Today we are still in thrall to Great Man history, if only because we like reading biography. American presidential politics is entirely based on the myth that a perfect, omniscient, virtuous and inco...
Though politicians are regarded as scum, government as a machine is held to be almost infallible.
This turns out not to be true. Darwinian change is inevitable in any system of information transmission so long as there is some lumpiness in the things transmitted, some fidelity of transmission and...
This is not true for other creatures, not even brainy ones like chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, parrots and octopi. They may occasionally use tools, they may occasionally shift their ecological nich...
The traditional university will surely be gone in fifty years, swept away by technology.
The internet, in other words, may be the best forum for crime, but it is also the best forum for free and fair exchange the world has ever seen.
The comedian Emo Philips once joked that he considered his brain to be the most fascinating organ in his body – until he realised who was telling him this.
Sometimes the obvious can stare you in the face. Until 1955, it was agreed that human beings had twenty-four pairs of chromosomes. It was just one of those facts that everybody knew was right. They kn...
So one way to raise your standard of living would be to lower somebody else’s: buy a slave. That was indeed how people got rich for thousands of years. Yet,
Perhaps the internet has returned us to a world a bit like the Stone Age in which there is no place for a fraudster to hide.
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...
Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less,’ he
Nancy Wexler fears that science is now in the position of Tiresias, the blind seer of Thebes.
Money is not metal. It is trust inscribed. NIALL FERGUSON
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 is common to find that two traders both think their counterparts are idiotically overpaying: that is the beauty of Ricardo’s magic trick.
It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember, to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts. Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just the carr...
The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Surviv...
Good institutions cannot usually be imposed from above: that way they are oxymorons.
Showing 141 to 160 of 408 results