Web
Posted 24 Oct 2012 / 0
The Chronicle of Higher Education “Saving Gaia From the Greens“
A Minor Post, Anthropogenic Change, Articles, Biography, Climate Change, Ecological Modeling, Ecosystem Ecology, Ecosystem Services, Religion, Survival, Sustainability
Posted 10 Oct 2012 / 0
The Huffington Post “Ayn Rand and Modern Politics” What I really appreciate about this post is its very simple brand of analysis. It asks a simple question and employs a clear methodology to objectively understand a phenomenon (in this case, the appeal of Ayn Rand to conservatives). Talk about a job of social construction: the Read More
A Minor Post, Behavior, Belief, Carrying Capacity, Cooperation, Cultural Evolution, Economics, Ethics, Game Theory, Philosophy, Political Science, Psychology, Religion, Social Norms, System Stability, Web
