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POPSRage Against the Art Gene On the other hand: Stephen Jay Gould. Until his death in 2002, he stood as one of the great champions and evangelists of science, as well as one of the most exacting critics of its tendency to overreach. According to Gould, life's history needs to be understood not just as the result of natural forces explicable by science, but also of contingency: strange, unplanned events that change the course of everything that follows. The arts, likewise, may be one of the many adaptively useless byproducts of a complex brain that evolved to perform other tasks. something rings false in the overriding impression created by evolutionary esthetics: that a mental trait is ennobled when we supply it with Darwinian roots. Gould, the self-described "naturalist by profession, and a humanist at heart," knew the opposite to be true. An interesting debate, one that surely is only beginning as we enter this era of progress...
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POPSStories of the Dreaming All over Australia, Dreaming stories tell of the ancestor spirits who created the land and everything on it. ----- This is the creation story of Ngiyaampaa country, as well as the land belonging to Eaglehawk and Crow. Now long, long time ago of course, in the beginning, when there was no people, no trees, no plants whatever on this land, "Guthi-guthi", the spirit of our ancestral being, he lived up in the sky. So he came down and he wanted to create the special land for people and animals and birds to live in. .. Fabulous stories! Text, audio and video versions at the source. .:) *(Please note that the stories may take a minute or so to download depending on your setup.)
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POPSThe power of storytelling…to make us stupid and crazy Bruce’s answer is that “we’re a species of storytellers,” and thus persistently vulnerable to a particular variety of logic failure, the movie-plot threat. Terrorists taking pictures is a quintessential detail in any good movie. Of course it makes sense that terrorists will take pictures of their targets. They have to do reconnaissance, don’t they? We need 45 minutes of television action before the actual terrorist attack—90 minutes if it’s a movie—and a photography scene is just perfect. It’s our movie-plot terrorists that are photographers, even if the real-world ones are not.
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POPSFlying Humans Wing suits are not new; they have captured the imagination of storytellers since man dreamed of flying. From Icarus to Wile E. Coyote, who crashed into a mesa on his attempt, the results have usually been disastrous.
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POPSGay Muslims Unveiled in 'Jihad for Love' Sharma's film offers no pat answers to the questions posed by its gay and lesbian subjects. Their struggle to create space in society to be both gay and devoutly Muslim often takes the form of interpreting the Koran differently than the Muslim clerics. (Indeed, Sharma says there has been a long history of Muslims adopting alternative understandings of scripture.) Others seek asylum in France or Canada, or pursue gay lifestyles in secret. Ultimately, the film succeeds by opening "a completely different discourse on Islam," as Sharma puts it. At a time of mounting islamophobia, A Jihad for Love recasts Islam as a religion that inspires deep devotion among its adherents, even in gay Muslims so often marginalized by clerics and culture. Theirs is a quest for love, not war.
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POPSNew evolution science The Newsweek magazine this week describes some recent changes to the theory of evolution due to recent DNA experiments. Previously based on fossils and digs, the evolution research is now taking place in bioresearch labs.
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