chaotic order

It is a cloudy and windy evening here in Salt Lake City. I returned from work at 5.30, took a swim, ordered in a Pizza from a local Pizzeria called the "Big Daddy", pulled up a couple of pillows behind me and continued my reading of a wonderful book of essays by Stephen Jay Gould - an evolutionary biologist. Dr Gould is arguably the best known and widely read scientist of our generation. A Paleont ologist by profession, but is widely recognized for his path breaking views on Darwinian theory of evolution and the articulate essays that he regularly wrote for the "The Natural History" magazine for a period of thirty odd years till his death in 2002. All his known essays have been collected in individual volumes edited by and prefaced by Gould himself. Since the time Darwin published his seminal work “Origin of species" in 1850, scientific thinking, buttressed by religious authority has been vociferously advocating, establishing and pontificating on an anthropoce

Will and Ariel Durant - A personal tribute and remembrance Mel Gibson’s great and controversial movie “Apocalyptic”, released in 2006, fictionalized the decline and fall of the famed Mayan civilization: it begins with the following graphical quote: ‘A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself within’. These are the words of Will Durant, written nearly  fifty years ago in the hallowed pages of his epic work “The story of civilization” in eleven volumes. In nearly thirteen thousand pages of immaculate writing, poetic audacity, delectable idioms and sweeping generalizations; both Will and his wife Ariel Durant spans the lifetime of human civilization in all its principal aspects with a finesse, grace and erudition that has never before been attempted , and In my opinion , can never be bettered in its execution. The work took them fifty years to plan and complete, and during that period, the husband and wife traveled the globe a dozen times, saw and r