The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [147]
The single biggest mystery in evolutionary biology is not how to get adaptation from nothing. The real problem is explaining the profligate wastefulness of natural selection: why evolution resulted in sex. It’s everywhere and yet it is so wasteful of the very thing reproduction is supposed to spread: information and order. Sex should have been selected against. The best treatment of this mystery belongs to the most important biologist since Darwin, W. D. Hamilton. See his Narrow Roads of Gene Land, volume 2: Evolution of Sex (2002). A less mathematical presentation can be found in John Maynard Smith and Eörs Szathmáry, The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (1999).
There is a wonderful graph of the major extinctions at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/oconnell/astr121/guide22.html. The Wiki site for “atmosphere of Earth” has an equally clear graph showing the transition from a time when oxygen was a poison for most living things on Earth.
The most earnest attempt to reconcile religion and science, and especially Darwin and God, comes from the Catholic theologian John Haught, Making Sense of Evolution: Darwin, God and the Drama of Life (2010). Father Haught is a good guy, having testified against “intelligent design” in the courts. But he gets his Darwinian biology wrong in just the way the less learned reconcilers do.
If you really want to check on Bishop Ussher’s calculations, there is a good introduction at “Ussher chronology” on Wikipedia.
MORALITY: THE BAD NEWS AND
THE GOOD
Plato’s problem for sermonizing about morality is developed in his dialogue, the Euthyphro. It’s in almost every collection of Plato’s dialogues. There are lots of translations from Plato’s classic Greek available online.
J. L. Mackie really began making moral philosophers take evolutionary biology and nihilism seriously in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977). Richard Joyce followed Mackie’s “error” theory of ethics 30 years later. The Evolution of Morality (2006) updated the evidence that morality is an adaptation and showed why that fact is no reason to believe it, even when it is the cause of our believing it.
Shaun Nichols’s Sentimental Rules: On the Natural Foundations of Moral Judgment (2004) brings together the neuroscientific evidence and the evolutionary factors that shape universal core morality. His book with Joshua Knobe, Experimental Philosophy (2008), shows how the hardware and software of the brain—shaped by cultural and natural selection—generate pretty much the same moral judgments in everyone. Further evidence for how everyone carries around roughly the same morality is being illuminated by functional magnetic resonance studies of the brain, as described by Joshua Greene in The Moral Brain and How to Use It (2011)
How bad is Mother Nature at selecting for true beliefs? How good is she at selecting for false ones? Daniel Dennett and Ryan McKay examine these questions in their paper “The Evolution of Misbelief,” in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2009). You can find it online for free and for a fee. They show that evolution is good at selecting false beliefs when they have beneficial consequences for our posterity—just why you’d expect Mother Nature to select for core morality along with other false beliefs.
Before the Dawn (2006), by Nicholas Wade, introduces what we are beginning to learn about human prehistory by the combination of paleoarcheology and human gene sequencing. Clever use of gene sequence data can detail the earliest arrivals of humans everywhere and where they passed through on the way. It can also tell us how widespread cannibalism was—very; when we began to wear clothes—70,000 years ago; how one of our favorite foods—the dog—domesticated us; and whether we had sex with Neanderthals. This subject is moving so fast—two new human