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Ann Druyan and I come from families that knew grinding poverty. But our parents were passionate readers. One of our grandmothers learned to read because her father, a subsistence farmer, traded a sack of onions to an itinerant teacher. She read for the next hundred years. Our parents had personal hygiene and the germ…
At the same time, children with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programmes for the 'gifted' are sometimes decried as 'elitism'. Why aren't intensive practice sessions for varsity football, baseball and basketball players and interschool…
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he…
The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called 'sciences as one would'. For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they…
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something…
The Destruction of the Temple and Signs of the End Times 5 Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones and with gifts dedicated to God. But Jesus said, 6 “As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another; every one of them will be…
[A]s children tremble and fear everything in the blind darkness, so we in the light sometimes fear what is no more to be feared than the things children in the dark hold in terror . . .
Why does the waist-to-hip ratio matter? Singh observes that a "gynoid" fat distribution—more fat on the hips, less on the torso—is necessary for the hormonal changes associated with female fertility. An "android" fat distribution-—fat on the belly, thin hips—is associated with the symptoms of male disabilities such as…
Even at its best, pre-modern medical practice did not save many. Queen Anne was the last Stuart monarch of Great Britain. In the last seventeen years of the seventeenth century, she was pregnant eighteen times. Only five children were born alive. Only one of them survived infancy. He died before reaching adulthood…
Likewise, the manner in which sexual selection capriciously seizes upon preexisting perceptual biases fits with the fact that apes are by nature naturally "curious, playful, easily bored, and appreciative of simulation." Miller suggests that to keep a husbanc around long enough to help in raising children, women would…
At school, boys are fidgety, difficult, inattentive, and slow to learn, compared to girls. Nineteen out of every twenty hyperactive children are boys. Four times as many boys as girls are dyslexic and learning disabled. "Education is almost a conspiracy against the aptitudes and inclinations of a schoolboy," wrote…
There are three reasons to expect evolution to have produced different mentalities in men and women. The first is that men and women are mammals, and all mammals show sexual differences in behavior. As Charles Darwin put it, "No one disputes that the bull differs in disposition from the cow, the wild boar from the…
Birth after birth the line unchanging runs, And fathers live transmitted in their sons; Each passing year beholds the unvarying kinds, The same their manners, and the same their minds. Till, as erelong successive buds decay, And insect-shoals successive pass away, Increasing wants the pregnant parent vex With the fond…
Inside my skull is a brain that was designed to exploit the conditions of an African savanna between 3 million and 100,000 years ago. When my ancestors moved into Europe (I am a white European by descent) about 100,000 years ago, they quickly evolved a set of physiological features to suit the sunless climate of…
Michael Ghiselin developed this idea further in 1974 and made some telling analogies with economic trends. As Ghiselin put it, "In a saturated economy, it pays to diversify." Ghiselin suggested that most creatures compete with their brothers and sisters, so if everybody is a little different from their brothers and…
If we were hairless chimpanzees, our society would still Dok fairly familiar in some ways. We would live in families, be very social, hierarchical, group-territorial, and aggressive toward other groups than those we belong to. In other words, we would be family-based, urban, class-conscious, nationalist, and…
Low was looking to explain why young women have fat on their breasts and buttocks more than on other parts of their bodies. The reason this requires explaining is that young women are different from other human beings in this respect. Older women, young girls, and men of all ages gain fat on their torsos and limbs…
Trivers and Willard realized that the same general principle of sex allocation, which determines the gender of nematodes and fish, applies even to those creatures that cannot change sex but that take care of their young. They predicted that animals would be found to have some systematic control over the sex ratio of…
Another insect, a scale insect, has an even more bizarre genetic parasite. When its eggs are fertilized. sometimes more than one sperm penetrates the egg. If this happens, one of the sperm fuses with the egg's nucleus in the normal way; the spare sperm hang around and begin dividing as the egg divides. When the…
The relationship between a mother and her child is fairly straightforward: Both are seeking roughly the same goal—the welfare of themselves and each other. The relationship between a man and his wife's lover or between a woman and her rival for a promotion is also fairly Straightforward: Both want the worst for each…