This View of Life
Magazine

The question of discounting not only moves quickly from economics to ethics, it also leads to the search for the “deep structures” of human society and human reasoning.

The evolutionary paradigm should be consulted by people across the political spectrum.

“We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.”There are many criticisms of the evolutionary view of human nature, and most of these have been the subject of ongoing debate and commentary. In this series of posts, of which this is the first installment, I will address one of the most pervasive objections, particularly among secular humanists and even some scientists: the notion that we’re telling “just-so stories” about human nature.

The famed australopithecine “Lucy” might have run into more than just her own species when she roamed Eastern Africa 3.2 million years ago.

After initially accepting the metaphor of mental immunity as a useful gift from a cherished friend, my more deeply ingrained worldview now appears to be casting doubts upon it.

The decision making rules of fisherman.

Scientists respond to the media buzz about their research that went viral.While scientists increasingly have become interested in publicizing science and publishing popular books, media have played important roles in translating science from the field or laboratory to the public domain. Thus, scientists, media, and the public flanked by industry, business, and government define the consortium of producers, consumers, and sponsors of discovery.

A study recently published in the journal <em>Science</em> puts a time period on the eruptions that is far more concrete than any estimate thus far.

For millennia, group boundaries have organized our identities, motivated allegiances, and inspired feats of coordination the likes of which are unparalleled in the animal kingdom.We hypothesize that psychological adaptations exist that structure the way we think about groups, and that regulate cooperative and competitive behavior in the context of specific coalitional dynamics; specifically, we argue that humans are endowed with an evolved “coalitional psychology.”

We ought to look to nature—and its 3.5 billion years of adaptations for survival—for how to better protect ourselves from terrorist attacks, natural disasters and infectious disease.