A good find by Kottke.org…
Jared Diamond, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Guns, Germs & Steel (and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed), offers a lecture at USC where he gets into the universal attributes of religions and their underlying adaptive value/social purpose. The talk runs about 41 minutes, followed by a long Q&A session.
For those looking for more academic lectures, I should remind you of the recent launch of YouTube EDU and Academic Earth, plus our large collection of free university courses.
via @kottkedotorg
please forward any historical essays about jesus, of nazareth