The reluctance to accept coincidence lies at the heart of telepathy, spiritualism, ghosts and other manifestations of the supernatural. The mystical mentality insists that something caused a coinciden...
The cultural progress of the Species encountered impediments along the way. Overpopulation was a constant problem: as soon as the capacity of the local environment to support the population began to s...
The big firms that survive will do so by turning themselves into bottom-up evolvers.
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.
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...
Karl Popper – that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.
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 fact the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, which became known to the world in 1900, ought to have killed eugenics stone dead.
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...
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...
George Washington said that ‘Government is not reason. It is not eloquence. Government is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master.
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...
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.
Countries where commerce thrives have far less violence than countries where it is suppressed. Does
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,...
Because bodies do not replicate themselves but are grown, whereas genes do replicate themselves, it inevitably follows that the body is merely an evolutionary vehicle for the gene, rather than vice ve...