This was a Third World disease attacking First World people. The world is now divided into Third and First, not Old and New. Pathogens once confined to the Third World are now making deadly inroads in...
There is an old French curse: may your fondest wish come true. If this treatment is cheap and available to everyone, it will destroy the earth through overpopulation. If it is dear and available only...
Then there was that absurd syntax business again. No language without syntax. Well, what about Latin! These assholes didn’t even know Latin! Where did these guys go to school?
The twentieth century showed us the evil face of physics. This century will show us the evil face of biology.
The Monster’s crimes were so horrific that a mere man could not possibly have committed them. Satan, in the end, had to be invoked.
Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. No civilization has su...
She learned her first two signs five weeks later, on—let’s see here—June 4, 1967. They were hug and me. On June 6, she spontaneously signed Hug me Jennie to Mrs. Archibald, her surrogate mother.
She learned her first two signs five weeks later, on—let’s see here—June 4, 1967. They were hug and me. On June 6, she spontaneously signed Hug me Jennie to Mrs. Archibald, her surrogate mother. Mrs....
Religion arose as an effort to explicate the inexplicable, control the uncontrollable, make bearable the unbearable. Belief in a higher power became the most powerful innovation in late human evolutio...
Pendergast moved with a feline grace, using the waxing moon as his only source of light
Our modes of speech are bred in the bone, madam. We cannot escape them any more than we can the colour of our eyes.
Nobody knows what language is. It isn’t just speech, that’s for sure. But try to explain that to some of these reductionist structural linguists.
News of the murder had her all in a tizzy.
My idle curiosity might lead to something more official, if the lieutenant feels his work is being hindered by an officious, small-minded, self-important bureaucrat. Not you, of course. I speak in gen...
Most science reporters for newspapers and magazines did not have the scientific background to understand the ramifications of the story. Those involved with the story of Jennie’s life were anxious to...
Jennie is very like a human child in challenging and testing her elders. I feel that R. wants to love Jennie, and wants Jennie to love her. She does not, I fear, have the right touch with Jennie. She...
It encourages us to develop evolution’s greatest gift to us: our intellects. It instructs us to appreciate this life as fully as possible, because we will never have another. This, then, is my religio...
In his groundbreaking book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond poses the question: Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around? Why did disease move in...
If this sounds like strange talk from a scientist—so be it. If there is one thing I have learned from a lifetime study of science, it is that the world is not a place we human beings will ever compreh...
I would ask the reader to pause for a moment and ponder the statistics. Statistics are mere numbers; they need to be translated into human experience. What would a 90 percent mortality rate mean to th...