You have got a fever, your body aches, and you feel dreadful. What should you do? The traditional answer is: “Take two aspirin, drink lots of fluids, get to bed and call me in the morning if you don’t feel better.” Could it be that this is just the wrong advice? That the last thing you should do is reduce your temperature with aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever? Is it, to use a phrase, nature’s way of fighting illness?

This is very much the position of a small group of biologists and medics who are pushing what has come to be known as “evolutionary medicine.” Crystallized about 20 years ago by a book – Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine – authored by the distinguished evolutionist George C. Williams and the psychiatrist Randolph Nesse, it claims that the force that caused us all, Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection, does not care about human…

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Expectedly, my argument last week that the randomness of Darwinian evolution poses a major but not necessarily insuperable problem for the Christian has brought down on my head the wrath and contempt of the New Atheists. (The junior ones at least. The senior ones, like Aristotle’s unmoved movers, are so busy contemplating their own perfection, that they have no thoughts for chaps like me.)

Loveable, predictable Jerry Coyne is “baffled” by my constantly trying to find ways of reconciling science and religion. He thinks it a “waste of good philosophical brainpower.” (I note the adjective. Thanks for the compliment!) In exasperation he declares: “If you seek a theological solution to a scientific dilemma, then you’re not reconciling science with faith—you’re distorting science to comport it with faith.” And he exhorts me to stop catering to “unfounded superstition.�…

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Over on his blog, Why Evolution is True, the eminent Chicago evolutionist Jerry Coyne has taken on the role of my doppelgänger, since we agree 90 percent of the time and then 10 percent of the time find ourselves in completely different positions. Although perhaps I am his doppelgänger and exist only as a function of his imagination or psychic aura.

Putting such fascinating Germanic speculations aside, a couple of days ago Coyne raised a point about the science-religion relationship that has long troubled me and that he thinks – and I agree entirely – is not dealt with adequately by those who want to promote harmony between science and religion, the dreaded (or pitiful) “accommodationists,” a label that Jerry Coyne bestows with scorn and that I wear with pride.

The problem is this. If Christianity is true, then the existence of humans cannot be a contingent matter….

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Like everyone else, as the sordid Penn State story becomes more and more detailed, I have been more and more depressed and appalled. How could these men have so completely turned their backs on the gross mistreatment of young children? How could people in authority, people who made so much of their personal integrity, have so disregarded the most basic rules of morality? How could Joe Paterno of all people done what he did, for it seems now that there were sins of commission, active covering up, as well as sins of omission, not doing what one should do?

The answer of course in large part is simply because these people — in order to protect themselves and the system of which they were part — deliberately, of their own free will, did what is wrong. No amount of excusing or justifying or anything else can blind us to this fact. These people, with great powers and responsibilities,…

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Actually, that is not quite true. She did not eat the family dog, or rather family dogs – for I confess that we have five dogs. It sounds as if Lizzie and I suffer from empty-nest syndrome. That is not true. We love our children to death, but we do very much enjoy loving them from a distance. It is rather that the number just grew. Anyway, I am glad to say that the Cairn Terriers – Toby, Grover, and Gabby – and the pound specials – Cricket and Weasely (I wanted to call her Shreeky after the dreadful little girl in Care Bears) – are still in the land of the living.

However, some poor mutt in Vietnam, where our daughter Emily is spending the summer, has gone to a better place.

You’re going to hate me for this but I ate some dog meat this afternoon. The woman whose hotel I’m staying in bought it and cooked it for a group of us. OMG — I took photographs. There was an entire…

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There are some things in life that give unalloyed, uncomplicated pleasure, year after year. For me, this group includes Pickwick Papers by Dickens, Don Pasquale by Donizetti, and fried haddock and chips (with lots of salt and vinegar). Make your own list if you will, because it is not a competition. But don’t try to impress just for the sake of it. I get huge pleasure from Descartes’ Meditations and every day of my life from my relationship with Lizzie, but I wouldn’t describe either as exactly uncomplicated, if you know what I mean.

Having just made reference to them in my last piece, I just realized that to my list I must add Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales for Children. This is a group of poems about naughty children and about what happens to them – concluded with the opposite story of Charles Augustus Fortescue, “who always did what was right, and so accumulated an…

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It was about 10:30 on Thursday morning that I realized how very tense I had been over Obamacare and the real possibility that it would be struck down by the Supreme Court. Now, thank God, we can move forward, knowing that even if the worst happens this fall, it is going to be very difficult to dismantle some of the key provisions of the act. Who, for instance, really wants to stop kids under 26 from staying on their parents’ insurance?

Obviously the Administration has done a lousy job on selling the act, but still it amazes me that so many Americans oppose it. In my own state of Florida, apparently 70 percent of us are against it. This is a state with 4 million uninsured. The biggest irony is that a huge percentage of those opposed are themselves over 65 (remember this is Florida) and benefiting from a totally subsidized, government health plan – Medicare.

It is the old dilemma…

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A piece in The New York Times raises a dilemma about which I have been thinking much recently. Is some knowledge too dangerous to be released? Is some knowledge so dangerous that people (usually scientists) should not even be allowed to pursue it?

We philosophers are pretty good at thinking up examples that muddy the waters. Suppose you have a friend who is suicidal and he asks you if you have twenty bucks he could borrow and do you know the address of the nearest store where he could buy a large bottle of acetaminophen? I take it that knowledge in this case would not be a good thing—even though Kant would jump all over you if you told a lie (Plato would be on your side)—but what about generally?

It turns out that a couple of research groups have discovered how to make the lethal H5N1 bird flu virus. Naturally, pleased with their work, they wanted to publish in prominent places…

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Lonesome George has crossed the Rainbow Bridge. A 200-pound tortoise, he died on Sunday at about the age (or so it is believed) of 100. He was the last known specimen of the subspecies Chelonoidis nigra abingdoni.

Discovered in 1971, George came from the Galapagos Island of Pinta. The major reason why so many species and subspecies of Galapagos tortoises are no more is human devastation. Whalers would put in at the archipelago and carry aboard literally hundreds of the animals, keeping them alive as source of fresh meat. However, in this case it was goats that made for the decline of the group. Again whalers were responsible, for they left goats to roam on the islands and would then harvest them when they returned. Unfortunately goats reproduce rapidly, eating all before them, and some of the islands (with upwards of a hundred thousand of the mammals) were simply stripped of all…

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Robert Wright, the well-known journalist and author, has just suggested that the so-called New Atheists – people like Richard Dawkins who sneer and laugh at religion, thinking it a great evil and that science, Darwin’s theory of evolution in particular, shows the way forward – are if anything exacerbating the tension in the U.S. between those who accept evolution and those (“Creationists”) who accept some literal form of the Genesis story of origins.

He writes: “A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology class, and otherwise Darwinians would leave creationists alone.” However: “A few years ago, such biologists as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers started violating the nonaggression pact.”

Continuing: “I don’t just mean they professed atheism – many Darwinians had long done…

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A week or two back, David Brooks, the conservative columnist for The New York Times, talked about an online forum where students from so-called “elite universities” discussed their futures. He wrote:

The student discussion was smart, civil and illuminating. But I was struck by the unspoken assumptions. Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. But there was little interest in or awareness of the ministry, the military, the academy, government service or the zillion other sectors.

I have been thinking about that comment ever since I read it. And I wondered why Brooks was at all surprised about the students’ thinking. Let us take the four neglected a…

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On my recent trip to Africa, dashing from one plane to another at Heathrow Airport – in my opinion equaled only in its awfulness by the airport in New Jersey – I stopped at a bookshop to grab some reading for the journey. Hurried, I went for a safe choice, Robert Harris’s Fatherland, now celebrating its 20th year since publication. I had read it a long time ago and remembered it sufficiently to know that I liked it a lot and did not remember it sufficiently to anticipate every turn of the plot. It was a good choice and kept me engrossed going down Africa and coming back.

I guess everyone knows the basic idea, the conceit as one might say. Hitler won World War Two. His attack on the Russians proved successful and they were pushed back way beyond Moscow into central Asia. England had collapsed and now was (with other countries in Western Europe) under Nazi suzerainty. America and …

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Ruse with grad-student pal in Kenya

I was at supper the other day, chatting with my neighbor, a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Cambridge. As happens in these sorts of conversations, I asked him if he had any brothers or sisters. “Thirty,” he replied. “Goodness,” I said, “think of your poor mother.” “Oh,” he replied, “my father has four wives.” I was talking to a young Kenyan, on my recent trip to East Africa.

Now speaking as someone who has had two wives and who has five kids, I look upon myself as a somewhat of an alpha male. But four wives and 31 children! I am just an amateur! Joking apart, of course, there is a serious message here, because my supper-mate’s family is just a microcosm of what is happening in Kenya. At the time of independence, back in 19…

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(Photo at The Sun. Click to see page of origin.)

According to one of my favorite supermarket tabloids, the marriage of Charles and Camilla is on the rocks. Apparently she can no longer handle his goofy ways, especially the speaking to plants. One gathers that dishes have been thrown. We have certainly come a long way from the halcyon days when Charles’s only desire was to be a certain intimate piece of feminine necessity, inserted appropriately.

One has to say, however, that yesterday (Sunday) one would not have guessed that there was a rift in the lute. There is something obviously to be said for the English, stiff upper lip. There were Charles and Camilla gamely sitting down at an open-air lunch, in a street in downtown London. If my eyes did not deceive me, and I confess I watched the clip several times, Charles…

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The author, left, with Richard Leakey

I have just come back from a week in Kenya.  I was there to participate in a workshop on human evolution, invited by the organizer Rob Foley (a biological anthropologist at Cambridge) and his wife, Marta Lahr (also a biological anthropologist at Cambridge).  The welcome came primarily on the strength of a recent book I have published on philosophical questions around human evolution, but (to be totally candid) I was fortunate indeed to be included in such a discussion.

It is no exaggeration to say that it was one of the most stimulating weeks of my life, as we — anthropologists, climatologists, geneticists, paleontologists, and others — put together the incredible knowledge that we now have of our past.  Knowledge that takes us from the splitting from the…

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Here we go again. The latest news on the fighting-Creationism front is that states like Georgia have found ways to channel public funds to private schools. Some of the money goes–Surprise! Surprise!—to fund athletic scholarships. (And in places like Georgia, “athletics” means football.) Almost all of the money goes to institutions that teach Creationism—young earth, miraculous creation of organisms, two and only two humans coming last, and of course a universal flood.

A Beka Book— “excellence in education from a Christian perspective”—is a major textbook supplier.

An A Beka high school science text concluded that “much variety within the human race has developed from the eight people who left the Ark.” Another text, used in sixth grade, makes repeated references to Noah and the flood, which it calls the reason for both the world’s petroleum reserves and the…

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Mating ritual?

If David Barash’s series on the female orgasm showed anything, it is that when it comes to evolution it is human beings on people’s agendas. It always was this way. Charles Darwin’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was an 18th-century evolutionist and he made it clear that it is Homo sapiens that counts.

Imperious man, who rules the bestial crowd,
Of language, reason, and reflection proud,
With brow erect who scorns this earthy sod,
And styles himself the image of his God;
Arose from rudiments of form and sense,
An embryon point, or microscopic ens!

In the Origin, Darwin said little about humans, but at the end there is no doubt who is a big (albeit unspoken) theme in the book, and in the Descent of Man published some 12 years later, we have a starring role. And coming do…

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I never saw or heard Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in person, but he–along with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf – has been part of my life since I was a teenager. First on LP’s, then on tape, and more recently on CDs. He was born too young to be a real part of the Nazi shame; she unfortunately was seriously compromised. But as interpreters and performers of German vocal music, they were and are beyond compare. Above all the lieder and above all lieder the lieder of Schubert. I write with tears in my eyes as I listen once more to Der Winterabend and to Die Forelle and Der Erlkönig.

I do not believe in God or Heaven. It does not matter. We humans–we humans stained so deeply by original sin–have won. We have created such transcendent beauty that future promises are worthless. Why wait for eternity when this life of ours is touched with such greatness? I am truly grateful to these two great…

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NASA photo via Flickr/CC

My good friend Elliott Sober, perhaps today’s leading philosopher of science, is being roughed up by the New Atheists. Recently in a book, Did Darwin Write the Origin Backwards?, and then in a lecture that he gave at the University of Chicago, Elliott argued that if mutations are guided by God down at the quantum level, science cannot lay a finger on this claim. I should say that I don’t think that Elliott thinks that this claim is true and also that it is not original with him. Physicist-theologian Robert J. Russell has been pushing something like this for some time now. Elliott is simply making a technical point. He wants to show that science is not all-embracing. There is room for claims of a non-scientific nature.

Jerry Coyne, the biologist, for one, and Jason…

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Some years after I first came to Canada in 1962, the country changed from using the Imperial system of measures – pounds, gallons, miles – to the metric system – grams, liters, and kilometers.  As you can imagine, there was lots of grumbling from older people, with one or two garages defying the law and refusing to change. Then, some years later, with a new party in power, a move was made to switch back to the Imperial system.

It couldn’t be done.  No one under 20 had the slightest idea what was being talked about.  And when they learned, they recoiled with horror.  Sixteen ounces in a pound, 14 pounds in a stone, and gosh knows what number of stone in a hundredweight.  Certainly not 10.  The move was quietly dropped and Canada measures things in the sensible way, like the rest of the world, with one notable exception.

History repeats itself.  For me, the most…

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