Author: Mary

What is the goal of conservation biology or environmental activism? (Or to put it more generally, what is our obligation toward nature?) If the goal is to prese...

Well, it’s evidently more dangerous these days, but that’s because of us humans. This article from Live Science discusses how things that used to be...

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. ...