State of the Art

The Obvious Answer

In his book Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer, Duncan Watts posits that what we value as worthwhile is often determined by chance. He cites the case of the famous painting the Mona Lisa, which is now considered among the world’s masterpieces and hangs in a special place


Hands are awesome. Hands are marvelous in every sense of the word and are as important to us collectively and individually as are our intellects. Hands are the difference between thinking and doing. There may be other creatures in this world that have intelligence, but if they don’t have hands, they cannot act on that intelligence. They cannot make and place things. Without hands, they are trapped in a world that they cannot control

The Fallacy of Genetic Selection

The assumption behind the assertion that genes are either useful and present or harmful and extirpated is that this is a binary situation where genes are either one way or the other. The reality is that there are more than two choices and, more likely, a gradation from highly undesirable to the organism to highly desirable, with the intensity of natural selection graded as well…

Faith in Science

Faith is the desire to believe in something as true, or, if not absolutely true, then at least dependable. Faith seems to have been promoted through evolutionary trends, and, as such, it is a concoction of deep brain processes. Related to faith is the concept of truth. Truth is an ephemeral mental construct. We each have some idea of the meaning of truth. Most of the time, our ideas of truth reduce to what we are willing to believe through faith. Truth, in other words, can come from the words of our parents, instructors in our schools, or the teachings of our pastors. Truth can come from books on science or religion. These are different truths, to be sure, but they form the foundations of our essential selves.