When I watch Anthony and Cleopatra, I am seeing a four-hundred-year-old interpretation of a two-thousand-year-old history. Yet it never even occurs to me that love was any different then from what it...
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
The war is not over, however. Even organisations like Wikipedia succumbed to the authoritarian twitch, appointing editors with special privileges who could impose their own prejudices upon certain top...
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.
Most of the so-called robber barons got rich by cutting the price of goods, not raising them.
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 America, roughly 15 per cent of jobs are destroyed every year; and roughly 15 per cent created.
In 2009, an artist named Thomas Thwaites set out to make his own toaster, of the sort that he could buy from a shop for about £4.
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...
Friedrich Hayek advanced the view that the common law contributed to greater economic welfare because it was less interventionist, less under the tutelage of the state, and was better able to respond...
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.
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...
What really works inside a big firm is division of labour: you do what you’re good at, I’ll do what I’m good at, and we’ll coordinate our actions. That is what actually happens in practice inside most...
What was the secret that the serpent told Eve? That she could eat a certain fruit? Pah. That was a euphemism. The fruit was carnal knowledge, and everybody from Thomas Aquinas to Milton knew it. How d...
We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth that still fills me with astonishment. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Top–down language teaching just does not work well – it’s like learning to ride a bicycle in theory, without ever getting on one.
To those who do not accept miracles it seems more likely that the Koran is almost certainly a compilation of old texts, not a new document in the seventh century. It is like a lake into which many str...
This isn’t about auctions,’ said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, ‘in fact it’s not about economic warfare. It’s the opposite.’ It was survival of the nicest.