Perhaps the internet has returned us to a world a bit like the Stone Age in which there is no place for a fraudster to hide.
It is my proposition that the human race has become a collective problem-solving machine and it solves problems by changing its ways. It
Further evidence for the man-made nature of gods comes from their evolutionary history. It is a little-known fact, but gods evolve.
Arguably, the orang-utan, being devastated by the loss of forest to palm oil bio-fuel plantations in Borneo, is under greater threat from renewable energy than the polar bear is from global warming.
With the elucidation of the genetic code in 1966, Francis Crick confidently declared vitalism dead and buried. Only it still lives on in various pseudosciences. Homeopathy is based on vitalism. Its fo...
The whole point of science, the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, is the rejection of arguments from authority.
This is not true for other creatures, not even brainy ones like chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, parrots and octopi. They may occasionally use tools, they may occasionally shift their ecological nich...
This concept, that all progress is relative, has come to be known in biology by the name of the Red Queen, after a chess piece that Alice meets in Through the Looking-Glass, who perpetually runs witho...
The success of trust-based peer organizations such as eBay, Wikipedia, and the open-source movement, indicates that trust is a highly expandable network property.
The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Surviv...
The real tragedy of nationalised education is how little innovation it has seen.
The message from history is so blatantly obvious – that free trade causes mutual prosperity while protectionism causes poverty – that it seems incredible that anybody ever thinks otherwise.
The growth of international bureaucracies with power to determine many aspects of people’s lives is a dominant feature of our age. Even the European Union is increasingly powerless, as it merely trans...
The conclusion that all these studies converge upon is that about half of your IQ was inherited, and less than a fifth was due to the environment you shared with your siblings – the family. The rest c...
The brutal campaign of mass sterilisation, forced abortion and infanticide was exacerbated by the voluntary murder of baby girls on a genocidal scale as parents tried to ensure that their one legal ch...
The Planned Parenthood Foundation was founded in 1916 by Margaret Sanger, who thought philanthropy would ‘perpetuate constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents, and dependents’.
The Brazilian diplomat Josué de Castro, in his book The Geopolitics of Hunger, was even bolder in his criticism of the neo-Malthusians, saying that ‘The road to survival, therefore, does not lie in th...
Thanks largely to Greenblatt’s marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian...
Sometimes the obvious can stare you in the face. Until 1955, it was agreed that human beings had twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. It was just one of those facts that everybody knew was right. They kn...
Obama himself may have turned out to be something of a dud, but the cult of presidential personality that has dominated American politics for decades now still persists.