Confessions of a Conservative Atheist
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Though I am undoubtedly an insect, I do not inspire the same fear and revulsion as many of my cousins, unless I am infected with the horsehair worm. Then, my appearance is grotesque, the stuff of nightmares, and my suicidal behavior even more so. I am a zombie cricket about to drown myself so the… Continue reading I am a zombie cricket about to drown myself so the parasite I carry can reproduce, being a fictionalized account as told from the perspective of the doomed cricket
For the past three years, I have wandered mostly alone after being driven from the pride of my birth, doomed to lurk at the edge of my elder’s territory, always on the outside, looking in, but all that has changed since I drove off my father and killed his cubs. I am a young lion,… Continue reading I am a young lion and this is my pride, being a fictionalized account from the perspective of the King of the Jungle
The legendary biologist Richard Dawkins returns to evolutionary theory with his third and fourth big idea, ushering in a true paradigm shift in how we view ourselves, the world, and the DNA that builds bodies to interact between the two. Imagine if you can, extracting the DNA of an ancient eukaryotic cell, the earliest complex… Continue reading Are we nothing more than massive colonies of self-replicating viruses traveling through time?
For billions of Christians around the world, Christmas honors the birth of their savior, Jesus Christ, who lived to die to purge humanity of original sin in the ultimate sacrifice, but what if you believe in none of that? Why is a holiday to honor what you don’t accept still so important? For billions of… Continue reading An atheist on the spirit of Christmas
Since the 1960s, scientists have focused on a gene’s ability to encode proteins, resulting in a causal chain of gene expression from the initial coding in a strand of DNA, to the extraction of the code into RNA, to the formation of the protein and it’s ultimate expression in an organism. This view now appears… Continue reading A better late than never paradigm shift in molecular biology, long predicted by Richard Dawkins, happening right before our eyes
Based on the latest research, we can continue to maintain that sentience, and the higher order consciousness that springs from it in humans, is the most widespread accident in the history of life, completely unnecessary, but somehow omnipresent, or we can reject that view and assume it serves a deep evolutionary purpose. Thought experiments can… Continue reading The evolution of consciousness and the omnipresence of sentience
Most of us wouldn’t say we were thankful for breathing. It’s one of those things we take for granted until something goes wrong, but considering the millions of events happening, all of it without our knowledge and none of it under our control, perhaps we should be. Thankfulness can be a funny thing. There… Continue reading A few of the things we should all be thankful for like breathing
Can octopuses feel pain and pleasure? What about crabs, shrimp, insects, and spiders? The phrase “thought provoking” is frequently overused, but Professor Jonathan Birch’s new book on animal sentience and what we can do about it deserves the accolade and then some. When I was asked to review an advance copy of Professor Jonathan… Continue reading The Edge of Sentience and the beauty of being wrong
We, indeed all life on Earth, are as ancient as we are new, as grandly complex as we are simple. Indeed, it is fair to say that complex life wouldn’t exist at all without this contradiction. The mammalian ear is significantly more complex than our bird and lizard cousins in the vertebrate family. Rather than… Continue reading Evolution: Three new studies highlight the marvelous contradictions between preserved forms and new innovations that support complex life on Earth
A new study from the University of Vienna on the inner ear in mammals offers valuable evidence and insight, while upending at least some of the conventional wisdom by finding the shape of the ear in some lineages is more directly connected to habitat and lifestyle than genetics alone. Counter intuitively, we can find evidence… Continue reading The shape of your inner ear, convergent evolution, and the evolution of evolvability
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 