Stream Splashes October 27 – November 2 in Review
Every week, The Stream rounds up some highlights from the recent news. We call these our “splashes”: everything from insightful commentary on the week’s big events to small inspiring stories you may have missed.
Does our DNA disprove the biblical story of Adam and Eve? Many population geneticists say it does. They argue that if we compare the DNA of humans from around the world, we can tell we sprang from an ape-like population of no less than 10,000.
But a new paper in the journal BIO-Complexity challenges this picture. In the paper, biologist Ann Gauger and mathematician Ola Hössjer use a new computer model to show that a single human-couple origin is possible.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that he only knew one person who had seen a ghost, but she still said she didn’t believe in them.
It’s easy to scoff at belief in ghosts as silly superstition, but belief in ghosts seems to have been universal across human cultures from the beginning of recorded history.
Universal belief in ghosts doesn’t mean they exist however. Nevertheless, if they are so common to human experience it’s worth asking what ghosts might be.
My friend Dan told me recently he was thinking of leaving his church because they’d spent nine consecutive sermons on the Enneagram. Since then the same topic has popped up in at least four different places. I’ve done some research, and I’m alarmed at what I’m discovering.
The Enneagram is a personality test, much in the same vein as the Myers/Briggs Type Inventory, or the DiSC test. It claims to do more than they do, though. And, while claiming to do more, research on its validity is unimpressive, to say the least.
An endcap at Whole Foods in Arlington, Texas, is not where I expected to spot a fancy tarot card deck in gift-wrap packaging. Arlington ain’t Sedona. “Uh-oh,” I told myself, “Are tarot cards coming back into fashion?” A quick Google search confirmed my suspicions. We’re experiencing a burst in popularity of tarot cards.
I get it. Believe me, I get it. As it happens, this Halloween marks the 20th anniversary of what was the defining moment of my Christian walk. I tell the full story here. Before giving my life fully to Christ, I was a tarot card fanboy.
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