This week we celebrate Darwin's birthday and the publishing of the "Great Book" as it is known in biology, On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. But in the United States, there continue to be assaults on the ability of education to keep out erroneous questioning of evolution at the middle and high school levels.

It's the time of year when people take stock of the past 12 months, and make resolutions for the New Year. That's kind of what Svante Paab...

A friend's kid said to me the other day: "I'm a Darwinist...I don't believe in God." Okay, I thought, hold on there kid. Darwin wasn't a prophet who started an "-ism," and Science isn't a faith. We need to get rid of some of the category confusion that has crept into current debates and percolated down to secular kids. It can be tempting to respond to the sheer idiocy of American Creationists like Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA,) who recently described evolution and the Big Bang as "lies straight from the pit of Hell" by broadly rejecting religion. But these are not either-or categories and it is startling that they should have become so.

It's easier, more effective, and cheaper to let healthy bodies fight off disease and infections than to weaken those defence mechanisms and then compensate for them medically. If we want a stable health system, we must put more resources into reducing pollution and environmental degradation and creating a way of life that keeps bodies and minds happy and in good health.

While the world celebrates the discovery of the Higgs boson, these scientists are hard at work on one of the most profound mysteries left: Why, and how, did humans become conscious? Until we can figure out what consciousness physically is, there won't be any consensus on what function it serves, or indeed whether it serves any function at all.