It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biolo...
Monotheism generally allows for no greys. Ideas are either true or false. Hence, although science develops out of the alchemy of the medieval Christian milieu (derived from Arabic alchemy, which was stimulated by the much earlier Chinese alchemy), sc...
John Laroche: [viewing an orchid at a flower show] Angraecum sesquipedale! A beauty! God! Darwin wrote about this one. Charles Darwin? Evolution guy? Hello? You see that nectary all the way down there? Darwin hypothesized a moth with a nose twelve in...
It doesn't matter if I think like a boy or a girl. It doesn't matter anymore if I'm either or both or neither. All that shit seems so petty and immaterial now. There's so little difference between one human being and the next, it's just hypotheses, h...
With drug use related harms, explanatory models are often presented as predictive tools, even though they ‘are [rarely if ever] predictive of consequent behavior’ or outcomes. Hence, we feel confident in asserting at outset, that prohibition base...
Many scholars forget, it seems to me, that our enjoyment of the great works of literature depends more upon the depth of our sympathy than upon our understanding. The trouble is that very few of their laborious explanations stick in the memory. The m...
People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the ...
