A wise man with a provocative theory of violence may help us understand and save ourselves.
I just returned from a meeting in Paris (alright, a meeting followed by a marvelous three-day vacation) at which, along with some very pleasant wining and dining, I spent several days talking about imitation and violence. What do these two seemingly separate things have in common? According to René Girard, everything.
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Georgia: a fundamentalist backwater or a hotbed of evolutionary rebellion? Both.
In the past three days I somehow managed to give a lecture to medical students on medicine and anthropology, moderate a panel on evolutionary medicine, and conduct a seminar at a retreat for Emory Scholars–some of our most outstanding undergraduates–called "Religion, Science, Literature and Life."
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Evil is real, and so are evil genes.
Today I stumbled on a C-SPAN presentation by Barbara Oakley about her book Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend. I haven’t read the book, but it evidently overlaps with many things I’ve long thought and written myself, in The Tangled Wing and elsewhere.
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An excellent new study once again takes us back to the future.
Last week’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine carried another powerful vindication of The Paleolithic Prescription, a book co-authored by Boyd Eaton, Marjorie Shostak and me just twenty years ago. Boyd and I fired the first salvo in the same journal in 1985, with an article called “Paleolithic Nutrition.”
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Low fertility helps the species but threatens cultures and some dreams.
Weddings get me thinking about reproductive success. I went to two this week, both outstanding professional couples, and I couldn't help wondering if and when they might make a contribution to the next generation's genetic and cultural mix.
And I do mean "if."
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Genes in chocolate trees, cancers, and sea water are confirming Darwin and changing the world.
I knew genomics had come of age when I heard they were sequencing the chocolate genome-or the tree chocolate comes from, anyway. That’s Theobroma (“food of the gods”) cacao, which is so beset by diseases that the world’s chocolate addicts, me included, could lose our fix.
Next to the Genome, Culture is a Mess, and Its Evolution a Much Harder Puzzle
Okay, so what are memes? This is a term invented 30 years ago by Richard Dawkins, to try to find an equivalent for genes in cultural evolution. The term is now in general usage among those who study cultural evolution, and it has a certain usefulness.
However, it’s a mess compared to the concept of gene. A gene is Read more
Maternal yearning has its day in court
In early April Texas state authorities entered the compound of a polygamous sect and took as many as 468 children into custody for their own protection, following an anonymous phone call accusing the sect of promoting sex between grown men and girls as young as thirteen.
Whose genome matters more–the weirdest mammal or the decoder of DNA?
This month my mailbox has been filled with genomic goodies. Last month we had Jim Watson’s very own genome–the discoverer of DNA is out there now with all his base pairs.
May 1st, Nature reported on variation in eight human genomes, not counting Jim’s. The idea was to spot “one-armed bandits,”
Can a looming diabetes epidemic be averted by a hunter-gatherer lifestyle?
I just got back from a conference at Harvard where I gave an after-dinner talk (at the Harvard Faculty Club, no less) on a subject guaranteed to give everyone indigestion: why our ancestors ate healthier than we do.
I described in words and photos the lives of the !Kung hunter-gatherers depicted at the top of this page, as I and others saw it during two years of field work between 1969 and 1975. I briefly discussed hunter-gatherer studies generally, and I talked about the implications of hunter-gatherer life for us today.