Here’s a partial list: Wings on flightless birds. Small Leg bones on modern whales. Eyes that are found in blind animals such as Astyanax fasciatus (a species of fish) and moles. Because I wanted to know more about these useless animal parts, I checked some popular creationist web sites: Investigating…
Does it all seem like déjà vu? It should. Most of us first heard the unfolding national story while sitting on our parents’ laps, courtesy of Dr. Seuss. A con artist comes to town to exploit a glaring weakness: the willingness of the citizens to act out of bigotry. In…
As part of his Easter homily, Pope Benedict XVI invoked evolution in describing Christ’s resurrection: If we may borrow the language of the theory of evolution, it is the greatest ‘mutation,’ absolutely the most crucial leap into a totally new dimension that there has ever been in the long history…
I was raised Roman Catholic. Many things about the church puzzled me, Good Friday perhaps being the most puzzling of Holy Days. On the lighter side, the kids at Catholic school insisted that it always rained on Good Friday, usually in the afternoon while Jesus was dying on the cross. Whenever it did rain this was seen as proof of something important. When it didn’t rain on Good Friday, that lack of rain was merely an exception to the rule.
Throughout my life, I’ve found that Catholics are very skeptical about religious beliefs . . . well, as long as it isn’t their own beliefs that they are questioning. Growing up Catholic, I always heard about those “bizarre” beliefs of other types of religions. “How could anyone ever believe such silly things?” Catholics would often ask. For reasons I still don’t understand, I found myself asking these same skeptical questions about my own church (and everyone else’s church). I started asking these questions even as a young child. Good Friday has always been the focus for many of my questions, for at least three reasons:
I. False Suspense.
The Good Friday church services were always dreary. Tears were shed, incense was burned, and sad songs were sung. Those attending the services went away from them thinking that all bordering on hopelessness, as though this might be the year that Jesus didn’t rise from the dead. This was puzzling to me, given that Easter was already marked on everyone’s calendars. The …
. . . To explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Star Trek Mission Statement
When I hear the term “diversity” I become suspicious. For many people, diversity refers to the mechanical process of gathering different-looking people and assuming that doing this creates a melting pot of ideas and character traits. Used in this way, however, “diversity” is no less than a form of racism; the people who mechanically gather other people by their looks assume that people who look the same have the same character, intellect, and culture. This is not my experience. I have often found that groups of similar-looking people are often just as diverse (in character, intellect and culture) as groups of different-looking people. Similarly, groups of different-looking people are often culturally homogenous. You just shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. For me, then, mixing people by looks is not a legitimate form of diversity.
Understood in a broader way, however, diversity is something to which we should still aspire with vigor. To understand the importance of true diversity requires a short detour into the study of human cognition.
Humans are both assisted by and shackled by the “availability” heuristic. “Heuristics” are rules of thumb we constantly use, often unconsciously, to navigate our complex and often disorienting world. The availability heuristic is the “strong disposition to make judgments or evaluations in light of the first thing that comes to mind (or …