A Brief History of Inbreeding
How kinship, culture, and genetics shaped one of humanity’s oldest taboos.
Francisco Ceballos
· 12 min read
evolution
A collection of 14 posts
The Unwelcome Truth about Rape
For their research showing that rape is generally motivated by sexual desire, Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer were subjected to death threats and hounded in their personal and professional lives. And yet, they were right.
Peggy Sastre
· 14 min read
Too Much Monkey Business
The questions at the centre of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial are still contested today.
Graham Daseler
· 21 min read
Charles Darwin: The Best Scientist-Writer of All Time
The Voyage of the Beagle is a literary masterpiece, as well as a scientific one.
Lawrence M. Krauss
· 9 min read
When Animals Shed Their Wings
Worker ants can sprout wings—but don’t. Ant and termite queens destroy theirs after mating. Many island birds evolve into flightlessness. Can evolution explain why?
Richard Dawkins
· 7 min read
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Powerful Anti-Racist Book. So Why Doesn’t the Left Love It?
In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by European empires, the Western world awoke to the horrors that humans are capable of committing against those they perceived to be inferior.
Jerry Barnett
· 14 min read
David Gelernter is Wrong About Ditching Darwin
The last lesson of Gelernter’s piece is that while we shouldn’t judge someone’s arguments by their credentials alone, neither should we give unwarranted credence to those who have impressive credentials, particularly when they pronounce on a field in which they lack expertise.
Jerry A. Coyne
· 11 min read
Quillette Podcast 42 – Yale Professor Nicholas Christakis on What Evolution Can Teach Us About Resolving Conflict
Jonathan Kay talks to Nicholas Christakis, Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale, about his new book Blueprint and what evolution can teach us about overcoming conflict.
Quillette, Nicholas Christakis
· 1 min read
Origins and Exploration—An Interview with Dr. Lewis Dartnell
One of the big questions in evolutionary biology is: what drove our evolution from tree-swinging apes to bipedal, highly intelligent homonins that went on to build civilization and inherit the world?
Logan Chipkin
· 14 min read
Memes, Genes, and Sex Differences—An Interview with Dr. Steve Stewart-Williams
The meme’s-eye view says that memes are selected to the extent that they have effects on the people who encounter them that keep the memes alive in the culture: tunes that get stuck in our heads, for instance, or ideas that motivate us to talk about them, spread them, or impose them on other people.
Logan Chipkin
· 14 min read
A Girl’s Place in the World
Men (and, less often, women as well) across societies all over the world have used violence in an attempt to control women’s reproductive outcomes and limit the choices available to them, and in many circumstances, men have benefited from doing so.
William Buckner
· 15 min read
From Hegemonic to Responsive Masculinity: the Transformative Power of the Provider Role
There is little evidence to justify why the provider role has been held in such low regard.
Belinda Brown
· 11 min read
Science Denial Won’t End Sexism
We can acknowledge that male and female brains have differences in structure and function, on average, without subscribing to the belief that one sex is better than the other.
Debra Soh
· 6 min read
The Transhumanism Revolution: Oppression Disguised as Liberation
The transhumanist perspective insists that humans have a distinctly separate mind and body, and that what happens to one need not affect the other.
Libby Emmons
· 10 min read