Natural history of the present
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I’m just back from holidays and wading through some of the exciting science published while I was temporarily untethered from the Internet. One of the most interesting was a Science paper led by Lisa Cameron…
A few weeks ago I found myself reading up about the evolution of language in preparation for a talk I gave to the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia’s conference in Perth. It turns out the evolutionary…
When I give talks about the relevance of evolution to modern life, I can count on one regular question interrupting an orderly transition from lecture theatre to bar. Sometimes it comes with a “bet-you-didn’t-think-of-that-one…
Your ancient Greek-Latin binomial for the day is hyperemesis gravidarium. HG for short. It’s a particularly extreme form or pregnancy sickness (or morning sickness). Brought to you today by Catherine…
Evolutionary psychologists get a bad rap. I should not be surprised, really. They probe motivations for human behaviour that often exist far beneath conscious thought and the sanitised stories people tell…
Family life just got even more interesting. Just in time for Christmas, too! Families bustle with the push and pull of conflict and cooperation. But just how profoundly in the end do family members affect…
I would wager that if an average citizen from Athens of 1000 BC were to appear suddenly among us, he or she would be among the brightest and most intellectually alive of our colleagues and companions…
I am unexpectedly moved this morning by the news that Mitch Lucker has died following a Halloween motorcycle accident. Mitch was the “vocalist” for the American metal band Suicide Silence. I qualify the…
Why do humans tend to live such a long time? Our closest relatives, the chimpanzees, can last into their mid forties in the wild. Yet somewhere in the last six million years, human lifespans have lengthened…
Watching the US Presidential election from afar feels a bit like watching reality television. It seems interminable and very little of what the characters say seems to make sense. On that front, at least…