More on: evolution

Reading from Two Books: Nature, Scripture, and Evolution   In the Middle Ages, philosophers and theologians described nature as a book, a coherent work in which we could glimpse the mind of God. Like scripture, the book of nature bore the divine imprint—the Imago Dei—and the two books were seen as complementary. In the centuries…

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

In Anselm Kiefer’s Am Anfang A ladder rises like a DNA helix Out of the seething flux, an ocean Of broken glass, shattered light, The bonds just barely linking there, Chiral, as yet un-living, into proto- Membrane, proto-cell, accreting In the sugary stew of their forming, The nucleotides surging tidal As they begin to spiral…

When Charles Darwin sat down, finally to write his big book he wondered, not                                how it would end, but where                                on the shelf    …

Paul Shaw breeds insomniac flies. He tilts test tubes at unstable angles, then watches wide-eyed as the flies inside go haywire. Thousands of flies fly inside Paul’s hypotheses; thousands of flies defy them. As fast as he identifies a pattern, the field of sleep expands. Paul celebrated tenure in October, and all the Shaws flew…

This tall fern has a midrib so sturdy I can pluck its broad width of green and wave it before my face as I walk the lane, the gnats and the deerflies shooed pell-mell as the air ripples away from my body. I’m no longer a target. Do this enough, in three million years I’ll…