A study by Florida State University professor Robin Simon and Vanderbilt University’s Ranae Evenson found that parents have significantly higher levels of depression than adults who do not have children. Even more surprising, the symptoms of depression do not go away when the kids grow up and move out of the house.
New Guinea’s Foja Mountains were “as close to the Garden of Eden as you’re going to find on Earth,” said the co-leader of the expedition, CI’s Bruce Beehler. “The first bird we saw at our camp was a new species. Large mammals that have been hunted to near extinction elsewhere were here in abundance. We were able to simply pick up two Long-Beaked Echidnas, a primitive egg-laying mammal that is little known,” he added.
Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor for Tehran’s Hamshahri newspaper, said that the deliberately inflammatory contest would test out how committed Europeans were to the concept freedom of expression.
“The Western papers printed these sacrilegious cartoons on the pretext of freedom of expression, so let’s see if they mean what they say and also print these Holocaust cartoons,” he said.
In his remarks, he also criticizes the cardinal archbishop of Vienna’s support for Intelligent Design and notes that Pope John Paul’s declaration that “evolution is no longer a mere hypothesis” is “a fundamental church teaching” which advances the evolutionary debate.
[…]
He stresses that the theory of Intelligent Design diminishes God into “an engineer who designs systems rather than a lover.”
The analysis of 334 species of bat found that in species where the females were promiscuous, the males had evolved larger testes but had relatively small brains. In species, where the females were monogamous, the situation was reversed. Male fidelity appeared to have no influence over testes or brain size.
We now stand on the threshold of the 21st century where enormous challenges face us: staggering poverty, continuing racism, raging wars, pandemics, and the possibility of nuclear annihilation or of the irreversible despoliation of the planet. We cannot afford to approach these problems based on myths, religious or otherwise, however comforting. Religion cannot be our guide. And the alternative is not so metaphysically bleak as some would have us believe. Darwin himself said that there was a “grandeur” in his view of the unity of life. And there is hope in it too, since the scientific view of the world can lead us to a life that might be the envy of the gods, were there any.
Well, it’s because the credibility of the evidence is not predicated on its complexity. If SETI were to announce that we’re not alone because it had detected a signal, it would be on the basis of artificiality. An endless, sinusoidal signal—a dead simple tone—is not complex; it’s artificial. Such a tone just doesn’t seem to be generated by natural astrophysical processes. In addition, and unlike other radio emissions produced by the cosmos, such a signal is devoid of the appendages and inefficiencies nature always seems to add—for example, DNA’s junk and redundancy.
