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28 April 2024
"I put the ways of childhood behind me" — my remembrance of Dan Dennett
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For five years through 2018, our humanist community, the Humanist Hub*, met every Sunday afternoon at our suite in Harvard Square for fellow...
16 August 2023
Science, intuition and the "strange inversion of reasoning"
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A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition . Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposit...
12 August 2023
Scientific thinking as the antidote to intuition
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As I work on a book that will claim that evolution is easy, I have a parallel task of exploring the reasons we sense that it is hard or even...
10 August 2023
What I learned about me when I started reading novels again
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A few years ago, I somehow realized that I wanted to read more stories. My work as a journal editor involved hours of intense scientific rea...
09 August 2023
The known unknowns of biology: welcome to the unknome
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'Genome' is now a pretty standard word in our social vocabulary. We have to put up with overloaded metaphors like "blueprint&qu...
08 August 2023
Rebel scum
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This week in the Blaugust 2023 blogging festival , the broad theme is "Introduce yourself." Yesterday I alluded to my bardolatry a...
07 August 2023
Thoughts on quintessence, mutation, and evolution
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This blog's name captures my longstanding interest in human nature : humans are apes, and animals, and yet somehow able to create music...
06 August 2023
Sky Islands: one of Earth's great evolution laboratories
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Let's think of places on Earth where scientists have done great big natural "experiments" on evolution. Looking east from near...
05 August 2023
Contemplating libraries in biology. Not that kind. Not that one either.
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What is a library? If you ask a biologist (especially a molecular biologist) this question, they are likely to ask for clarification. In the...
04 August 2023
The library of possible proteins is beyond vast. Does this cause us to view evolution as harder than it is?
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Bates Hall at the Boston Public Library One of the most effective metaphors for evolutionary change is the image of an exploration of a spac...
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