Large swaths of the Internet have fallen under the spell of Baby Yoda, and I guess I’m not immune to those charms either. (Yes, I recognize they’re not actually young Yoda, but the character doesn’t have an actual name and Baby Yoda has a satisfying lilt.) Actually, part of the charm is intrinsic to our biology and psychology as humans; certain features common to human babies, like big eyes and proportionately large heads, read as cute to nearly all of us across a variety of contexts. One might expect baby chimps and monkeys to elicit a paternal response, but even creatures like squids which have few features in common with mammals, or inanimate objects like Pop! vinyls, or puppets of fictional 50-year-old aliens can exploit our neural pathways to get an “Awww.”
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biological evolution
Science Reader Question: So you want to read more about evolutionary biology and theology
I’ve written a lot over the past two months on the topics of evolutionary biology and theology, perhaps more than some of you required. And yet I’ve also only scratched the surface of the relevant issues. Rather than continue ad nauseum, I thought I’d conclude this series with some suggestions for further reading. This won’t be an exhaustive bibliography; if you want something more comprehensive, you might try the relevant sections of the American Scientific Affiliation’s categorized resources or this reading list from the Jesus Creed blog. What I’ve collected here is some of the writing that has influenced my thinking and resources that I and my collaborators and commenters think are interesting and helpful. Feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments!
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Science Reader Question: Putting the Biology in Evolutionary Biology
We’ve been taking a look at what an evolutionary natural history implies about God’s nature, human nature, and other theological topics. Last week I addressed some of the benefits of an evolutionary perspective. I think affirming evolution doesn’t mean settling for an otherwise undesirable position out of obligation to science; I believe looking at the world through an evolutionary lens is actually consistent with the narrative of scripture. At the same time, I am a biologist and this is a science column, so I’d like to wrap up by talking a little science.
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Science Reader Question: Life on the Edge
Throughout this ongoing series on evolution, inspired by some reader questions, we’ve looked at a lot of the challenges an evolutionary natural history presents for traditional Christian theology. Accounting for the modern biological understanding of life’s origin and diversity is usually framed as a series of conundrums requiring either substantial effort to resolve, or an ultimate rejection of either science or scripture. If evolutionary natural history is so problematic, why bother? If there’s any uncertainty, why give the benefit of the doubt to science? Do we even want to believe in a God who creates via evolution; wouldn’t we prefer a God who can do better?
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Science Reader Question: Which Came First, the Sinner or the Sin?
In the previous installment of my ongoing series on evolutionary biology questions, I shared my conversation with Mike Stell about original sin within the context of an evolutionary natural history. That topic leads naturally to a related question about who the original sinners were. Actually, both the blog commenter whose questions inspired this series and Mike Stell independently asked me very similar questions. What exactly does evolutionary biology say about the first humans?
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