Simultaneous discovery and invention mean that both patents and Nobel Prizes are fundamentally unfair things.
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...
Not inventing, and not adopting new ideas, can itself be both dangerous and immoral.
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...
Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. NIALL FERGUSON
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...
Long before he became well known for his atheism, Dawkins was famous for the ideas set out in his book The Selfish Gene.
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...
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.
Imagine you are a deer. You have essentially only four things to do during the day: sleep, eat, avoid being eaten and socialise (by which I mean mark a territory, pursue a member of the opposite sex,...
I don’t have to, replies the philosopher. I only have to outrun you.)
For most of history, the state has been an ‘ever-present predator and all-around abuser of human rights’,
Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvem...
By striking contrast, there is not a single non-renewable resource that has run out yet: not coal, oil, gas, copper, iron, uranium, silicon, or stone.
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...
É claro que não há um único gene, mas há algo infinitamente mais enaltecedor e magnífico: toda uma naturza humana, flexivelmente pré-ordenada em nossos cromossomos e indiossincrática de cada um de nós...
The universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival.
Yet the evidence, from twin studies, from the children of immigrants and from adoption studies, is now staring us in the face: people get their personalities from their genes and from their peers, not...
Yet as soon as Greece was unified into an empire by a thug – Philip of Macedon in 338 BC – it lost its edge.