In the days after the cataclysmic tsunami of 2004, as the full scale of the destruction and horror wreaked upon the islands of the Indian Ocean became apparent, the fate of the tribal peoples of the Andaman Islands remained a mystery.

It seemed inconceivable, above all, that the Sentinelese islanders could have survived, living as they did on a remote island directly in the tsunami’s path.

Yet when a helicopter flew low over the island, a Sentinelese man rushed out on to the beach, aiming his arrow at the pilot in a gesture that clearly said, ‘We don’t want you here’. Alone of the tens of millions of people affected by the disaster, the Sentinelese needed no help from anyone.

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READERS in search of literature about Darwin or Darwinism will have no
trouble finding it. Recent milestone anniversaries of Darwin’s birth
and of the publication of On the Origin of Species have prompted a
plethora of material, so authors thinking of adding another volume had
better have a good excuse for it. We have written another book about
Darwinism, and we urge you to take it to heart. Our excuse is in the
title: What Darwin Got Wrong.

By Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, from the NewScientist

Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical.
The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin’s account
of evolution is hardly considered. Such dissent as there is often
relies on theistic premises which Darwinists rightly say have no place
in the evaluation of scientific theories. So onlookers are left with
the impression that there is little or nothing about Darwin’s theory to
which a scientific naturalist could reasonably object. The
methodological scepticism that characterises most areas of scientific
discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.

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Evidence suggests that at the very least the consumption of psychedelic substances leads to an increased concern for Nature and ecological issues. On one level we can understand that this may be due to a basic appreciation of place and aesthetics that accompanies the increased sensory experience, or that since psychedelic plants come from Nature we are forced to enter its realms when we search them out. However, on a deeper level we can also appreciate that a communication with Nature may on occasion occur through the phenomenological properties of the psychedelic experience, some of which have been hailed by experients as life-transforming and spiritually renewing, even “mystical.”

By Dr. David Luke & Dr. Stanley Kripner

With the aid of mescaline Aldous Huxley came face to face with such a mystical experience, even though the Oxford Theologian R.C. Zaehner (1957) denigrated his experience of “nature mysticism” as somehow inferior to the “genuine” theistic mystical experience. Yet the irony remains that the very split from Nature that some Christian theologians claim occurred in the Garden of Eden may lie at the heart of many people’s current sense of separateness from their ecology. Whereas, under specificircumstances of substance, set, and setting, psychedelics are capable of augmenting such a reunion. Despite Zaehner’s derisions, Huxley (1954) reportedly witnessed this reunion through his experimental uses of mescaline: “I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of creation – the miracle, moment by moment of naked existent.”

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