The Marquez Restoration of 2012

It was an ungodly sight.

Years worth of collected books, decimated by severe termite infestation. I couldn’t recognize the Dan Brown books, and couldn’t distinguish Animal Farm from Catcher in the Rye. It was painful to think that the books that were supposed to be part of my mini-library were gone. Spared from the destructive wrath of the termites were several reference books from high school and college, including World History by Perry and Organic Chemistry by McMurry.

Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science

“Evolution. Evolution. EVOLUTION! It doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist, a churchgoer, a craven Faust in a foxhole. You may be Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Druid, a born-again Baptist, a born-again-and-again Buddhist. It doesn’t matter what you believe to be our purpose here on Earth or hope to find in the hereafter, or whether you have faith in a Supreme Being or prefer the Ronettes. It doesn’t matter what disk you insert in the mental module marked “God.” None of it will suffer if you see the principle underlying and interlocking all earthly life. The life of that we see around us, the life that we call our own, evolved from previous life forms, and they in turn descended from ancestral species before them. Newer species evolved from a prior species through the majestic might of natural selection, a force so nearly omnipotent in its scope and skill that it needs no qualification, supplementation, ballast, or apologist. […] For many biologists, evolution is part of the definition of life. “What is life?” one researcher puts it. “That which eats, that which breeds, that which is squishy, and that which evolves.” There’s one fundamental law that comes from the life sciences, and it’s just as deep and all-pervasive and universal as anything in the pantheon of physics. Evolution by natural selection is an absolute principle of nature, it operates everywhere, and it is astonishing. But evolution is underappreciated, and, what hurts me far more, is under assault.”

Best American Beginnings of Ten Stories about Ponies

Yesterday, while I patiently waited for my friends to meet me up at the mall, I managed to read 70 pages of the book The Best American Non-required Reading 2007 which I bought earlier that day, together with Jonathan Franzen’sThe Corrections, for a hundred pesos each at a local used books shop. TheBest American Nonrequired Reading is a yearly anthology of fiction and nonfiction selected annually by a committee of high school students from California and Michigan. The book also includes a selection of poetry, comics, and blogs, published during 2006.

The 2007 edition featured an interesting little segment titled “Best American Beginnings of Ten Stories about Ponies” by Wendy Molyneux, which originally appeared in Monkey Bicycle. I had a good laugh reading the article, so I thought why not share it with you? As Sadie Saxton always says, You’re welcome.

Science Will Never Silence God

by Jesse Bering, from edge.org

With each meticulous turn of the screw in science, with each tightening up of our understanding of the natural world, we pull more taut the straps over God’s muzzle. From botany to bioengineering, from physics to psychology, what is science really but true Revelation — and what is Revelation but the negation of God? It is a humble pursuit we scientists engage in: racing to reality. Many of us suffer the harsh glare of the American theocracy, whose heart still beats loud and strong in this new year of the 21st century. We bravely favor truth, in all its wondrous, amoral, and ‘meaningless’ complexity over the singularly destructive Truth born of the trembling minds of our ancestors. But my dangerous idea, I fear, is that no matter how far our thoughts shall vault into the eternal sky of scientific progress, no matter how dazzling the effects of this progress, God will always bite through his muzzle and banish us from the starry night of humanistic ideals.

Science is an endless series of binding and rebinding his breath; there will never be a day when God does not speak for the majority. There will never be a day even when he does not whisper in the most godless of scientists’ ears. This is because God is not an idea, nor a cultural invention, not an ‘opiate of the masses’ or any such thing; God is a way of thinking that was rendered permanent by natural selection.

As scientists, we must toil and labor and toil again to silence God, but ultimately this is like cutting off our ears to hear more clearly. God too is a biological appendage; until we acknowledge this fact for what it is, until we rear our children with this knowledge, he will continue to howl his discontent for all of time.