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.
Almost all biologists agreed that no creature could ever evolve the ability to help its species at the expense of itself. Only when the two interests coincided would it act selflessly.
Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones?
It is the customer who determines what a business is.
These features make sense, argues Davies, if you wish to mould people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.
On the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, Adam and God touch fingers. To the uneducated eye it is not clear who is creating whom. We are supposed to assume God’s the one doing the creating, and much of th...
Richard Dawkins that ‘money is a formal token of delayed reciprocal altruism’ –
I find the world is full of people who think that their dependence on others is decreasing, or that they would be better off if they were more self-sufficient, or that technological progress has broug...
In 1900, the average American spent $76 of every $100 on food, clothing and shelter. Today he spends $37.
It’s no good, you’ll never outrun a bear, says the logical friend.
The world’s cities already contain half the world’s people, but they occupy less than 3 per cent of the world’s land area.
The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of...
Just like religion, science as an institution is and always has been plagued by the temptations of confirmation bias. With alarming ease it morphs into pseudoscience, even – perhaps especially – in th...
Like Milton Friedman, I notice that ‘business corporations in general are not defenders of free enterprise. On the contrary, they are one of the chief sources of danger.
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.
This is the diagnostic feature of modern life, the very definition of a high standard of living: diverse consumption, simplified production.
I am just a node in a huge network of knowledge, trying to capture an ethereal and evolving entity in a few inadequate words.
We are told that we are sinning (by emitting CO2), that we have original sin (human greed), which has banished us from Eden (the pre-industrial world), for which we must confess (by condemning irrespo...
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
The phenomena we refer to as intelligence may be a byproduct of intergenomic conflict between genes mediating offense and defense in the context of language’, write Rice and Holland.
Showing 41 to 60 of 408 results