Ursula Goodenough: Science and the Sacred

A Wild and Beautiful World

"Cultural understandings can be very rapid, they can also be sometimes very resistant to change, which is part of the problem, but the evolution of culture is something we can and should think about in a very different way from biological evolution, which takes a long time--and the fact that cultural evolution can turn on a dime can be very encouraging, because it means that it could be that in the next ten years (in a fantasy) everybody's out in the streets, saying 'leave it in the ground'--the fossil fuel, that is."

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Ursula W. Goodenough is a Professor of Biology Emerita at Washington University in St. Louis where she engaged in research on eukaryotic algae. She authored the textbook Genetics and the best-selling book The Sacred Depths of Nature and speaks regularly about religious naturalism and evolution. She contributed to the NPR blog, 13.7: Cosmos & Culture, from 2009 to 2011.She currently serves as president of the Religious Naturalist Association and in 2023, she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

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Other links:

Religious Naturalist Association