Author: Mary

Is religion good for you or bad for you, in an evolutionary sense? I’ve certainly seen plenty of evidence in my own life for both positive and negative em...

I recently finished reading Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention. This book was a pl...

Here’s a thoughtful article from Slate about memory and identity. The writer describes his own experience of temporary memory loss after a car accident, a...

Here’s a story about the link between increasing oxygen levels in Earth’s atmosphere and the rise of mammals. This goes into a lot of detail about t...

The annual Lotus World Music Festival here in Bloomington usually inspires a number of Thinking Meat ideas. The way people gather to share each other’s mu...

When I reviewed recent nature documentaries, including March of the Penguins, I worried about anthropomorphizing the penguins, interpreting their behavior in hu...

Here’s an interesting article from the Los Angeles Times about Kurt Vonnegut’s latest book (A Man Without a Country) and about his work in general. ...

When something goes wrong, we want to understand why. It’s not just that we want to understand the physical forces involved so that we can know what to do...

David Barash recently wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that humans are not alone in the capacity for violence against their own kind. He was arguing a...