All of James Cameron's films after The Abyss increasingly resemble the Hindenburg: bloated, self-indulgent, lacking originality and subtlety in all but F/X. Avatar is the culmination of these -- with CGI.
As I look back on the past ten years of the "Still-Unnicknamed Zeroes," I'd like to formally request a little less turbulence in the next decade. Please? No era is devoid of history.
At the start of the decade, most of us believed that only chimpanzees might come anywhere near our wonderful human intellect, but by 2010 we realize that dogs, birds, monkeys, and elephants also challenge the human-animal divide.
Believe it or not, there are people who deny the veracity of the mountain of science behind the origins of humans, the formation of the universe, health care and the state of our environment.
Edwin Drake drilled the first commercial oil well in 1859. The Age of Oil was born. The same year, the science of global warming was born.
On Monday, November 30, 2009, Occidental College paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Donald Prothero and I teamed up against Intelligent Design ...
Anthropologists should not be helping U.S. military forces gather information about Afghan villagers and their way of life, a study commission sponsored by their academic organization said today.
Laymen need not be afraid to read The Purposeful Universe even if they are not predisposed to science. As deep and challenging of a read as this book might be for the Average Joe, it's well worth the effort.
There are times when all good women, and men, need to come to the aid of the party. Times when profound changes in understanding occur. Times that put...
The discovery of Ardi, the oldest hominid skeleton ever found, was big news for the science community around the world. But in the Middle East, the n...
If nothing else, creationist efforts to undermine science and science education should teach us something about our species, about our impressive capacity for delusion.
My Thanksgiving list this year includes Jane Goodall, who was interviewed by my colleague Bill Moyers for this week's edition of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.
When a person experiences relief from any treatment, conventional or alternative, one should not necessarily assume that a real healing has occurred.
The release of Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue, has been an occasion of great frivolity amongst those of us on the left.
Bill Bryson has created "A Really Short History of Nearly Everything," and he's done me -- and you, and every curious kid burdened by a dull textbook or a brain-dead science teacher -- a huge favor.
The idea that the Puritans (and Pilgrims) suffered from religious persecution in England is probably a myth. What they suffered from was unease at the general licentiousness of English life.
The concepts of creationism and "intelligent design" deserve no more credibility than that given to those who continue to "believe" in a flat earth.
2012 pillages an ancient culture, deliberately misrepresents its traditions, and then claims its all true. More important, it taps into the serious vein of crazy that we have in this country.
Our unique American intellectual tragedy is that of all Western countries we have the largest percentage of people who propose that modern humans essentially descended intact from the clouds.
In 1974, when I was a graduate student in anthropology at Columbia University, I wanted to organize a discussion of universals. At the time, I was working for Margaret Mead as one of her assistants.
Virtually every biography of Charles Darwin refers to his health problems and acknowledges that the one physician who provided an effective treatment for him was Dr. James Manby Gully.
