To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast, click here As a naturalist, Charles Darwin wasn’t much of a “bird guy.” His real fascination was with barnacles. He spent eight years of his life, in fact, painstakingly dissecting smelly samples from all over the world, piling up storage crates in his London study in the pre-refrigeration era. His hope was to… Read more »
In 1963, as a young, newly minted sociologist, Rodney Stark was given the chance of a lifetime. On behalf of the Survey Research Center of the University of California-Berkeley, he was granted the privilege of designing the first-ever major survey of religion in America. Stark intended to ask randomly selected church members, among other things, if they had ever had… Read more »
William Provine, a Distinguished Professor at Cornell University who served three different departments – History, Science and Technology Studies, and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology – was a brilliant scientist. He also had supreme confidence when it came to discussing life’s most important philosophical questions. Two decades ago he declared: “Let me summarize my views on what evolutionary biology tells us… Read more »
