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In a recent piece for National Geographic, Book Talk curator Simon Worrall entitled his headline, “In Age of Science, Is Religion 'Harmful Superstition'?” For the answer, he gave platform to Jerry Coyne, author of Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.

Coyne, an atheist and University of Chicago professor of Ecology and Evolution, answered, among other questions, why “are religion and science incompatible.”

“[T]here are a number of things about evolution and science that undermine religion,” Coyne responded, including “the fact that the Genesis story is wrong.” “There’s no evidence that there’s any qualitatively different feature about humans from other species, except maybe for language” – language that “could have evolved via culture.”

Superstitions don't rule the US Women's National Team — but they definitely have some

Whether you call it paranoid or just a ritual, some players just need their routines. Here are some of the United States Women's National Team members' rituals (or superstitions) that get them prepped for game day:

Carli Lloyd says she plays her best game when she knows the pressure of the eyes of her family and friends aren't there to throw her off.

Wasn’t the Enlightenment supposed to wash the world of its sins of superstition and religion? And yet humanity keeps clinging to its belief systems, its religious leaders, and its prayer. More than that, we’re dipping back into the magical realms — one would think that if superstition were to be eradicated through the power of reason and rationality, magic would be the first to go. It turns out our hunger for the irrational and the intuitive is more insatiable than previously assumed. We have our Kabbalah, our Chaos Magick, our Druids. We have our mystics and tarot card readers and our astrologers on morning news shows explaining why Kate and William are a match made by the gods. Wicca is a fast growing religion in the United States, and my German health insurance covers homeopathy and Reiki massage, both of which have always felt more like magic than science to me.

And yet the atheists keep on, telling us that we don’t have to believe in God. It maybe never occurred to them that perhaps we want to.

Magical belief, whether that entails an omnipotent God who watches over us or the conviction that we can communicate with “the other side,” fills a need in us. Some of us, I should say, as atheists would be quick to counter. How seriously we take that belief, and what we do with it varies from person to person. As the debates between the godless and the faithful continue — and these are so prevalent in our culture now, the religious figure versus the atheist, sponsored by every university and cultural center, that I read such a debate in a novel I had picked up — that perhaps these two kinds of people simply have a different set of needs. It’s like a new mother arguing with a woman who has never felt maternal a day in her life. Neither side will ever truly understand the longings of the other, and the fact that they can’t stop arguing and trying to convince is proof of that.

God is not only dead, author avers. He never lived. Not to mention the deaths of kids treated with faith instead of science-based medicine.

Another is free will: the idea that at any point in time all alternatives are open to us. This is the dualistic free will maintained by religions when they say you can choose to accept Jesus as your savior, or being homosexual is a choice. Science is starting to undercut this, by showing that there’s only one choice we can make, which is the output of our materialistic brains.

They’re incompatible first of all, because they both compete to find truths about the universe. There are some fundamental truths about the universe that believers have to accept in order to be religious.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.

Psychologists who study how the human mind responds to randomness call this the gambler’s fallacy — the belief that on some cosmic plane a run of bad luck creates an imbalance that must ultimately be corrected, a pressure that must be relieved

The opposite of that is the hot-hand fallacy — the belief that winning streaks, whether in basketball or coin tossing, have a tendency to continue

Both misconceptions are reflections of the brain’s wired-in rejection of the power that randomness holds over our lives. Look deep enough, we instinctively believe, and we may uncover a hidden order.

the “demarcation problem,” the issue of what separates good science from bad science and pseudoscience (and everything in between). The problem is relevant for at least three reasons.

The first is philosophical: Demarcation is crucial to our pursuit of knowledge; its issues go to the core of debates on epistemology and of the nature of truth and discovery.

The second reason is civic: our society spends billions of tax dollars on scientific research, so it is important that we also have a good grasp of what constitutes money well spent in this regard.

we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.

we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief.

Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.

five most common surnames in China -- shared by more than 433 million people, or 30% of the population

With 1.37 billion citizens, China has the world's largest population, but has one of the smallest surname pools. Only about 6,000 surnames are in use, according to the Ministry of Public Security. And the vast majority of the population -- almost 86% -- share just 100 of those surnames.

To put that in perspective, the United States -- with less than a quarter of China's population -- reported 6.3 million surnames in its 2010 census

More than 1 in 3 Americans believe that the Chinese government engineered the coronavirus as a weapon, and another third are convinced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has exaggerated the threat of Covid-19 to undermine President Trump.

Another is less so: a more solitary, anxious figure, moody and detached, perhaps including many who are older and living alone.

all conspiring to use Covid-19 for their own dark purposes.