Evolution’s Error: How Human Nature Went Awry
BIOLOGICAL EVOLUTION cannot literally err. The ability to make a mistake requires sentience, and evolution is not a sentient process. Hence, the “error” of my title is employed metaphorically, but is no less telling for... Read More
Towards a Post-Lies Future Fighting "Alternative Facts" and "Post-Truth" Politics
DONALD TRUMP is our first post-truth president. And he may well be the first of many. The Oxford Dictionaries website chose “post-truth” as its 2016 word of the year, in large part due to... Read More
The New Secular Moment
IT'S BEEN A DECADE since the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism jolted the public conversation about religion and emboldened a growing population of nonbelievers. Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith, Daniel Dennett’s Breaking... Read More
Fundamentalism on Trial How Twelve Claims of the Christian Right Fail under Strict Secular Scrutiny
THE EMINENT University of Chicago historian Daniel Boorstin identified American humanism as the defining characteristic of the nation, which is the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and the entirely secular US Constitution. The real menace to... Read More
The Arts for Humanists
OVER THE YEARS my wife and I have been very fortunate to have visited many of the great cities of Europe. One of the things we love best, and that we seek out in our... Read More
The Speed of Thought What the Revolution in Neuroscience Will Mean for Humanism
WE FIND OURSELVES amidst a revolution in neuroscience—the new neuroscience, if you will. In the United States the most visible face of this new science is the BRAIN initiative (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies)... Read More
Make America Kind Again
DID YOU SEE Donald Trump’s victory coming? I sure as hell didn’t. That Hillary Clinton would lose to a guy who says things like “My words are the best” seemed so improbable that last summer... Read More