Saving Evolution
Medicine

Molecularism Misleads: Data and Theory Blindness “If one wishes to understand the behavior of animals, one must take account of their individuality, annoying as this may be to those who prefer the tidiness of physics, chemistry, and mathematical formulations.” – Donald Griffin via Jennifer Ackerman in The Bird Way In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel […]

While the US Flounders, the Globe Steps Up “Even now, as we dream of embedding artificial intelligence into every surface of our lives… we’re making a bad copy of the Earth… and destroying the original.” – Claire Evans in “Beyond Smart Rocks” in Grow In the 80s, “appropriate technology” was a buzzword. In Africa, I […]

Fear of Life “Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.” – Maya Angelou Though the dodo bird is long extinct, its name lives on as a reminder that sapiens took their lack of fear—and ease of killing—as a sign of stupidity. […]

The UN and the Grassroots Step Up “Only very recently in human did people realize that Homo sapiens, and everything it finds meaningful, might permanently disappear. [This discovery] is perhaps one of our crowning achievements. Why? Because we can only become truly responsible for ourselves when we fully realize what is at stake.” – Thomas […]

Screens for Dark Enchantment “The world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade… it is the second consecutive decade that governments have failed to meet targets.” – Patrick Greenfield in The Guardian Is your television using you, or are you using it? […]

Travel to the Living Earth—Without Leaving It “Deep in the forests of Ecuador, preservationists have created the first ‘quiet park’… the Taiwanese forest bureau recognized a ‘National Silence Trail’… [New Zealand’s] MacKenzie River Basin received their Dark Sky Reserve designation in 2012.” – Sam Goldman in “Building a movement to preserve silence as a natural […]

Devolution “Lemmings… come charging down… to burst into the sea… and drown. Man… break[s]… into groups which destroy one another. We do not know the reasons for…the sudden mutation in the group psyche which makes lemmings men react in such an interesting way.” – John Steinbeck to Wilbur Needham, 1940 You may have seen the […]

Thinking Fast “Perhaps we will have to inspect mankind as a species, not with our usual awe at how wonderful we are, but with the cool and neutral attitude we reserve for all things save ourselves.” – John Steinbeck in America and Americans For people who don’t think in money in modified forms such as […]

Dogma “I meet people who apologize because they work for salmon farms, on the Alberta tar sand, or for a pharmaceutical corporation or logging company. They say they don’t agree with their employers but they have to make a living. I hope none of you finds yourself in a situation where your job clashes with […]

Small is Beautiful “It’s with no irony that the world’s foremost scientific institutions are now recommending that to save nature, what needs to be done is, well, save nature.” – Jimmy Thomson in “One key solution to the world’s climate woes? Canada’s natural landscapes” The Narwhal In a previous posting, I pointed out that The […]

The Last Shade is Burning “Leiberg began his piece by stating that ‘a steadily progressing aridity is slowly replacing former, more humid climactic conditions from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific.” – Fifth issue of National Geographic, via Jack Nesbitt As Robin Wall Kimmerer has pointed out in Braiding Sweetgrass, late modern logic has taken […]

“If men in their greed cut forests that preserve and distill moisture, clear fields, take the shelter of trees from creeks and rivers, [and] drain the water from swamps so that they can be cleared and cultivated, they prevent vapor from rising. And if it does not rise, it cannot fall.” – Gene Stratton-Porter, quoted […]

“[We have] excessive confidence in what we believe we know, [and an] apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainty of the world we live in.” – Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow Imagine that you have been invited to be part of a dietary study that involves all […]

“If there is going to be a new green economy in Appalachia, this is how it will happen: one relationship at a time – between people, between people and land. [It] won’t make headlines. But it just might help put eastern Kentucky back together again.” – Gabriel Popkin in “The Green Miles” via The Washington […]

“One of Crutzen’s fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife, ‘The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.’” – Elizabeth Kolbert in The Sixth Extinction To make sense of our lives and the life of our species, we humans […]

“When you believe in things you don’t understand, you suffer / Superstition ain’t the way.” – Stevie Wonder in “Superstition” Briefly, scientism is worshipping the tools and trappings of science—in short, the idolatry of the Trojan Horse, the golden calf, or outdated scientific methods. Let’s take a closer look. According to my 1981 Macquarie Dictionary, […]

“Many at Restart described it as a vicious cycle of depression and screen-enabled dopamine feedback loops.” – Charlie Warzl in “Inside How A 12-Step Recovery Program For Social Media Addiction Works” Buzzfeed News It’s amazing how much we late moderns love molecular narratives that incorporate neurotransmitters, and equally amazing how the devices in front of […]

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” – Albert Einstein In teaching statistics and statistical analysis, we introduce a number of assumptions that tend to take on a life of their own. Events are random or can be treated as such. If something is unusual enough, we can take that as […]

“Knowledge of perception and ignorance about decision theory both contributed to a large step forward in our research.” – Daniel Kahneman The body—miracle that it is—can do some things but not others. For this reason, whatever misfortunes may befall the body, one or another organ system will fail in a way that we call a […]

“The main reason that decision theorists study simple gambles is that this is what other decision theorists do.” – Daniel Kahneman All diagnoses are clinical. Despite late modern efforts to systemize medicine as an industrial or IT product, medicine remains a living, evolving art that engages body, being, becoming, and doing. Rigorous thinking is helpful […]