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Richard Dawkins

Critical Mass and Tipping Points: How To Identify Inflection Points Before They Happen

Critical mass, which is sometimes referred to as tipping points, is one of the most effective mental models you can use to understand the world. The concept can explain everything from viral cat …

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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 …

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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 …

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The Seven Books Bill Gates Thinks You Should Read This Summer

Bill Gates is out with his annual summer reading list and, while longer than last year’s, it’s a great place to kick off your summer reading. “Each of these books,” Gates writes, …

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Claude Shannon: The Man Who Turned Paper Into Pixels

“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.” — …

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The False Allure of Group Selection.

From Steven Pinker’s edge.org article The False Allure of Group Selection. Pinker argues that the more carefully you think about group selection, the less sense it makes, and the more poorly it …

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Richard Dawkins on Pascal’s Wager

Richard Dawkins’s wide-ranging interview with Playboy Magazine. PLAYBOY: So you aren’t taking Pascal up on his wager. He was the 17th century philosopher who argued it’s a smarter bet to believe …

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