Was that me?
One of the things that fascinates me the most about the brain is the way it makes up coherent, mostly convincing stories with great confidence, even in the face...
Author: Mary
The Darwinian unconscious
In E.O. Wilson’s talk at the Consilience Conference, he described ants as “angelic robots,” which we most definitely are not and would not want to b...
Evolution as a bad story
The talk by Dan McAdams that I described in my last post was mentioned in a blog post at the Chronicle of Higher Education. In discussing the importance of stor...
Three layers of personality
An interesting theme that emerged from the Consilience Conference was the idea of humans as makers and enjoyers of stories. Two of the leading scholars in liter...
E. O. Wilson on how we got to be this way
Distinguished evolutionary biologist Edward O. Wilson, who coined the term consilience as it was used at the conference I attended last weekend, gave the keynot...
Consilience conference
This past weekend, I attended an intense and very interesting conference in St. Louis on the topic of consilience (Consilience: Evolution in Biology, the Human ...
Big history: Perspective!
Big history combines the cosmological, geological, evolutionary, and human timelines into one grand overview. It provides both insight and awe.
Movie review: Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, documentary film by Werner Herzog, 2010 This documentary is almost certainly as close as you will ever get to exploring the Chauvet Ca...
Writing, loss, and memory
I’ve been thinking about this quote from The Country of Language by Scott Russell Sanders: “And I knew that my impulse to write is bound up with my ...
Book review: Delusions of Gender
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, by Cordelia Fine I enjoy seeing images and reading descriptions of how people pe...