A collection of 27 posts
Visionaries may be moody, obsessive loners but without them to provide a good idea in the first place, implementers end up working diligently to implement a faulty vision, like clockwork toys set off in the wrong direction.
It is important to note that this does not take into account the difficulty or danger involved in the types of tasks undertaken by hunter-gatherers.
“We’ve successfully banished the notion of punishment in that realm,” Sapolsky writes. “It may take centuries, but we can do the same in all our current arenas of punishment.”
One consequence of these genetic battles is the effect on reproductive compatibility within a species.
“Many of our expert epigenetics research colleagues are deeply embarrassed by the warm, uncritical response their work has attracted from the social sciences,”
Despite strong genetic influences on IQ (and there are strong genetic influences on IQ), we can’t calculate the proportion of credit for Einstein’s intellect that is owed solely to his genes.
A number of popular articles (and books) have implored people to have fewer children as a way of minimizing anthropogenic global warming.
Somewhere in our evolutionary past how smart and social we are became the major control on our access to sexual partners — not how big or fancy a male’s penis is.
To go from noticing that genetic differences were making a difference to knowing which genetic differences were making a difference, geneticists had to move from the classical twin methods to the modern “molecular” methods.
We should start at the beginning, which is to say, conception. That magical moment when sperm meets egg holds an important insight.
Gossip can actually be thought of not as a character flaw, but as a highly evolved social skill.
Non-additive effects don’t breed true with the same degree of fidelity—in fact these effects bust up the clean transmission of traits from parents to children (to use a sports analogy, it’s a bit like a cornerback in football deflecting the quarterback’s perfect spiral aimed at the receiver).