A species that over many generations repeatedly exposes itself to some experience will eventually find its offspring selected for a genetic predisposition to cope with that experience. Why?
American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and incorruptible saviour will emerge from the New Hampshire primary every four years, and proceed to...
California was especially enthusiastic about eugenics. By 1933 it had forcibly sterilised more people than all other states combined. So when the Third International Congress of Eugenics gathered at t...
China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentra...
Depending on whose estimate you choose, and how you correct for inflation, the average person alive in the world today earns in a year between ten and twenty times as much money, in real terms, as the...
Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change, teachers are encouraged to teach to the exam rather than to the pupils’ or their own strengths, t...
Friedrich Hayek’s, with his prescient warning in The Road to Serfdom (1944) that socialism and fascism were not really opposites, but had ‘fundamental similarity of methods and ideas’, that economic p...
Google has likewise turned itself into a trial-and-error company, by encouraging employees to spend 20 per cent of their time on their own projects.
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...
Humanity is experiencing an extraordinary burst of evolutionary change, driven by good old-fashioned Darwinian natural selection. But it is selection among ideas, not among genes.
In civilized society,’ wrote Adam Smith, an individual ‘stands at all times in need of the co-operation and assistance of great multitudes, while his whole life is scarce sufficient to gain the friend...
In short, there is no question that a country can run a stable paper currency without a gold standard, a central bank, a lender of last resort, or much regulation; and not only avoid disaster, but per...
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.
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.
It makes more sense to see the body as serving the needs of the genes than vice versa. Bottom–up.
Sexual relations are driven not by what is good, in evolutionary terms, for men or for women, but for their chromosomes. The ability to seduce a woman was good for Y chromosomes in the past; the abili...
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.
The media tycoon Ted Turner told a newspaper reporter in 2010 that other countries should follow China’s lead in instituting a one-child policy to reduce global population over time. Malthus’s
There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable ri...
Top–down language teaching just does not work well – it’s like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one.
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