These new people had something special: they were not prisoners of their ecological niche, but could change their habits quite easily if prey disappeared, or better opportunities arose.
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 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.
The government monopoly of money leads not just to the suppression of innovation and experiment, not just to inflation and debasement, not just to financial crises, but to inequality too. As Dominic F...
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in 1976 coined the term ‘meme’ for a unit of cultural imitation.
Some thought they were messages from Gaia to tell humanity to combat global warming.
Morality therefore emerged as a consequence of certain aspects of human nature in response to social conditions.
Malthus’s poor laws were wrong; British attitudes to famine in India and Ireland were wrong; eugenics was wrong; the Holocaust was wrong; India’s sterilisation programme was wrong; China’s one-child p...
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.
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...
In other words, cooking encourages specialisation by sex. The first and deepest division of labour is the sexual one.
Falling consumer prices is what enriches people (deflation of asset prices can ruin them, but that is because they are using asset prices to get them the wherewithal to purchase consumer items). And,...
As Lord Acton said, great men are mostly bad men.
When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.
To me this is a dangerous doctrine, which justifies inflicting real pain in the here and now on disadvantaged people on the basis of forestalling a distant possibility of doom.
These were people collaborating because they wanted to, not because they were paid to, and with little or no intellectual property in their ideas.
The simple one-way relationship that so entrances our politicians and commentators – education spending in, economic growth out – simply doesn’t exist.
Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things.
Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral.
Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.