Studies of criminal records of adoptees in Denmark revealed a strong correlation with the criminal record of the biological parent and a very small correlation with the criminal record of the adopting...
Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one’s similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.
Religions always and everywhere insist upon the argument from authority. You should do this or that because the Pope or the Koran or the local priest says you should. For centuries most of the world c...
Paradoxically, depathologising people’s fundamental inclinations and giving group members permission to be the way they are seemed to constitute the best insurance that their self-esteem and interpers...
Most aid is delivered by governments to governments.
Just as human nature is the same everywhere, so it is recognizably the same as it was in the past. A Shakespeare play is about motives and predicaments and feelings and personalities that are instantl...
It is an extraordinary fact, unremembered by most, that in the Anglosphere people live by laws that did not originate with governments at all.
In the beginning was the word. The word proselytised the sea with its message, copying itself unceasingly and forever. The word discovered how to rearrange chemicals so as to capture little eddies in...
In 2003, the OECD published a paper on ‘sources of growth in OECD countries’ between 1971 and 1998, finding to its explicit surprise that whereas privately funded research and development stimulated e...
In 1976, when eight million Indians were sterilised, Robert McNamara visited the country and congratulated it: ‘At long last India is moving effectively to address its population problem.
If God is not needed for morality, and if language is a spontaneous system, then perhaps the king, the pope and the official are not quite as vital to the functioning of an orderly society as they pre...
Henry’s novel The Portrait of a Lady was written in thrall to Darwin’s idea of female choice as a force in evolution.
Half of the biggest American companies of 1980 have now disappeared by take-over or bankruptcy; half of today’s biggest companies did not even exist in 1980. The same is not true of government monopol...
Gutenberg made printed books affordable, which kicked off an increase in literacy, which created a market for spectacles, which led to work on lenses that in turn resulted in the invention of microsco...
God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.
Futurology always ends up telling you more about your own time than about the future.
First, I need to convince you that human progress has, on balance, been a good thing, and that, despite the constant temptation to moan, the world is as good a place to live as it has ever been for th...
Few debates in the history of science have been conducted with such stupidity as the one about intelligence.
Far from being choosy, female primates seemed to be initiators of much promiscuity. Hrdy began to suggest that there was something wrong with the theory rather than the females.
Either human beings must be more instinctive, or animals must be more conscious than we had previously suspected. The similarities, not the differences, were what caught the attention.