Randy Olson is a scientist-turned-filmmaker whose first production, A Flock of Dodos, was about the Intelligent Design circus. His second production, Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy, is just being released. Both are fun and informative at the same time. They also address a theme that is worth...

Arguably the best New Yorker cover of all time was Saul Steinberg's "view of the world from 9th avenue" (March 29, 1976), which showed the richly detailed streets of Manhattan in the foreground, a highly simplified USA stretching into the distance, and "China," "Japan," and "Russia" as amorphous islands...

Wine connoisseurs on a budget often have a bottle of "the good stuff" that they reserve for special occasions. I feel like celebrating the conclusion of my Stealth series by breaking out the equivalent of a fine bottle of wine: a book that actually does use science to shed light...

Sacred texts such as the Bible say so many things that almost any position can be supported by selecting the right passages. So it is with scientific hypotheses. In Stealth III, I listed six plausible scientific hypotheses about the nature of religion. If we are allowed to pick and...

Those who are following my Stealth blogs have been on the edge of their seats, waiting to know the true nature of religion (see Stealth III for details). It is a superorganism? A form of exploitation? A disease? Like a moth to flame? Like obesity? A roll of...

My previous two blogs (I and II) stressed that we must be skeptical about atheist beliefs, lest they go the way of stealth religions. Now let's roll up our sleeves and see what this means for the study of overt religions. Here are four questions:

Q1)...

My previous blog attracted 250 comments, putting atheism right up there with Britney Spears as one of the most newsworthy issues of our day. Seriously, there are important issues at stake with the New Atheism movement, meriting a follow-up blog. One question on my mind concerns the quality of...

In today's polarized world, the conflict between atheism and religion is shaping up to be the fight of the century. In this corner, the new atheists, flexing their muscles with books such as God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. In that corner,...

If men are from Mars and women from Venus, where do liberals and conservatives come from? They are so befuddled by each other that it is tempting to say different galaxies--or, to employ a biological metaphor, that they are different species. It turns out that the biological metaphor might be...

Dan Agin has boldly waved selfish genes goodbye in his report on my article with E.O. Wilson in the November 3 issue of New Scientist, which is a digest of a more comprehensive article that will appear in the December issue of Quarterly Review of Biology titled "Rethinking...