The future of humanity, and other stories

Michael sketches the future of humanity, which is neither epic nor tragic.

Paul also wants to discuss the future of humanity by separating the quants from the poets. I suspect we need both.

Brad talks tax (again). Having previously described why Christians willingly pay taxes, this time he asks if it is ever justified for Christians to engage in tax avoidance (or even evasion): part one; part two; part three.

Carl shares how the human body is like a lake, or what medicine needs to learn from ecology: "We know now that there are a hundred trillion microbes in a human body. You carry more microbes in you this moment than all the people who ever lived. Those microbes are growing all the time. [...] The microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one. And they come in a huge diversity of species — somewhere in the thousands, although no one has a precise count yet. By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go."

UK journalists posing as representatives of arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin expose corporate greenwashing in an undercover sting at well-known environmental charity Conservation International. A useful rule of thumb: the larger the company, the more sceptical to be regarding corporate claims to ecological credentials.

Jason links to an article answering the ever-pressing question: When did girls start wearing pink?