This View of Life
Magazine

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.

Given its huge success in describing the natural world for the past 150 years, the theory of evolution is remarkably misunderstood.

Read an excerpt from Dominic Johnson's new book 'God is Watching You' where he presents a new theory of the origins and evolution of not only religion, but also human cooperation and society, and explores how fear of supernatural punishment exists within and outside of religious contexts.

Over the long history of life on earth, the most consequential events have been those in which organisms came to embody new levels or modalities of existence.