Quoted: Some evolutionists are arguing, for example, that 'there seems to be no natural law sufficient to describe Darwinian pre-adaptations', as evolutionary theorist Stuart Kauffman puts it. A Darwinian pre-adaption is a property that has no selection value in one environment, it's value only emerging in another later. 'An example is human middle-ear bones, which are derived from three adjacent jawbones of an early fish,' Kaufmann continues. And its not just ears. Lungs, hearts, livers and much more besides fall in the same category. (The battle over spandrels will be familiar to many, recently stirred up by Jerry Fodor.)

Quoted: Allegory fell on hard times in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the charm of beloved works of English literature such as Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress lies in the imaginative use of allegory, biblical scholars banished the term from their vocabulary. Harper’s Bible Dictionary, for example, published in the 1980s by leading scholars of the Society of Biblical Literature, does not even have an entry under the word.

Quoted: In particular, without the knowledge of his other doctors and at the same time as they were giving him other drugs, he was being tended to by Max Jacobson, a doctor known as "Dr Feelgood" because of his reputation as a provider of amphetamines and pep pills. In time Jacobson's drug treatment became almost a recreational drug for Kennedy. Jacobson was later struck off.

Quoted: A new book asks all the right questions about animal rights, even if it doesn't canvass all the possible answers

Nice history of the evolution of gansta rap

Quoted: Keepin' It Unreal

Quoted: Two days ago, the Guardian published in G2, and on the website, a series of photographs by a German photographer, Walter Schels, and his partner Beate Lakotta. The subject matter was death: the pictures consisted of a series of portraits of people both before and - crucially - after death.