The public's general indifference to one of science's landmark achievements has persisted even as the science and technology involved have yielded some remarkable discoveries.

Of course, people can perhaps be forgiven for not wanting to recognize that they don't have many more genes than round worms or fruit flies.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the "masses" want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less.

To keep up with the latest entertainment, you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships.

To people over a certain age the idea that popular culture is in decline is a comforting one, which may explain its deep appeal. If today's TV shows are worse than yesterday's, and if new diversions like video games are inferior to their earlier counterparts, whatever those might be (Scrabble? Monopoly?), then there's no harm in paying them no attention. To a 40-year-old who's busy with work and family, the belief that he isn't missing anything by not mastering "SimCity" or by letting his 10-year-old program the new iPod is a blessed solace. If the new tricks are stupid tricks, then old dogs don't need to learn them. They can go on comfortably sleeping by the fire.

Since beginning work last month, Afghanistan's Central Poppy Eradication Force, an American-trained group, has destroyed less than 250 acres, according to the two American officials. Its original goal was to eradicate 37,000 acres, but that target has recently been reduced to 17,000 acres. With the poppy harvest already under way, the actual eradication levels will probably be far lower.

The department's annual drug-trafficking report, released in March, warned that Afghanistan was "on the verge of becoming a narcotics state."

We are spending way too much time debating with ourselves, or playing defense, and way too little time actually looking Arab Muslims in the eye and telling them the truth as we see it.

Here's what I think will happen if and when China changes its currency policy, and those cheap loans are no longer available. US interest rates will rise; the housing bubble will probably burst; construction employment and consumer spending will both fall; falling home prices may lead to a wave of bankruptcies. And we'll suddenly wonder why anyone thought financing the budget deficit was easy.

In other words, we've developed an addiction to Chinese dollar purchases, and will suffer painful withdrawal symptoms when they come to an end.

One can choose to view chance selection as obvious evidence that there is no God, as Dr. Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and uncompromising atheist, might argue, or to conclude instead that God chooses to work through natural means. In the latter case, the overwhelming evidence that natural selection has determined the evolution of life on earth would simply imply that God is "the cause of causes," as Cardinal Ratzinger's document describes it.

The very fact that two such diametrically opposed views can be applied to the same scientific theory demonstrates that the fact of evolution need not dictate theology. In other words, the apparently contentious questions are not scientific ones. It is possible for profoundly atheist evolutionary biologists like Dr. Dawkins and deeply spiritual ones like Dr. Kenneth Miller of Brown University, who writes extensively on evolution, to be in complete agreement about the scientific mechanism governing biological evolution, and the fact that life has evolved via natural selection.