Come on, admit it, you are ready for a little humor. I promise it won’t take long. And it is relevant to what I have recently written. I tried and tried to be a great composer. But it was frustrating, because I learned just enough about music to recognize how great the Great Composers were (are?) and how I would never match them. If I had worked on composition all my life, I might have been the late twentieth century equivalent of Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf. Never heard of him? That’s my point. I recently wrote an essay (August 9) about genius. Humor is a kind of genius. One kind of comedic ..read more

I’ve been looking through a dull but well-intentioned book from 1937, 101 of the World’s Greatest Books. That is, five to ten page summaries of them. They were the ones you would expect from the era which continued with Great Books of the Western World, whose numerous volumes filled many library shelves even in small towns because teachers and librarians thought these were the books that everyone ought to know about to be considered educated. Great novels, epic stories, great scholarly works, great plays, great works of philosophy, almost all of which were outdated even in 1937. I wasn’t expec ..read more

 I posted a video in which I explain where new evolutionary adaptations, and cultural innovations, come from. I filmed the video in Strasbourg, which has many old villages crammed together, such as Hoenheim (where I live) and Bischeim and even one called Souffelweyersheim. Here is how I learned the process of natural selection. A new mutation appears, then if it is a good one, natural selection favors it. It starts off very rare—only one individual carries it—and ends up common, maybe even going to fixation (completely replacing the other versions of the gene). This is the way I taught it ..read more

There are geniuses among us. Some of you might be geniuses. But since it is impossible to define what a genius is, few of us can ever know who is or is not a genius. I will just share some insights, from the evolutionary point of view. First, what genius is not. It is not just intelligence. I am intelligent, as seen from the outside, but when I am being intelligent, as when I am writing, I can see myself from the inside: I am paddling like crazy, like a dog trying to not drown in a flood of stupidity around me. But for a real genius, everything comes almost without thinking. Mozart would fit a ..read more

After decades of teaching, writing, and reading about ecology and evolution I thought I had heard everything. But just recently I ran across an example of mutualism that surprised me. Most vertebrates have lots and lots of parasites inside and outside of our bodies. Birds are no exception. They have it worse than humans because, unlike us, they cannot bathe away the oils, dirt, and parasites that accumulate on their skin, well protected as it is by feathers that are really good at repelling water. But there are some things that birds do to reduce their parasite loads, besides preening with the ..read more

  I have always (even when I was a child) been inspired by trees out in the forest, especially the giant sequoia trees in the Sierra Nevada mountains near the town where I grew up. In contrast, urban trees seemed much less important, especially since many of them are horticulturally altered versions of tree species that are not native to the area. Urban parks and woodlots offer shade and peace in cities, but compared to the canyonlike buildings around them, they seem to be of little importance. A park cannot compare with the grandeur of a forest. I just finished reading a book by Thomas B ..read more

July 4 is when Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence, even though they know very little about it. In the weeks leading up to July 4, 1776, white European or European-derived men met together in Philadelphia to figure out a system of government that, it must be admitted even by its critics, had not been seen before in Europe, Asia, or Africa. One characteristic of this system of government is that, the Founding Fathers claimed, it was based on the laws of nature. Thomas Jefferson was particularly clear on this point. Democracy is essential for a healthy nation. Jefferson pointed o ..read more

As a scientist, let me start off by saying what faith is not. It is not simply believing something that somebody else has told you. Faith is something broad and deep that you believe. It is the most important thing in life. It is so important that you are willing to spend years, or the rest of your life, proving or disproving it. Faith is not, therefore, something you believe despite evidence, but because of it. As a result, scientists may have more faith than anyone else. Every scientist will agree that if you believe nothing, then you will never try to find out what is true and what is not ..read more

 I am a vulgarizer. That is, my science books are intended for ordinary intelligent people (the original Latin meaning of vulgar), not for other scientists. This is true for all five of my published books (see links at www.stanleyrice.com), and for the sixth book that is under contract. I have written very few journal papers for other scientists to read. Most of my journal articles have been about science education, that is, for students and teachers. The reward for me was not to hear from a fellow scientist, “Good paper!” but to hear from a high school student who wanted to do a project ..read more

I have just finished reading my third science fiction novel by the twentieth-century French writer René Barjavel. I have written previously about his novel Le Voyageur Imprudent. A time traveler accidentally kills his own grandfather in the past and thus finds that he does not exist and has never existed. This novel also included a glimpse into a very distant nightmare utopia. Other Barjavel novels dealt straight on with the main issue of the writer’s time, nuclear disaster. In La Nuit de Temps he wrote about a previous utopian world that destroyed itself by nuclear war, but also the explosion ..read more