Isn't language loss a good thing, because fewer languages mean easier communication among the world's people? Perhaps, but it's a bad thing in other respects. Languages differ in structure and vocabul...
On the beginning of the mid-1990s' genocidal war in Rwanda:)Within six weeks, an estimated 800,000 Tutsi, representing about three-quarters of the Tutsi then remaining in Rwanda, or 11% of Rwanda's to...
Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.
The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to bio...
My two main conclusions are that technology develops cumulatively, rather than in isolated heroic acts, and that it finds most of its uses after it has been invented, rather than being invented to mee...
I decided that now is the time to start doing the things that really interest me and I find important. It was in the 10 years of the MacArthur grant that I began working on my first book... and I bega...
I've worked very hard in this book to keep the lines of communication open. I don't want to turn someone away from this information for partisan political reasons.
Sex is flagrantly separated from reproduction in a few species, including bonobos and dolphins.
To me, the conclusion that the public has the ultimate responsibility for the behavior of even the biggest businesses is empowering and hopeful, rather than disappointing. My conclusion is not a moral...
History as well as life itself is complicated -- neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.
Yes, world history is indeed such an onion! But that peeling back of the onion’s layers is fascinating, challenging—and of overwhelming importance to us today, as we seek to grasp our past’s lessons f...
Big-bang reproduction, or semelparity: a single reproductive effort, followed by preprogrammed death.
Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increasing globalization and increasing worldwide economi...
Recreational sex is thus supposed to function as the glue holding a human couple together while they cooperate in rearing their helpless baby.
Breeds of dogs were developed and raised for food in Aztec Mexico, Polynesia, and ancient China.
A society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.
Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not o...
Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems. Technology simply means increased power, which is...
Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle all the environmental laws we've got in this count...
Plant domestication is not a matter of hunter-gatherers’ domesticating a single plant and otherwise carrying on unchanged with their nomadic lifestyle.
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