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evolution

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Limerence

Love in Four Acts: What is Romantic Love?:

The romantic couples who have been together for half their lives have something quite different from romantic love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – “it represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama … or an extraordinary intensity in everything” (pg. 195). In a strange way, this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives.

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Costly signaling

I always love these articles about “costly signaling” — the pursuit of real, not-fakable signals of your mating fitness. Take a look at Sex and shopping – it’s a guy thing - New Scientist (emphasis mine):

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Dawkins on Human Perception

A great talk by Richard Dawkins in July 2005, The universe is queerer than we can suppose. A quick summary:

Biologist Richard Dawkins makes a case for “thinking the improbable” by looking at how our human frame of reference — the things we can perceive with our five senses, and understand with our eight-pound brain — limits our understanding of the universe. Think of it: We can’t see atoms, we can’t see infrared light, we can’t hear ultrasonic frequencies, but we know without a doubt that they exist. What else is out there that we can’t yet perceive — what dimensions of space, what aspects of time, what forms of life?

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Dead Reckoning

I always thought that dead reckoning was a complete guess about distance traveled. Turns out, it is based on an estimation of important factors like speed and time, not just looking back over the distance covered and making a visual guess thereof:

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Hair Theories

The ideas for the following theory have been steeping in my head for a while. And since I’m doing something similar to kottke’s operation clear all browser tabs, you get to read my thoughts on the topic. See, the theory is about why we have a different density of hair on different parts of our body. To begin: evoultionary biology dictates that the different hair densities on our bodies must have conferred an advantage to individuals who had favorable distributions of said hair.

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Pope Pius XII Quote

The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter.

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Flying Spaghetti Monsterism

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism - One of the most creative commentaries on America’s current “intelligent design in school” issue.

It asks an important question: if the government endorses multiple creation viewpoints, where does it stop? Why can’t Flying Spaghetti Monsterism receive equal billing as Evangelical Christianity?

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The Blind Watchmaker

The Blind Watchmaker - I need to read this book. As an adament believer that God and evolution easily coexist, I am intrigued by how I could help others to at least understand (not necessarily agree with) my view.

Part of a customer review reads:”If one doesn’t believe in the power of natural selection after reading this book, then that person is not rational.”

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