inkbluesky

Can biology do better than faith?

In all of the history of science, only one other disparity of comparable magnitude to evolution has occurred between a scientific event and the impact it has had on the public mind. This was the discovery by Copernicus that Earth, and therefore humanity, is not the centre of the universe, and the universe is not a closed spherical bubble. Copernicus delayed publication of his master work On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres until the year of his death (1543). For his extension of the idea, Bruno was burned at the stake, and for its documentation Galileo was shown the instruments of torture and remained under house arrest for the remainder of his life.

Today we live in a less barbaric age, but an otherwise comparable disjunction between science and religion still roils the public mind. Why does such intense and pervasive resistance to evolution continue 150 years after the publication of On The Origin of Species, and in the teeth of the overwhelming accumulated evidence favouring it? The answer is simply that the Darwinian revolution, even more than the Copernican revolution, challenges the prehistoric and still-regnant self-image of humanity.

Wilson thinks the gap between religion and science cannot be mended in a way that brings them together. On the contrary, I agree the gap in widening. What Wilson and others call scientific humanism doesn’t offer, on the urgent primal level that religion does anyway an answer to mankind’s anxiety about death. Death and well, sex motivate everything we do directly or indirectly. While myths about swtiching from this worldly conscientious to other worldly offer some solace in a frequently harsh world we pay a price for promises of eternal life in the here and now,

The toxic mix of religion and tribalism has become so dangerous as to justify taking seriously the alternative view, that humanism based on science is the effective antidote…

winter dreams wallpaper 

LookyBook has some flash based children’s books such as Enemy Pie, Sparkle and Spin, First Snow and the classic Little Red Riding Hood that you can flip through. The print isn’t big enough to read ( at least I couldn’t figure out how to make them readable), but the illustrations look great. I think the idea is that the kids get a preview of the characters and then you can order a dead tree version. The site also provides some nice inspiration for illustrators and graphic artists.