A little red beetle walks over my arm. On this wonderfully warm Saturday I have nothing on my to-do list, so I can enjoy our square meter of vegetable garden. During the week, Freddy is the hero in the garden who keeps everything alive. The bean plants tumble over their growing strings and bloom abundantly. …
Darwin at Tahiti
Because today is the birthday of Charles Darwin, I have browsed the essays of Stephen J. Gould to find something to write about. Gould was an evolutionary biologist, with a great interest in the history of science. He is one of my favorite authors. We have one book of him, a yellowed Penguin edition of …
The Selfless Gene (2)
What is the difficulty about living with God and Darwin? If we ask Darwin himself, he gives a clear answer in the quote above: Natural selection appears to be a process of waste, cruelty, suffering, and destruction of the weak. Ichneumonidae are wasps that lay their eggs in the larvae of other insects, after which …
The Selfless Gene (1)
On the birthday of Charles Darwin, I want to discuss a book that I mainly started reading for the subtitle: Living with God and Darwin. I have always been around a lot of people who live with God and others who live with Darwin. But I have been a little short on people who are …