This View of Life
Magazine

The ideology behind extremist violence looks remarkably like the “moral sentiments” of empathy, indignation, and shame that are presumed to confer fitness advantages in human social interactions.

That wretched hive of scum and quackery that he’s infested almost since its beginning The Huffington Post.

Since cultural evolution is fueled by the creative efforts of human minds which, by anyone’s definition, are conscious, it would seem that consciousness plays a central role in cultural evolution.

Religious systems that lose their adaptability become dangerous to the societies in which they exist, and to themselves, because they absolutize the relative.

The evolutionary principles of variation and selection are relevant to finance because the practices of banks and related financial institutions are selected by their impact on profits.

The attempt to solve a problem by destroying its source remains an eternal aspect of the human condition.

A new and important change is occurring in the history of political violence which suggests that insights from genetic as well as cultural evolution may prove fruitful.

The tobacco industry provides a lesson about the harm that can be done in the name of profit. No other industry has contributed as much to promote illness and death.

The biological clock prepares our bodies for predictable events, like sleep and energy intake. Misalignment of the biological clock may have serious metabolic consequences.

Radicalization is an inherently relational concept. One can only be radical in relation to someone who is not. Similarly, one cannot be extreme without an accepted center norm. But the center is not a fixed state. It shifts and changes across time, place, circumstance, and culture.

The common denominator here is not consciousness, but the spontaneous emergence of systems that are agents, systems with teleological properties: the “end-directed” properties that unequivocally characterize life.