LIFE, LOVE, & EVOLUTION

Image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/wasik/22785930068 My main reasons for opposing Trump lie outside the sphere of his disqualifying personality and temperament. Rather, it is Trump’s opposition to Enlightenment values that bar him from holding any elected office. Specifically, international laws against the targeting of civilians during warfare and using torture as retributive justice are at risk of rotting alongside half-eaten taco bowls in the gastric juices of the president elect. Also at risk is the founding document of our Jeffersonian democracy—the document that is the first instantiation of Enlightenment-era thought in the practical realm of governance: the US Constitution. Trump’s threats to expand libel laws against journalists and to bar individuals from entering the US if they hold the wrong religious beliefs should give pause to those who support him because of his presumed opposition to the unconstitutional free speech stifling culture of political c...

It might not be tomorrow; it might not be in ten years; eventually, however, the dawn of secularism will rise. Not to wax utopian, but it is hard to foresee how an interconnected world can fail to embrace the liberal ethos of free speech, the separation of government and religion, and the valuation of human lives over dogma and ideology. As of late, there have been quite a number of attacks on Enlightenment (I hesitate to say “Western”) values of free debate and reason. Too many demagogues have found it worthwhile to impugn the free exchange of ideas for the sake of protecting this or that group’s sacred values. Freedom from being offended has replaced the freedom to express one’s views in the public sphere. Whether it is the Christian right’s “War on Christmas,” the feminist left’s war on the biological differences between men and women, or the Muslim right’s war on the criticism of Islam (not to mention Islam’s literal war of global Jihad), pluralism has had quite a difficu...

The best case for consilience, at le ast as I see it, is the lack of coherent borderlines between levels of explanation. Specifically, if I were to describe why it is that I want water at the moment, I would most likely mention something about my lack of fluid intake over the past two hours. Or, I might defer to a more “ultimate” level explanation and state that, because my circulatory system is dependent on water, a water-seeking-and-imbibing set of processes has evolved which enables me to survive and, ultimately, reproduce. Now, if I were to offer the latter of the two explanations, I would probably be shunned at parties. However, neither of the two explanations is either more or less valid. Likewise, although there is a distinction between the two, the precise ways in which the ultimate level-phenomena are related to the proximate-level phenomena are complicated, a nd are still part of an ongoing body of research.            ...

Taking its time to mellow out on the soot-layered windowpanes, the saxophone’s melody softened its momentum. The grimy edges of these sin-covered vertebral exertions lay waste to the saxophone’s origins and enveloped its effusive sounds in a nothingness—a nothingness permeating and infusing rhythm into the heart of the city. The buildings—century-old relics, stretching their tired, old-world hands into the single-layered present from the nostalgic aura of the booze-soaked lights and sounds of the past—swayed with the melody’s multilayered textures, and I, easily misled by my infantile yearnings for the taste of cosmopolitan heaven, swayed along with them. Once again, I found myself on the island. The high-class, upper-scale rhythms of old Manhattan have almost completed their gradual, gradated diffusion into the synthesized novelty of mechanized beats, and we, lost children of falling markets and falling columns, roamed the streets in search of something—perhaps each other, p...

We, the inheritors of the post-WWII and post-Civil Rights era, like to believe that eugenics lies with the discredited ideas of pseudosciences such as phrenology and blending inheritance . Julian Huxley may have sounded the last non-fringe “hurrah!” on behalf of the intellectual and scientific supporters of eugenics[i], but the reality is not that simple; although the politically correct mediums of modern academia and popular culture may have purged their halls and airwaves of explicit supporters of state-instituted eugenic practices (though for a recent, well-reasoned exception, see Geoffrey Miller’s response to the Edge question “What should we be worried about?”), these practices lie at the foundation of many of our personal decisions, institutional practices, and government policies. Most biologically-oriented social scientists admit that eugenic self-selection occurs at the individual level—not only in the sperm clinic but also at bars and nightclubs. But even among academic...

Death supplants life and life supplants death. The intricately woven webs of life are reconstructed anew with each generation. Species relying on each other at one epoch produce offspring who take over their ancestors’ positions at a later epoch. Each individual is but a small fragment of this “entangled bank”—to use Darwin’s phrase. To some, this realization is fractionating, disheartening, and lonely. To others, it represents a connection to all of existence . To others still, it represents a middle ground between separation and transcendence. Indeed, if one truly examines the nature of existence, both theoretically and empirically, one is left with an incessant search for the ‘demarcation’, ‘cutoff point’, or ‘dividing line’ between various phenomenological entities. Where do “I”—as an individual—begin and the outside world end? Where does one of my thoughts or emotions commence and another fizzle out? Come to think of it, where and how does thought differ from emotion? Such qu...