Competition, Cooperation, and the Selfish Gene
Richard Dawkins has one of the best-selling books of all time for a serious piece of scientific writing. Often labeled “pop science”, The Selfish Gene pulls together the “gene-centered” view of …
Charles Darwin
How To Mentally Overachieve — Charles Darwin’s Reflections On His Own Mind
We’ve written quite a bit about the marvelous British naturalist Charles Darwin, who with his Origin of Species created perhaps the most intense intellectual debate in human history, one which …
What Are You Doing About It? Reaching Deep Fluency with Mental Models
The mental models approach is very intellectually appealing, almost seductive to a certain type of person. (It certainly is for us.) The whole idea is to take the world’s greatest, most useful …
Eager to Be Wrong
“You know what Kipling said? Treat those two impostors just the same — success and failure. Of course, there’s going to be some failure in making the correct decisions. Nobody bats a thousand. I …
Karl Popper: The Line Between Science and Pseudoscience
It’s not immediately clear to the layman what the essential difference is between science and something masquerading as science: pseudoscience. The distinction between the two is at …
What Can Chain Letters Teach us about Natural Selection?
“It is important to understand that none of these replicating entities is consciously interested in getting itself duplicated. But it will just happen that the world becomes filled with …
How Darwin Thought: The Golden Rule of Thinking
In his 1986 speech at the commencement of Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles (found in Poor Charlie’s Almanack) Charlie Munger gave a short Johnny Carson-like speech on the things to avoid …
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 …
The Darwin Economy – Why Smith’s Invisible Hand Breaks Down
In The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and The Common Good Robert H. Frank, an economics professor at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, takes on the debate of who was a …
The Book of Trees: Visualizing Branches of Knowledge
“There certainly have been many new things in the world of visualization; but unless you know its history, everything might seem novel.” — Michael Friendly *** It’s tempting to consider information …
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 …
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 …
How a Scientist Gets Things Wrong
Albert Einstein, writing to fellow physicist Hendrik Lorentz in 1915, describes how a scientist gets things wrong: 1. The devil leads him by the nose with a false hypothesis. (For this he deserves our …
The Work Required to Have an Opinion
While we all hold an opinion on almost everything, how many of us actually do the work required to have an opinion? I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the …