When I write or speak about falling child mortality in Africa today, I can be sure I will get a response along exactly these Malthusian lines: but surely it’s a bad thing if you stop poor people dying...
What is truly revolutionary about molecular biology in the post-Watson-Crick era is that it has become digital...the machine code of the genes is uncannily computer-like.' -Richard Dawkins
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...
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...
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 more prosperous and free that people become, the more their birth rate settles at around two children per woman with no coercion necessary.
The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.
The great success of ants and termites – between them they may comprise one-third of all the animal biomass of land animals – is undoubtedly down to their division of labour.
South Korea and Ghana had the same income per capita in the 1950s. One received far more aid, advice and political intervention than the other. It is now by far the poorer of the two. In general, Asia...
Posterity can pay for its ancestors’ lives because posterity can be richer through innovation. If somebody somewhere takes out a mortgage, which he will repay in three decades’ time, to invest in a bu...
Neanderthals had all of these: huge brains, probably complex languages, lots of technology. But they never burst out of their niche. It is my contention that in looking inside our heads, we would be l...
Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.
Karl Popper – that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.
It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.
It is when we go beyond instinct that we seem most idiosyncratically human. Perhaps, as Darwin suggested, the difference is one of degree rather than kind; it is quantitative, not qualitative.
In truth, far from being unsustainable, the interdependence of the world through trade is the very thing that makes modern life as sustainable as it is.
In fact the discoveries of Gregor Mendel, which became known to the world in 1900, ought to have killed eugenics stone dead.
In America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.
If your teacher is in a private, for-profit school, however, and you withdraw your child, then the owner of the school will quickly feel the effect in his pocket, and the bad teacher will be fired. In...
If you divide the world into those countries where the majority live in cities, and those where the majority live in the countryside, you find that the former are four times as wealthy, in terms of av...