I greatly admire Darwin's selection hypotheses and think what I have to say might surprise some readers familiar with my skeptical attitude to some investigations of sexual selection.
In correspondence and comments on some of my blogs, there have been confusions or questions as to what I mean by "natural genetic engineering" (NGE). I will use this blog to spell out what my understanding of NGE is.
Our psychology has been shaped by a sometimes uneasy balance of natural and sexual selection -- the practical need to acquire our daily bread and the romantic need to find love and produce offspring.
We have a natural environment. And a world of fast-food drive-through restaurants, fax machines, escalators and email is not it. The nutritional environment we live in is toxic to us. The effects of that toxicity are rampant chronic disease and epidemic obesity.
Love might be blind, but she is rarely deaf: Language and love have always been intimately entangled. Indeed Darwin believed love was one of the main ...
Like many of you, I bit on the Up-Goer Five Text Editor. I marveled at "Hamlet" in the ten hundred most common English words. Jumping in, I took the challenge.
Only by knowing Mik-tal's endowment to us can we hope to meet the challenges of the modern world. Our efforts to find our way home begin by knowing where home is, and where we are now. Our efforts to achieve dietary health begin by knowing ourselves.
Happy Darwin Day! February 12th marks the anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth. In celebration, I managed to dig up some little known details about h...
In commemoration of Charles Darwin's birthday, we will be reading again about evolution. Much of it will have been said before, many times. Here I am going to try to take a less familiar line and show how Darwinian evolution by natural selection has roots in the atomism of ancient Greece.
In most realms of human endeavor, no one person ever stands out as clearly greater than the other greats in that field. Because so many are great, no one person ever shines brightest. Psychology is an exception -- Charles Darwin does tower over this field.
This particular morning in mid-April was quite chilly, although clear. In fact, the early suffusion of sunlight was promising a day of great beauty. Not that Michelle was listening to such promises. Far too busy. And besides, the climate inside was always perfect.
The issue of personal responsibility for health and weight control comes up frequently in my professional circles, generating strong and opposing views. I have addressed this theme recently -- and many times in the past -- and expressed my own opinions.
We have long known that lucky charms and superstitious rituals provide psychological comfort to those hoping to win the lottery, knock in a winning run, or get an A on a calculus exam, but now there is good evidence that our superstitions actually work -- not through magic but through psychology.
Blind mole rats could be a real eye-opener for evolutionary science. According to a new study, the burrowing rodents are key to answering a contro...
By James Poskett and Nature magazine Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace are credited for co-discovering evolution by natural selection in ...
Developmental systems may have many potential outcomes, some of which may turn out to be adaptations only "after that fact." While evolution can thus occur with or without natural selection, the really big transformations are unlikely to have been produced by incremental adaptation.
The history of science helps explain why the common sense and experiences of our daily lives seem increasingly remote from what contemporary science suggests is actually going on. The more we know, the more mysterious the universe actually seems.
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 dramatically, so that living into our seventies is no big surprise.
Most scientists and science organizations in America wish to stay on good terms with the believing majority, and so the fundamental incompatibility between random evolution and divinely-guided evolution is kept under wraps.
Did Wallace and Darwin hit the nail on the head and identify the crucial process of biological diversification? To most people, and especially to the evolutionist profession, the answer is so obviously "Yes" that even to pose the question subjects the person asking to abuse.
Following Darwinian logic, we end up in some unexpected places. Of course, to get there we must accept the premise that the human mind might be capable of existing independently of the neuronal activity on which it usually depends.
How could natural selection operate so that "the good ones spread in the population" if there were no positive variants in the first place? That is why I am confounded by Jerry Coyne's comment that he can explain natural genetic engineering by "garden variety natural selection."
As the Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman has noted, those unflinching realists who scoff at the notion of an afterlife may be the ones indulging in wishful thinking.
This question originally appeared on Quora. By Jonathan Brill, VP Sales at Software Start-up I'm going to talk you out of having kids. Before...
