As James Watson has put it, ‘We talk about gene therapy as if it can change someone’s fate, but you can also change someone’s fate if you pay off their credit card.
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.
Again and again, we have told ourselves that there is a top–down description of the world, and a top–down prescription by which we should live.
A corollary of this perspective is that there is no such thing as a perfect market, an equilibrium or an end state.
A Californian firm called Morning Star Tomatoes has been experimenting with ‘self-management’ for two decades.
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...
You put garbage in the rubbish bin; you keep junk in the attic or garage.
You are descended not from your mother but from her ovary. Nothing that happened to her body or her mind in her life could affect your nature
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.
What if morality itself was not handed down from the Judeo-Christian God as a prescription? And was not even the imitation of a Platonic ideal, but was a spontaneous thing produced by social interacti...
We are perforce in some sense constrained, goaded, or at least affected by the accumulated impact of selective decisions made over thousands of generations.
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.
Those of libertarian bent often prove more generous than those of a socialist persuasion: where the socialist feels that it is government’s job to look after the poor using taxes, libertarians think i...
This was socialism without the state. There is no doubt that it would have continued to expand and evolve.
There is no country in the world that has a higher birth rate than it had in 1960, and in the less developed world as a whole the birth rate has approximately halved.
The obsession with which those on the right resist Charles Darwin’s insight – that the complexity of nature does not imply a designer – matches the obsession with which those on the left resist Adam S...
The number of countries that censor the internet has grown steadily, and now stands at more than forty.
The more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.