Life adapted to the laws of physics, not vice versa.
Let’s give a bit less credit to creationists, while we encourage and celebrate the evolution of everything.
It was these Prussian schools that introduced many of the features we now take for granted. There was teaching by year group rather than by ability, which made sense if the aim was to produce military...
It is not confined to genetic systems, but explains the way that virtually all of human culture changes: from morality to technology, from money to religion.
It is just possible that the predators and parasites will actually win altogether, or rather that ambitious ideological busybodies will succeed in shutting down the catallaxy and crashing the world ba...
I don’t have to, replies the philosopher. I only have to outrun you.)
Half the ideas in this book are probably wrong. The history of human science is not encouraging. Galton's eugenics, Freud's unconscious, Durkheim's sociology, Mead's culture-driven anthropology, Skinn...
For most of history, the state has been an ‘ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights’,
What if renewable energy rolled out on a grand scale proves so environmentally damaging that it does great harm? Bio-energy, a policy intended to forestall global warming, is already killing hundreds...
Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.
The truth is that the wild west was without much government, but it was very far from lawless, or even violent.
The police have come to resemble an occupying army who see the citizenry as the enemy.
The moral of this story is that autocrats get too much credit for episodes of increased economic freedom,’ wrote William Easterly.
Some are worse off than they were just a few months or years before. But the vast majority of people are much better fed, much better sheltered, much better entertained, much better protected against...
So plants can withstand almost any loss, and regenerate easily. They are utterly decentralised.
Perhaps the heritability of IQ implies something entirely different, something that once and for all proves that Galton’s attempt to discriminate between nature and nurture is misconceived. Consider t...
Montagues and Capulets, French and English, Whig and Tory, Airbus and Boeing, Pepsi and Coke, Serb and Muslim, Christian and Saracen – we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival g...
Many people are bothered about the number of privately owned guns in the United States, but what about publicly owned ones? In recent years the United States government (not the military) has purchase...
Letting good evolve, while doing bad, has been the dominant theme of history. That is why the news is full of only bad things being done, but we find when they are over that great good has happened un...