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...
Category: Thinking Meat Project
Posts from my blog the Thinking Meat Project (2006–2018)
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...
Beauty, meaning, and freedom: How science changed my worldview
Last week I wrote that science enriches rather than impoverishes my worldview. I thought it might be useful to describe more precisely what I mean by this. It&#...
Mortality and evolution
Well, it’s spring (in the northern hemisphere, anyway) and new life is bursting out everywhere you look, but again I’m going to talk to you about mo...
More about mortality, intolerance, and mindfulness
A few weeks ago, I posted about a study that looked at how mindfulness affected people’s reactions to thoughts of their own deaths. Thanks to a good-heart...