Evolution is not a ladder. Even the tree metaphor is flawed because it gives the faulty impression of 'progress' upward. Evolution is only change in whatever direction leads to the most reproduction. Cultural evolution is the idea that our ideas and way of life evolves generation to generation much the way an organism does, based …
Conspiracies… :o
I've started reading Foucault's Pendulum, which appears to be about a group of editors who create a conspiracy for fun, but then end up believing in it themselves. I'm just at the beginning of it, but already the type of mind to create and believe in complicated conspiracies is captured very well in the narrator. …
Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Very few books I've read can hold so much power in so few words. The ending of this book, in the final paragraphs, performs a tying up of the whole novel that changes the light cast on all the previous pages. The Affirmation had a similar effect in its final page, but this one …
Thought is a luxury we should not take for granted.
Sometimes we all feel like we have no time to relax and think. But imagine for a moment a field worker or a miner or any other manual laborer, living just a couple centuries ago. Such a person probably didn't know how to read, or not how to read for enjoyment. They worked day all …
Continue reading "Thought is a luxury we should not take for granted."
Horrors of the world
Rings of Saturn's seemingly random topic hoping is all coming together, related in the big picture by every thought, every piece of history he talks about seeming to show how humans are terrible, or maybe that the world is terrible. Aside from the overt bleakness of the historical stuff he talks about, there is a …
Jonas David 