Project Steve

The Bible & Torture - Skeptics Annotated Bible

Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors -Nicholas Wade. This is an excellent recap of the last half century of research into human origins. Easily the best book on evolution for the non-scientist since ‘Beak of the Finch’. ‘Before the Dawn’ will be familiar to anyone who reads the NY Times Tuesday Science section – many of the discussions in the book started as articles Wade has written over many years there. Now he synthesizes those pieces and shows how a new consensus is developing and how once heretical theories like Greenberg’s on language are being supported by new research in genetics and molecular biology. As others have mentioned, some of his suggestions need more support, but in a time when scientific ignorance is getting worse, this is a great book to recommend for anyone.

 Evolution of Cooperation Robert Axelrod If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. This unexpected victory proved that cooperation--one might even say altruism--is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it.

Other recommended books on evolution:

The Structure of Evolutionary Theory Stephen Jay Gould Can Science Explain Religion? The Blank Slate Steven Pinker Darwin's Dangerous Idea Dan Dennett Noah's Flood Richard Dawkins The Blind Watchmaker : Why the Evidence... Climbing Mount Improbable The Selfish Gene The Ancestor's Tale The Beak of the Finch The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson The Moral Animal The Origin of Virtue The Great Human Diasporas: The History of Diversity and Evolution -Luigi Cavalli-Sforza The Mistaken Extinction : Dinosaur Evolution and the Origin of Birds by Lowell Dingus, Timothy Rowe

Fictional Science: Calcutta Chromosome Hopeful Monsters

Other links:  Proof of Creation Religion Critical Thinking Bible Studies

Map - 1997 - Human Evolution - National Geographic Original, paper wallmaps from National Geographic   Map - 1989 - March Toward Extinction / Dinosaurs Original, paper wallmaps from National Geographic   Map - 2000 - The Peopling of the Americas Original, paper wallmaps from National Geographic   Map - 1993 - North America in the Age of Dinosaurs Original, paper wallmaps from National Geographic Science books and discussion Online Ecology games Cascoly Puzzles Other Science Programs Evolution and Biology Religion Philosophy Critical Thinking