Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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Benjamin Franklin famously or infamously said that the country was a Republic, if you can keep it. To liken great things to small, this is a blog if I can keep it up, but isn’t that true of everything in life? When I started this blog in November 2020, it wasn’t clear to me how… Continue reading Celebrating 1,000 posts with a few near incoherent thoughts on the past, present, and future
As opposed to the traditional view of evolution by natural selection, niche selection theory holds that we aren’t passive participants in our fate. Therefore, a new study about changes in our diet and our teeth millions of years ago should not have been surprising. Sometimes, even the experts can miss the forest for the trees… Continue reading The second most underrated and misunderstood evolutionary concept
As my lovely wife is fond of saying, we and our beloved doggies are thrown together by fate, but I want to go much further back in time than she’s normally thinking to consider what fate had in store up to a hundred million years ago when humans and canines were one species. Since every… Continue reading Me, my dogs, and our long march together through evolutionary time
Scientists discover a new cell that lives like a virus and a new rule of life that can best be seen as the opposite of a regular rule, introducing chaos into the operation of a cell at a fundamental level. Scientists like tidy groupings, where you are either in or you’re out. At least since… Continue reading Evolution, two recent discoveries, and how there remain more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy
As a child, did you ever think to yourself that you’ll never stop playing with toys or you’ll never like a member of the opposite sex whatever the adults say? If so, do you remember when and why you changed your mind? The question is oddly impossible to answer. Childhood is a wonderfully weird thing,… Continue reading Why do humans have to grow up rather than emerge from a cocoon like butterflies?
Almost everyone knows that an octopus is much smarter than we would expect for a boneless creature that lives in the ocean, but next to no one expected they would achieve their intelligence using some of the same genes and chemical processes we do. Octopi and their cephalopod cousins have long been regarded as unusually… Continue reading Our brains might have more in common with an octopus than we’d like to believe, suggesting that famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’ new paradigm is correct
If Henry V survived, he would have been king of both England and France, forging one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful country on Earth at the time. After I killed him however, a slow, agonizing death, not suited for a warrior, the world was changed forever. I am an amoeba and… Continue reading I am a lowly amoeba and I just killed the most powerful man in the world, changing all of history in the process
Whether you have heard of Caenorhabditis elegans, your own body and mind work much the same way. Essentially, your brain is C elegans’ times 331,125,828 or so, having neurons that look both inward and outward, reflecting even upon themselves over and over and over again. I am one of those neurons. I am a neuron… Continue reading I am a neuron in the human brain, almost the same as that found in a lowly roundworm
For the first time ever, scientists observe a doubling in the size of a genome with an immediate evolutionary advantage, solving a longstanding riddle that goes back to Darwin himself, and proving that complexity can arise spontaneously and persist through the generations. Ever since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species on November 24,… Continue reading The origins of evolutionary complexity
I am a stranger to humanity, but you live your lives upon my brothers, loving, hating, caring, killing, birthing, burying, and everything else you do only because we are solid enough to build upon and in many cases, build from. If we were like you, there would be no humanity in the first place. I… Continue reading I am a rock on the Galapagos Archipelago, being a fictionalized account told from the perspective of the volcanic remnant itself
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 