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...
Book is a piece of digital information, written in linear, one-dimensional and one-directional form and defined by a code that transliterates a small alphabet of signs into a large lexicon of meanings...
The diagnostic feature of life is that it captures energy to create order. This is also a hallmark of civilisation.
A handbook for users of the Arpanet at MIT in the 1980s reminded them that ‘sending electronic messages over the ARPAnet for commercial profit or political purposes is both antisocial and illegal’. Th...
A própria palavra sedução implica mentira e manipulação.
A series of papers by the Princeton economist Dani Rodrik and his colleagues tried to shed light on the impact of policy decisions on economic growth, but found that ‘most instances of economic reform...
An evolutionary bargain seems to have been struck: in exchange for sexual exclusivity, the man brings meat and protects the fire from thieves and bullies; in exchange for help rearing the children, th...
And by forcing ourselves to learn something, we place ourselves in a selective environment that puts a premium on a future instinctive solution to the problem. Thus, learning gradually gives way to in...
And there are genes that can be used to write the history of human migrations in the last few thousand years. From four billion years ago to just a few hundred years ago, the genome has been a sort of...
As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.
Cities, marriage, language, music, art – these manifestations of culture all change in regular and retrospectively predictable ways, but in ways that nobody did predict, let alone direct. They evolve.
Good things are gradual; bad things are sudden. Above all, good things evolve.
I think knowledge is a blessing, not a curse. This is especially true in the case of genetic knowledge. To understand the molecular nature of cancer for the first time, to diagnose and prevent Alzheim...
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...
In history and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no f...
Karl Popper – that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.
La extraordinaria difusión del psicoanálisis entre 1920 y 1970 se debe más al marketing que a los éxitos terapéuticos. Al hablar con los enfermos sobre sus infancia, los analistas ofrecían una humanid...
Vernon Smith and his colleagues have long confirmed that markets in goods and services for immediate consumption – haircuts and hamburgers – work so well that it is hard to design them so they fail to...
What was the international reaction to this holocaust? The United Nations Secretary General awarded a prize to General Qian in 1983, and recorded his ‘deep appreciation’ for the way in which the Chine...
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.
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