Author: Adam Neiblum
Adam Neiblum is the author of Unexceptional: Darwin, Atheism & Human Nature and Common Sense Recovery: An Atheist’s Guide to Alcoholics Anonymous. He is currently writing about human progress and utopian thought.
Getting it Right: Darwin and Human Evolution, Part II
Evolution and Progress Are Not Synonyms As a result of our instinctive exceptionalist inclinations, we have long misinterpreted Charles Darwin. One of the most telling illustrations of this is our tendency to conflate evolution and progress. From religious literalism and creationist thinking to the more secular minds of scientists and atheists, most of us think …
Getting It Right: Darwin and Human Evolution, Part 1
We want to be here. We want to be here long term, and we want it to be beautiful. Beginning with an honest appraisal of precisely who and what we are, we can make that happen. For millennia, our cultural origin stories have served as the familiar foundations for our overall self-conception. From Abraham to …
Are We Born to Believe?
The first time I saw this meme—all that sweetness and purity on the verge of corruption, the spread of ethnicities representing the diverse peoples of our shared world, those innocent cherubic minds naively awaiting indoctrination at the hands of evil-doing religious zealots—I was genuinely upset. Of course, that was the point. It is effective. But …
Gould’s Second Stage: Progress, Evolution, and Human Exceptionalism
Our self conception is very important. The way we understand ourselves as a species here on this planet—the who we are and the why we are here, our overall sense of how we human beings fit into the whole cosmic scheme of things—matters enormously. Whether it is subconscious or conscious, accurate or false, our subjective …