Charles Darwin: The Best Scientist-Writer of All Time
The Voyage of the Beagle is a literary masterpiece, as well as a scientific one.
A collection of 11 posts
The Voyage of the Beagle is a literary masterpiece, as well as a scientific one.
Worker ants can sprout wings—but don’t. Ant and termite queens destroy theirs after mating. Many island birds evolve into flightlessness. Can evolution explain why?
In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by European empires, the Western world awoke to the horrors that humans are capable of committing against those they perceived to be inferior.
The last lesson of Gelernter’s piece is that while we shouldn’t judge someone’s arguments by their credentials alone, neither should we give unwarranted credence to those who have impressive credentials, particularly when they pronounce on a field in which they lack expertise.
Jonathan Kay talks to Nicholas Christakis, Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale, about his new book Blueprint and what evolution can teach us about overcoming conflict.
One of the big questions in evolutionary biology is: what drove our evolution from tree-swinging apes to bipedal, highly intelligent homonins that went on to build civilization and inherit the world?
The meme’s-eye view says that memes are selected to the extent that they have effects on the people who encounter them that keep the memes alive in the culture: tunes that get stuck in our heads, for instance, or ideas that motivate us to talk about them, spread them, or impose them on other people.
Men (and, less often, women as well) across societies all over the world have used violence in an attempt to control women’s reproductive outcomes and limit the choices available to them, and in many circumstances, men have benefited from doing so.
There is little evidence to justify why the provider role has been held in such low regard.
We can acknowledge that male and female brains have differences in structure and function, on average, without subscribing to the belief that one sex is better than the other.
The transhumanist perspective insists that humans have a distinctly separate mind and body, and that what happens to one need not affect the other.