Ken Christenson
Author's posts
May 14
Two Buddhas, Part-5: Your mind is not other than a fallen leaf, or a footprint
A short selection from Essay Six in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. (So let’s step beyond our inner nerd now, and follow our Buddhas.) “What is the Way?” Ordinary mind is the Way. “Should I turn toward it or not?” If you turn toward it you turn away from it. “How can I know the …
May 10
Two Buddhas, Part-4: “The Big Picture”
A short selection from Essay Five in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. (The sequel to the “prequel” in Part Four.) [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] Now let us suppose that … a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes the hole, …
May 04
Two Buddhas, Part-3: The Narrow Way
A short selection from Essay Four from Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice, the physical prequel for my metaphysical ramblings on Humans and Nature (the Two Buddhas). Our Platonic heritage prompts us to view means and medians as the hard ‘realities,’ and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect …
May 03
Two Buddhas, Part-2: Evo-eco, and Human, “Hosts”
A short selection from Essay Three in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. [YOU MIGHT WANT TO SKIP THIS ON A FIRST READING OF THE TWO BUDDHAS SEQUENCE] However a phenotype develops, however genetic algorithms conspire with environment to produce, maintain, and alter an organism over its lifetime, or perhaps even pass on some of …
May 02
The Great God Pan, Intelligent Designer? Part-1
A short selection from Essay Two in Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. Organisms consist of germ cells that transmit heritable information and somatic cells that carry out ordinary functions. Germ cells are not altered by environment, learning, or the morphological changes of a lifetime. This information is lost after each generation. —Weismann’s germ plasm …
Apr 25
Two Buddhas, Part-1
The first section of Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice begins. PART I —Trouble with GAIA Gaia … 1 (also Gaea …) Gk Myth the Earth personified as a goddess, daughter of Chaos. She was born the mother and wife of Uranus (Heaven); their offspring included the Titans and the Cyclops. 2 the earth viewed as a …
Apr 19
Can HUMANITY ever KNOW ITSELF without first knowing the GREAT GOD PAN? Part-2
Another short selection from the Introduction to Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. 95 I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody too? Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know. How dreary to be a somebody! How public, like a frog, To tell your name the livelong day To an …
Apr 16
Can HUMANITY ever KNOW ITSELF without first knowing the GREAT GOD PAN? Part-1
A short selection from the Introduction to Darwin, Dogen, and the Extremophile Choice. In essence, the pivotal ‘two trees’ theme is this: A celebration of Nature, and Man, as two sovereign and mutually revealing (phylogenic and techno-genic) ‘evolutions’. . . . I don’t promise, of course, that the book is an easy read if you …
Aug 28
The Leadership Crisis
The average citizen doesn’t follow science close enough to appreciate the threat of climate change, let alone study science close enough to sort truth from misinformation in today’s social media free-for-all. It is the responsibility of government to pay attention to experts, to set policy according to their advice, and to tell constituents the truth. …
Apr 27
Hiatus
Good morning fellow conservationists, climate activists and rewilders! Well, I think I’ve shot my last bolt for now from the extremophilechoice.com website. There’s nothing new I can feed into our shared new(s)-hungry cyberspace, so I invite you to look over any previous post that interests you, and to engage with me in its comment section …
