evolution

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?

David Gelernter is Wrong About Ditching Darwin
I’ve never been one to judge somebody’s arguments by their scholarly credentials. After all, two major contributors to my own field of evolutionary genetics, Gregor Mendel and Charles Darwin, were amateur naturalists and autodidacts trained more thoroughly in theology than in biology. So when well-known Yale professor and

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.

A Girl’s Place in the World
Worth mentioning here is the way in which the boy’s plight differs from the girl’s in almost every known society. Whatever the arrangements in regard to descent or ownership of property…the prestige values always attach to the occupations of men. —Margaret Mead, Sex and Temperament in Three

Science Denial Won’t End Sexism
Last week, Nature, one of the top scientific journals in the world, ran a review written by Lise Eliot of Gina Rippon’s new book, The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain. Both Eliot and Rippon, neuroscientists affiliated with Rosalind Franklin University and