TST: New Content, Stories, Read-Aloud

Latest 5

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The 5 latest stories.

One-minute tidbits.

Idea 1.

A Science Story.

First Animal Teeth.

439 Million years ago (+/- 1 million)

Teeth first evolved in a common fish ancestor of reptiles, dinosaurs, and mammals.

The earliest direct evidence we currently have for true teeth comes from a tiny jawed fish called Qianodus duplicis, which lived about 439 million years ago during the Silurian Period. This tiny fossilized tooth whorls from China, how rows of teeth added as the animal grew.

But teeth almost certainly have an older backstory going back another 20 million years, in jawless vertebrates such as Eriptychius. These animals had dentine-bearing structures called odontodes on the outside of their bodies. Remarkably, modern sharks, rays, and skates still carry thousands of these tooth-like dermal denticles across their skin. Current evidence suggests that teeth evolved when this ancient developmental machinery was recruited into the mouth.

From there, teeth exploded into variety. Fish evolved rows, whorls, crushing plates, needles, and replaceable teeth. As vertebrates moved onto land, reptiles and the synapsid line leading to mammals kept modifying them. Dinosaurs took teeth in their own spectacular directions. Meat-eating theropods generally evolved sharp, recurved, serrated teeth for gripping and slicing flesh, while plant-eating dinosaurs evolved a much wider variety capable of grinding tough vegetation. Some dinosaurs even evolved distinctly different kinds of teeth in the same mouth.

In our own lineage, therapsids differentiated them into incisors, canines, and grinding cheek teeth. And evolution sometimes went the other direction. Modern birds descended from toothed dinosaurs but lost their teeth. Adult platypuses lost theirs too. Some fish even lose oral teeth while keeping teeth deeper in the throat. Once evolution had successful teeth, it was perfectly willing to reshape them, move them, or throw them away.

I wrote that Science Story,

and posted it to TST 4 days ago.

Idea 2.

A Philosophy Story.

Hume’s Is–Ought Problem.

1741

David Hume

In 1740, David Hume published Book III, Of Morals, of his A Treatise of Human Nature. Buried inside was an observation that became one of philosophy’s most important warnings about moral reasoning. Thinkers frequently move from statements about what is true to conclusions about what we ought to do without explaining the value hidden between them. Today we call this the is–ought problem.

TST does not try to prove Hume wrong. It simply refuses to hide that missing step. The normative aim is flourishing, and the directive is explicit: act toward flourishing for all. Once that value is stated openly, empirical facts can enter the reasoning. If an action demonstrably causes unnecessary harm, destroys trust, weakens health, or undermines agency, those facts matter because we have already said what we value. The structure becomes clearer:

normative premise to empirical premise to practical conclusion.

This also introduces some useful vocabulary.

Teleological reasoning asks whether actions actually move us toward an identified end.
Evaluative concepts such as harm, fairness, health, and flourishing already include judgments about better and worse conditions.
Epistemic norms guide good thinking: follow evidence, reason carefully, and update when reality proves you wrong.

None of these magically creates the original moral “ought.” They help us reason once the value is openly on the table.

That is where the TST Ethical Roadmap fits. It treats ethics as a process model: guidance, choice, intent, result, adjustment. Hume’s warning remains intact. We do not jump directly from nature to morality. We state the moral direction, act, see what happens in reality, and adjust. TST does not erase Hume’s gap. It builds an ethical process that remembers it.

I wrote that Philosophy Story,

and posted it to TST 1 month ago.

Idea 3.

A History Story.

The famous Lewis “Truth in Fiction” Paper.

1978

by David K. Lewis

David K. Lewis, born in 1941, opened the modern technical doorway into fictional truth. In his model, we can say things like “in the Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street” without pretending Holmes was a historical person. That distinction helps separate empirical event truth from truth inside a fictional construction.

His 1978 paper, “Truth in Fiction,” asks what it means for a statement to be true within a fictional world, often framed in symbolic shorthand as “in fiction f, Φ.” This means, “Within the fictional story called f, the statement Φ is true.” The letter f stands for the fiction, while the Greek letter phi represents a statement made about it.

Lewis gave the question its modern analytic form, asking what makes a statement true within a fictional world. Aristotle had earlier argued that fiction can express universal truths about human life. The TST Idea of Ideas adds a different distinction: fictional worlds also borrow already-true ideas from reality. Trees, flight, mathematics, grief, and gravity do not become true because they appear rationally consistent within Star Wars. They remain empirically or rationally true because they belong to the Grand Rational Framework. The speculative story rearranges them alongside invented elements such as the Force. In this sense, fiction adopts reality as its starting framework, then modifies selected parts of it.

I wrote that History Story,

and posted it to TST 3 months ago.

Idea 4.

A History Story.

R. G. Collingwood.

1889

Robin George Collingwood was born in England in 1889 and became a philosopher, historian, and practicing archaeologist. He taught at Oxford and became the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College. His work ranged across aesthetics, metaphysics, archaeology, and history, but he is best remembered for his philosophy of history. Collingwood matters because he treats history not as a dead pile of facts, but as an active discipline of reconstruction. To understand the past, the historian must do more than collect evidence akin to reporting; the historian must also be like a journalist and think through the actions, purposes, and questions of those who lived before.

Collingwood’s final years were difficult, as he felt death coming early for him, and pushed himself, hard. Too hard. He desperately wanted to finish his life’s work and send it into the future. After suffering from high blood pressure, and a series of debilitating strokes, he died in 1943 at Coniston in Lancashire. Nearing age 54, Collingwood was not quite done with his life’s work.

Collingwood’s holistic eudaimonia was completed after his death by T. M. Knox, his friend, former student, and literary executor. Knox gathered the unfinished materials and edited them into The Idea of History, published in 1946.

The book became one of the major English-language works in the philosophy of history and helped shape later debates over historical explanation, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. In a fitting twist, Collingwood himself became part of the kind of story he studied: a thinker whose unfinished work was gathered from traces, reconstructed by others, and carried forward into history.

I wrote that History Story,

and posted it to TST 4 months ago.

Idea 5.

A Critical Thinking Story.

Rudolf Steiner.

Lived from 1861 to 1925, aged 64.

Anthroposophy and Spiritual Science

Steiner was born in 1861, at a time when science was rising, religion was wobbling, psychology was emerging, and many were looking to keep meaning alive. Into that moment stepped Steiner: philosopher, lecturer, and spiritual thinker. As the founder of anthroposophy, his influence founded Waldorf education, biodynamic agriculture, and influenced architecture, medicine, and theater. His spiritual philosophy was not merely a mystic hiding from the modern world. He was trying to answer a modern crisis: how can human beings live with science and still feel spiritually whole?

At his best, Steiner’s spirituality was an attempt to treat the human being as more than a machine. He wanted education to nourish the whole child. He wanted farming to respect the living system. He wanted art, movement, and imagination to influence human development. From my view, that impulse is reasonable and even valuable. Humans do not live by data alone. We also live through meaning, ritual, and wonder. Steiner’s gift was seeing that modern life could become spiritually thin if it reduced everything to mechanism.

But we must place Steiner carefully. We can place his ethical, educational, artistic, and ecological ideas as rational frameworks. But his stronger claims about spiritual worlds, clairvoyant knowledge, cosmic forces, and “spiritual science” remain speculative. Don’t reject Steiner, just sort his ideas. His grounded insights support flourishing, but his unverifiable claims must not be promoted into public truth.

Rudolf Steiner was born in 1861, in the Austrian Empire, now Croatia. He studied in Vienna, worked as a writer, editor, lecturer, and Goethe scholar (holistic knowing). He later became a major figure in the Theosophical movement before founding the Anthroposophical Society. He married twice, but had no kids. Steiner died in 1925, in Switzerland, at age 64.

I wrote that Critical Thinking Story,