…was the title of a  book by Paul Davies  published in 2007. He was and is one of the great astrophysical cosmologists and had just moved to the U.S. from his native Australia. Unlike many other members of his academic guild he favors the hypothesis that a transcendent presence or force (God?) was and is involved in the origin of the universe and its “tuning” to make life and evolution possible and “inevitable.” This was, predictably, one of the programs most often requested for replay and that’s what we do right here.

Some of the earliest dinosaurs – from which the later and larger ones evolved – were found in the U.S. by Paul Sereno of the University of Chicago. Here in a 2004 discussion he describes how he and his student assistants went about finding them and extracting them from the ground and, dating them.

Is Homo Sapiens directly descended from some prior species? If so, it would probably be “Homo Neanderthalis.” That is the question with which this fine discussion from 2004 begins. One of the participants is a biological scientist and the other is engaged in archeological anthropology. Both have spent their careers trying to track the long geneology of our species.

That is the title of a book by Jerry Coyne, one of our guests in this assertive and informative 2009 show. He is Professor of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago. Our other guest, Robert Richards, is in Philosophy of Science at the same institution. Both are experts on Darwinian theory. But, say the doubters, how could something as complex as the human eye have “just evolved” rather than have been designed? They explain that one and a great deal more in this noteworthy discussion.