Author Archives: thebookofworks

I suppose it’s appropriate that my first full-length blog post on this page has a title that contains several questions, since the book itself opens with a chapter called “The Importance of Questions.” The answers to the (six) questions posed … Continue reading →

I began this blog in May 2015. I had just retired from the NIH, and I was fortunate enough to receive a grant from the John Templeton Foundation for two years that allowed me to do research on gene regulatory … Continue reading →

In the 1960s, a climatologist named Edward Lorenz worked on developing a set of difference equations to study weather forecasting. This type of equation is used to model what happens to a system as a function of time: a variable … Continue reading →

Why doesn’t God step in and stop bad things from happening? On a cool cloudy day in Manhattan, a young mother walking with her three children (one in a stroller) was caught in a sudden downpour. She was pushing the … Continue reading →

Last week I was standing at the ocean’s edge on a beach in eastern Long Island, and I remembered that at an earlier point in my life, while still an agnostic, I used to (in a way) worship the ocean. … Continue reading →

I recently tweeted something that raised quite a few eyebrows among scientifically minded folks, both atheists and Christians. The tweet implied that I believe that evolution cannot explain all human characteristics, and that a divine intervention in the form of … Continue reading →

Carl Sagan’s Cosmos came out while I was an atheist, and I thought it was a wonderful TV series. I loved the state-of-the-art graphics, and, of course, Sagan was a master documentarian. I know now that there was quite a … Continue reading →