Sifting Through Photographs of Our Ancestors to See Evolu...

Find a picture of yourself. Now take a picture of your father and place it on top. Then find a picture of his father, your grandfather. Then place on top of that a picture of your grandfather's father, your great-grandfather. You may not have ever met any of your great-grandfathers. I never met any of mine, but I know that one was a country schoolmaster, one a country doctor, one a forester in British India, and one a lawyer, greedy for cream, who died rock-climbing in old age. Still, even if...

 Parenting is Responsibility Without Power

Raising children is an intrinsically difficult and uncertain job in ways that science can't really address. For most of us parents there is literally nothing more important than the well-being of our children. There are not many things we could imagine giving our lives for, but we could give our lives for them. And, in a less melodramatic way, of course, we do give our lives for them. For fifteen or twenty years our everyday energy, our individual liberty, our income, our attention, our conce...