Natural history of the present
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Are people naturally monogamous, polygamous or promiscuous? It’s one of those questions that most people feel quite confident in answering. Ask a few people and you’re likely to receive a variety of contradictory…
“Heredity”, opined the pioneering cultural anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber in 1915, “cannot be allowed to have acted any part in history”. I have yet to encounter a crisper expression of the view that…
How will the Ebola crisis influence next week’s mid-term elections in the USA? One might expect that an epidemic limited almost entirely to West Africa should be way, way down on the list of factors likely…
Settle in for a long read. Over the coming weeks you will be bombarded by shorter, snappier pieces about a controversy inflaming the front where evolutionary and social psychology meet. I’ve touched on…
My social media accounts today are cluttered with stories about “mutating” Ebola viruses. The usually excellent ScienceAlert, for example, rather breathlessly informs us “The Ebola virus is mutating faster…
Marriage, according to those who habitually preface the word with “traditional”, is a collaboration. With complementary roles, filled as predictably by one woman and one man as peanut butter fills the…
About a month ago, I stumbled across a paper that left me with the warm reinforcing glow that comes with being right. The rather artificial experiment played female subjects two pieces of music varying…
The soccer World Cup (yes, I persist in calling it “soccer”) is the one time in every four years I pay any sustained attention to the round-ball game. There is so much to love about the world’s most popular…
What separates humans from other animals, including our closest relatives? It’s one of those big questions perennially posed by the evo-curious public. But until recently I seldom gave it much thought…
When Jack was young, he began inflicting harm on animals. It started with just pulling the wings off flies, but eventually progressed to torturing squirrels and stray cats in his neighbourhood. As an adult…