Science

Zombies have eaten their way into our brains. From the halloween party at your neighbour's to the plots of major Hollywood features, they've become part of our culture.

I recently wrote a blog post criticizing how evolution was used in very peculiar way. In an opinion piece, two Swedish academics claimed that we should eat the kind of diet that our bodies “were adapted to” – said to be the time when our distant relatives were hunters and gatherers.

Most of us with a scientific background consider ourselves to be rational, critical thinkers. Then again, most of us like to be flattered.

The story of life and the universe can be mesmerizing. In his book The Universe Within Neil Shubin illustrates the history of the universe – all 13.7 billion years of it – by means of the much shorter history of scientific discovery of it. As parameters for a work of popular science go, they don't come much bigger. But Shubin succeeds brilliantly in meshing the shorter narrative with the great one: how 13.7 billion years of history have formed and fine-tuned ourselves and all living things.