The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from...
The four horsemen of the human apocalypse, which cause the most premature and avoidable death in poor countries, are and will be for many years the same: hunger, dirty water, indoor smoke and malaria,...
The filament of D N A is information, a message written in a codeof chemicals, one chemical for each letter. It is almost too good to betrue, but the code turns out to be written in a way that we can...
The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund):
Specialisation, accompanied by exchange, is the source of economic prosperity. Here, in my own words, is what a modern version of Smithism claims. First, the spontaneous and voluntary exchange of good...
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...
So growth will resume – unless prevented by the wrong policies. Somebody, somewhere, is still tweaking a piece of software, testing a new material, or transferring a gene that will make your and my li...
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...
Organic farming also originated in vitalism, its founder Rudolf Steiner believing that in order ‘to influence organic life on earth through cosmic and terrestrial forces’, it was necessary to ‘stimula...
No horoscope matches this accuracy. No theory of human causality, Freudian, Marxist, Christian or animist, has ever been so precise. No prophet in the Old Testament, no entrail-grazing oracle in ancie...
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...
Lao Tzu saw this twenty-six centuries ago: ‘The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.’ Montesquieu’s phrase for the calming effect of trade on human violence, intolerance and e...
Language is just as rule-based in its newest slang forms, and just as sophisticated as it ever was in ancient Rome. But the rules, now as then, are written from below, not from above.
It reminds us that the genome, great book that it is, may give us the bleakest kind of self-knowledge: the knowledge of our destiny, not the kind of knowledge that you can do something about, but the...
It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.
It is strange to me that most people assume companies will be imperfect (as they are), but they assume that government agencies will be perfect, which they are not.
It is a remarkable fact that people who have been preparing for an important exam, and have shown the symptoms of stress, are more likely to catch colds and other infections, because one of the effect...
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 the 1950s it took thirty minutes work to earn the price of a McDonald’s cheeseburger; today it takes three minutes.
In short, the explosion in sub-prime lending was a thoroughly top–down, political project, mandated by Congress, implemented by government-sponsored enterprises, enforced by the law, encouraged by the...