This View of Life
Magazine

Adopting an evolutionary framework, based on sound scientific empirical work, is our best way forward to understand human health in the modern world.

This year, I’m seizing the opportunity to be a better parent. This year, I’m going to play more. Because I want my children to play more.

This Darwin Day, consider investing in a tree-of-life tee-shirt or a tree-of-life necklace or even a tree-of-life tattoo. You’ll be honoring Darwin’s legacy while also conveying a cognitively apt representation of evolution to the public at large.

Every day teachers build lessons, units, semesters, and school years around a narrative structure. But did you know that these strategies also make sense from an evolutionary perspective as well?

The opportunities for applying formal tools from evolutionary biology and ecology to cancer are vast, a fact that was recognized by pioneers in the field of evolution and cancer, many of whom came together in at the Wellcome Genome Campus to teach at the EBEC summer school. And if this summer school is any indication, this initially very quiet evolution revolution in cancer biology is starting to get rowdy.

“… breach of obligation may be ‘one of the few, if not, indeed, the only act that is always and everywhere held to be immoral’.”

The term "Social Darwinism" is associated primarily with the moral justification of inequality, resulting in policies such as withholding welfare for the poor, colonialism, eugenics, and genocide. We would like to confront this legacy directly.

For a world struggling to live with its own pace, policies, and perplexities, This View of Life is a great place to gain fresh insights.

By studying the transition to multicellularity in a controlled laboratory setting, scientists can gain detailed insight into how these transitions might have occurred in the past.

Shakespeare understood, implicitly, what modern psychology has found: that human beings have a habit of making decisions based more on their intuitions and emotions than on their cognitive reasoning.

Unless we learn how to pivot in a different mental direction, we will experience the frightful evolutionary mismatch between human cognition and psychological peace of mind.

As a biologist, I know the importance of genetic diversity in evolution by natural selection. It is precisely because of our diversity as a nation that America leads the world in innovation.