Sublime

Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep

Evolution by natural selection is not itself a designed thing, an agent with purposes, but it acts as if it were (it occupies the role vacated by the Intelligent Designer): it is a set of processes that “find” and “track” reasons for things to be arranged one way rather than another. The chief difference between the reasons found by evolution and t

The emergence of humans and other living creatures is best explained as the intended result of an intelligent mind, rather than as the happenstance of an unintended and undirected process.

But modern scientific paradigms are rarely overthrown. Instead, they are built upon. They create a platform that supports new paradigms above them. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was a “dangerous” idea—in Daniel Dennett’s phrase—because it challenged Biblical and human-centric accounts of life’s history, but the true measure of its scientific

Dunbar witnessed important breakthroughs live, and saw that the labs most likely to turn unexpected findings into new knowledge for humanity made a lot of analogies, and made them from a variety of base domains. The labs in which scientists had more diverse professional backgrounds were the ones where more and more varied analogies were offered, an

Through the process of inventing, our imagination playfully and spontaneously pulls together ideas and images to make something new. But how do we explain the process of inventing? How did it arise? What purpose does it serve? Evolutionary accounts of man’s creative capacities don’t provide adequate justification for the imagination and our inventi