You inherit not your IQ but your ability to develop a high IQ under certain environmental circumstances. How does one parcel that one into nature and nurture? It is frankly impossible.
The complexity of society does not imply a planner.
If commercial behaviour might make people more moral.
They may direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have made almost at once—in response to experience.
These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.
Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. NIALL FERGUSON
Imagine if you had to be completely self-sufficient (not just pretending, like Thoreau).
Even allowing for the hundreds of millions who still live in abject poverty, disease and want, this generation of human beings has access to more calories, watts, lumen-hours, square feet, gigabytes,...
Homini lupus’, said Plautus. ‘Man is a wolf to man.
So – as animal experiments have suggested – oxytocin does not affect reciprocity, just the tendency to take a social risk, to go out on a limb.
Richard Dawkins that ‘money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism’ –
On what principle is it, that when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us? THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY
Nature is the length of the rectangle, nurture the width. There can be no rectangle without both.
Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones?
Mankind is a self-domesticated animal; a mammal; an ape; a social ape; an ape in which the male takes the iniative in courtship and females usually leave the society of their birth; an ape in which me...
In Bletchley, in Britain, in 1943, in total secrecy, a brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing, is seeing his most incisive insight turned into physical reality. Turing has argued that numbers can comput...
I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words.
God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.
Far more than we like to admit, the world is to a remarkable extent a self-organising, self-changing place.
The beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people’s problems. It is ‘best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions t...