A tiny spider has been found that can launch itself at 10 times the speed that would make a test pilot black out. And if that isn’t amazing enough, it builds its own catapult out of web material that can tolerate sustained tension for hours and days. This is the “slingshot spider” of Peru.

On the subject of evolution, the scientific “consensus” depends on maintaining the public’s forgetfulness of Charles Darwin’s great partner, rival, and challenger, Alfred Russel Wallace. He co-discovered the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin, and solved the problem of evolution by redefining it as “directed, detectably designed, and purposeful common descent.”

There’s an outcry on behalf of journalist Andrew Sullivan today over how he was canceled by New York Magazine. His offense was publishing an excerpt from Charles Murray’s controversial book The Bell Curve — 25 years ago in The New Republic. I may not be sympathetic to the argument about race and genetics in Murray’s book, but I am sympathetic to Sullivan and the way he is still being punished for his editorial decision.

Information sharing can occur between chains of molecules arranged in a signaling cascade, where each one triggers action in the next. This is a bit more like the Rube Goldberg technique, except that in cells, it is much more logical and reliable.

Philosopher and writer Keith Frankish sets himself a formidable task: to explain how the human mind originated. On his terms, consciousness must arise by wholly natural means. Behind the nature in which it arises, there is nothing, no consciousness, no mind that could play a role. There is nothing.