Natural history of the present
Displaying 41 - 50 of 92 articles
Few subjects more predictably animate furious disagreement and cross-purposes discussion than the origins of human warfare. Are people “naturally” belligerent? And what does that even mean? The question…
That’s the message uber-cerebral Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman wants to spread. He’s crowdfunding a music video and short documentary in support of what he calls the new Golden Rule of Sex. How cool can…
This week I’ve been wrestling with a particularly large writing project which has kept me away from posting in this column. But, staring into my Twitter feed in procrastination, I spotted much outrage…
“This,” as I believe it is now fashionable to say, “is actually a thing.” Where by this I mean Sexcereal. A his and hers line of wholefood cereals that tout themselves as the world’s first all-natural…
Why would an otherwise healthy animal stop reproducing? Natural selection usually favours genes that elevate reproductive success because the very act of reproduction is how genes proliferate. So adaptations…
If you spend any time, as I do, in that strange and confusing place we call “The Internet” or that only marginally less strange and confusing place called the USA, you might have noticed an unholy row…
Becoming a parent isn’t easy. Okay, conceiving can be far too easy. But I mean all that stuff about nappies and midnight feeds, and the germs they bring back from daycare, and trying to understand school…
This weekend I gained a grudging appreciation for Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Governator, not the Terminator. Having watched Arnie’s political rise and fall from afar, he always seemed an odd chimera. Lines…
The poor old placenta. It really doesn’t get much public attention. And yet it does a crucially important job - acting as the interface between the mother’s blood supply and that of her developing foetus…
Brian Mautz has had a big week. Since his paper on the importance of penis size in attractiveness judgements was published in PNAS on Tuesday morning, news outlets and blogs have proved near-insatiable…