Putting Time In Perspective is a series of timelines posted on WaitButWhy.com. Informative and fun, start with your morning coffee today and change up the scales of your reality with these annotated timelines.
Science fiction writer and anthropologist Mary Doria Russell is the author of “The Sparrow” and its sequel “Children of God.”
From the Metanexus lecture series “By Nature Creators: Coming to Terms with Human Nature” I. Creating Meaning in a World of Surplus Ideas If this were a sermon, its text would be a passage from Paul Ricoeur’s book, Interpretation Theory: “Because our experience of the world provokes more ideas than we have words to express…
Human consciousness and uniquely human behavioural distinctives are the end products of a phylogenetic history shared with other hominids, plus a lengthy and uniquely human ontogenetic development. Human behavioural distinctions include the ability to infer abstract causality, abstract theory construction, language embodied in culture, morality, artistic endeavour and spirituality. Our basic thesis here is that…
The end of the classic Mayan civilization in the lowlands of Mesoamerica was likely expedited by shifting trade routes that started to bring valuable goods to coastal regions instead of the inland city-states of the ancient Native Americans. While the cause of this decline is still shrouded in mystery, most scholars consider the period of…
Emergence and soul In an essay published in 1967, dealing with science and faith, the theologian Karl Rahner had this to say about the problem of the appearance of the soul in the course of evolution: “If effectively the process of becoming is really one of self-transcendence which, depending on the circumstances, can go so…
Fire was undoubtedly one of our earliest conquests of Nature. We do have evidence of hearths in caves dating back to almost a hundred thousand years ago among the Sinanthropus (Peking Man, more than 500,000 years old), as also (much later) in the dwellings of the so-called Neanderthal Man (disappearing about 30,000 years ago), although…