Daniel Rourke /stream

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Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates.

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It’s been nearly 160 years since we Homo sapiens, or “wise people,” first got an inkling through Charles Darwin and the discovery of Neanderthal remains that we are just another evolving…

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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Craig Venter reclines in his chair, puts his feet up on his desk and - gently stroking his milk chocolate-coloured miniature poodle, Darwin, asleep in his arms - shares his vision…

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Sir—There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed…

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The illusion of purpose and design is perhaps the most pervasive illusion about nature that science has to confront on a daily basis. Everywhere we look, it appears that the world…

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It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this…

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The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question:…

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How do we deal with a purposeless universe and the finality of death? From Victorian séances to the embalming of Lenin's corpse to schemes for uploading our minds into cyberspace, there…

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The general consensus of the contemporary mass media is that the return of religion has emerged as the most important factor in global politics and culture today. Now, those who currently…

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According to the late Harvard University biologist Ernst W. Mayr, the greatest evolutionary theorist since Charles Darwin, “species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively isolated…

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The posthuman worldview goes a step beyond demoting human begins in the hierarchy of value. It promotes other species, proposing that animals are more rational than we knew. We are forced…

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Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my experience,…

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WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas…

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We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the…

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It’s hard to exaggerate just how widely Darwin’s ideas on natural selection and the evolution of human kind traveled in the cultural milieu of his day, even in the age of…

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Human beings expend an enormous amount of energy doing things that don't seem to have any survival value: singing, dancing, painting caves, decorating spears and, above all, telling stories. (Think how…

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Charles Darwin thought of evolution as an incremental process, like the patient creep of glaciers or the march of continental plates.

Bookmark

It’s been nearly 160 years since we Homo sapiens, or “wise people,” first got an inkling through Charles Darwin and the discovery of Neanderthal remains that we are just another evolving…

Bookmark

Charles Darwin and Alan Turing, in their different ways, both homed in on the same idea: the existence of competence without comprehension. Francis Crick and James Watson closed their epoch-making paper…

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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Sir—There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed…

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Genetic information storage and processing rely on just two polymers, DNA and RNA, yet whether their role reflects evolutionary history or fundamental functional constraints is currently unknown. With the use of…

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It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this…

Bookmark

The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question:…

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The general consensus of the contemporary mass media is that the return of religion has emerged as the most important factor in global politics and culture today. Now, those who currently…

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These are fighting words. But can the scientific model really be applied to literature? Some of the scholars I talked to regard science’s push into the humanities as an intrusion, an…

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Atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens confront the faithful head-on, but there may be another way to dispel religious beliefs. I am not so sure about this. In my experience,…

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WHEREVER their investigations lead, all analysts of religion begin somewhere. And in the final lines of his densely but skilfully packed account of faith from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, Nicholas…

Bookmark

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin's theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin's On the Origin of Species evolved over the…

Bookmark

It’s hard to exaggerate just how widely Darwin’s ideas on natural selection and the evolution of human kind traveled in the cultural milieu of his day, even in the age of…

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A few years ago Tufts philosopher Daniel Dennett opined that the idea of natural selection - proposed 150 years ago in Charles Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" - was "the…