Apple gadget and all of that, which is great and i love those things and theyre worth celebrating. We dont spend enough time talking about the people who made that clean glass of Drinking Water part of our lives. So i want to with this book stop and look at these objects go back and tell these stories, and also to talk about the kind of unexpected places that these technologies ultimately led us. This is the idea of the hummingbird effect. Elaborate metaphor for nature. I was writing the book in california and we have hummingbirds in our garden and i was obsessed with them and how they worked and crazy anatomy. And the hummingbird evolved in an interesting play. You have flowering plants and insect developed this complicated dance of pollennation, but its a connection that doesnt really have anything to do with birds. And then all of a sudden this bird kind of over time figures out theres a way to get in on the action of all this nectar but has to evolve this wing structure to be able
Seems like every two years. This is one of the most extraordinary scholarshiply things i have seen. I dont know how you do this bus that not story. I want to talk to you about your book because it is its so definitive about violence and religion. But secondly, your thesis is really interesting. Which is that religion may not necessarily be the cause of all violence, and i wondered what prompted you to do this book in the first place. Guest just abuse im a writer about religion, i keep getting told by taxi drivers, psychiatrists, and teachers, that religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history, and it really jars because its clear the not true. The first world and Second World Wars were not caused by religion. They were fought for secular nationalism, and i think that if we could keep on just casting religion in the role of the absolute villain, we are not looking at some of the other factors that military historians tell us are always involved in both violence and terror