Education, done properly, is an emergent, evolutionary phenomenon.
All Britons are descended from the same set of people a mere thirty generations ago.
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.
The market system makes self interest into something thoroughly virtuous.’ This is the extraordinary feature of markets: just as they can turn many individually irrational individuals into a collectiv...
The complexity of society does not imply a planner.
If commercial behaviour might make people more moral.
Evolutionary biologist Ryan Gregory put it, anyone who thinks he or she can assign a function to every letter in the human genome should be asked why an onion needs a genome that is about five times l...
Each person ‘intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many oth...
Yet to define genes by the diseases they cause is about as absurd as defining organs of the body by the diseases they get: livers are there to cause cirrhosis, hearts to cause heart attacks and brains...
With increasingly money-based interactions among strangers, people increasingly began to think of neighbours as potential trading partners rather than potential prey. Killing the shopkeeper makes no s...
This means - and religious people might find this a useful argument - that there was only one creation, one single event when life was born. Of course, that life might have been born on a different pl...
There was never a better illustration of the validity of the Enlightenment dream – that order can emerge where nobody is in charge. The genome, now sequenced, stands as emphatic evidence that there ca...
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 mind drives the body, which drives the genome.
The influential 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica goes to the opposite extreme from the Encyclopédie: social history is buried within biography. So to read about the post-Roman world you mu...
The influence upon our intelligence of events that happened in the womb is three times as great as anything our parents did to us after our birth.
The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella).
The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.
The Great Man theory lives on as strongly as ever in one field of human endeavour: big business.