Each year, the United States issues about 70,000 patents, only a few of which ultimately reach the stage of commercial production.
But the Semitic names did possess meaning in Semitic languages: they were the words for familiar objects (’aleph = ox, beth = house, gimel = camel, daleth = door, and so on). These Semitic words were...
Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive a...
Клептократ і мудрий державний діяч, барон-грабіжник і громадський доброчинець відрізняються лише мірою: тобто тим, яку частку стягненої із виробників данини утримує еліта і наскільки простолюду подоба...
Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? Those disparate rates constitute history’s broadest pattern and my book’s subject. While this book is thus ultimately
People with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.
Bonobo).
Writers find it tempting to draw analogies between those trajectories of human societies and the trajectories of individual human lives – to talk of a society's birth, growth, peak, senescence, and de...
The whole modern world has been shaped by lopsided outcomes.
Science is often misrepresented as ‘the body of knowledge acquired by performing replicated controlled experiments in the laboratory.’ Actually, science is something broader: the acquisition of reliab...
Polynesians and Aztecs developed dog breeds specifically raised for food.
Perhaps the most important single step in the whole history of writing was the Sumerians’ introduction of phonetic representation, initially by writing an abstract noun (which could not be readily dra...
Negative images of emigration were transformed into positive ones, not by Wakefield in 1830, but by a much broader trans-Atlantic ideological transition around 1815. Its semiotic shape was the partial...
Nations and individuals accept national and individual responsibility to take action to solve the problem, or else deny responsibility by self-pity, blaming others, and assuming the role of victim.
For example, the great Italian Jewish author Primo Levi, who did survive Auschwitz, said afterwards, The experience of Auschwitz for me was such as to sweep away whatever legacies of my religious educ...
Besides justifying the transfer of wealth to kleptocrats, institutionalized religion brings two other important benefits to centralized societies. First, shared ideology or religion helps solve the pr...
1) Risk-taking behavior, essential for efforts at innovation, is more widespread in some societies than in others. (2) The scientific outlook is a unique feature of post-Renaissance European society t...
Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years.
When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty the King of Spain. Our Lord permitted that your pride...
Two million years ago, several proto-human lineages had coexisted side by side until a shake-up left only one. It now appears that a similar shake-up occurred within the last 60,000 years, and that al...