By 2010 the internet had roughly as many hyperlinks as the brain has synapses, and a significant proportion of the whispering that goes on within the internet originates in devices rather than people....
But if there is one dominant myth about the world, one huge mistake we all make, one blind spot, it is that we all go around assuming the world is much more of a planned place than it is.
As a result, whereas other primates have guts weighing four times their brains, the human brain weighs more than the human intestine. Cooking enabled hominids to trade gut size for brain size. Erectus
As I mentioned earlier, the diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order.
Apart from the fusion of chromosome 2, visible differences between chimp and human chromosomes are few and tiny. In thirteen chromosomes no visible differences of any kind exist. If you select at rand...
Anaxagoras’ belief that lying on the right side during sex would produce a boy was so influential that centuries later some French aristocrats had their left testicles amputated.
An extraordinarily nimble synthesist, Ridley leaps from chromosome to chromosome in a handy summation of our ever increasing understanding of the roles that genes play in disease, behavior, sexual dif...
All that determinists are asking you to accept is that there cannot be effect without cause.
The Pentagon actually donates military equipment to the police, including tanks.
In a sorry world there is no safety to be found in standing still.
Homini lupus’, said Plautus. ‘Man is a wolf to man.
As Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘disregard for the preferences and interests of individuals alive today in order to pursue some distant social goal that their rulers have claimed is their duty to promote has...
With the first steam engines, the barrier between heat and work was breached, so that coal’s energy could now amplify the work of people.
When you think about it, it is rather strange that liberated, freethinking people, when their children reach the age of five, send them off to a sort of prison for the next twelve to sixteen years.
When I go into the local superstore, I never see people driven to misery by the impossibility of choice. I see people choosing.
To put my explanation in its boldest and most surprising form: bad news is manmade, top–down, purposed stuff, imposed on history. Good news is accidental, unplanned, emergent stuff that gradually evol...
Throughout history, the characteristic feature of the nation state is its monopoly of violence.
This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve.
This is not a book about the Human Genome Project — about mapping and sequencing techniques - but a book about what that project has found. Some time in the year 2000, we shall probably have a rough f...
The ten most violent countries in the world in 2014 – Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan and North Korea – are...