Wired for Culture
What makes us human? In part, argues evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel in Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind, language is one of the keys to our evolutionary success, especially in …
Biology
Charles Darwin — Natural Selection was like Confessing a Murder
On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published. In Letters of Note we find an interesting letter from him to Joseph Hooker 15 years before what would later be …
Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
Morality is hard to define, but all non-psychopaths experience strong gut reactions to certain moral violations. One way to understand it is from an evolutionary perspective. Our sense of morality is …
The Minimum Effective Dose: Why Less is More
“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry *** In pharmacology, the effective dose is the …
Breakpoint: When Bigger is Not Better
Jeff Stibel’s book Breakpoint: Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain is an interesting read. The book is about …
Evolution is Blind but We’re Not
The first thing we do is try to figure out what went wrong. When people in organizations evaluate poor outcomes, determining what went wrong, and why is one of the first steps. Once we have a cause, …
Coevolution and Artificial Selection
“The ancient relationship between bees and flowers is a classic example of coevolution. In a coevolutionary bargain like the one struck by the bee and the apple tree, the two parties acton each …
The Honeybee Conjecture: What Is It About Bees And Hexagons?
Why is every cell in this honeycomb a hexagon? More than 2,000 years ago, Marcus Terentius Varro, a roman citizen, proposed an answer, which ever since has been called “The Honeybee …
Benoit Mandelbrot — The Fractalist: Memoir of a Scientific Maverick
“I have never done anything like others,” Benoit Mandelbrot (1924-2010) once said. That statement is proven time and time again in his autobiography: The Fractalist. Mandelbrot is …
What Animals Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, believes that her fellow human physicians have much to learn from their veterinary counterparts. These are not …
Richard Feynman — Take the World From Another Point of View
In this clip from a documentary film shot in Yorkshire in 1973, physicist and philosopher Richard Feynman (1918-1988) talks with Fred Hoyle, an accomplished astronomer from the United Kingdom. Feynman …
Physicist Richard Feynman on Beauty of a Flower
Richard Feynman talking about the beauty of the natural world. I have a friend who’s an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a …
Why is it so Hard to Kill a Cockroach with your Shoe?
The Cockroach Papers by Richard Schwied is an interesting book if you are looking to learn more about biology or evolution. Cockroaches are built for survival no matter what the world throws at them. …
The Science of Obesity
One thing that has always baffled me is how we get fat. Why We Get Fat by Gary Taubes unearths the biological truth around why we’re getting fat. In the process, Taubes dispels many accepted …