I love apostates, believers in or, better yet, conceivers of a theory who turn against it. They restore my faith in science, because they show that scientists can overcome attachment to their own brainchildren, a feat that is essential for progress and cannot be taken for granted...
Since September, I’ve posted three columns, including two written by others, on whether lethal chimpanzee raids–and by implication, human warfare—are adaptive and hence innate...
The approach of Thanksgiving, that quintessential American holiday, has me brooding once again over slanderous scientific portrayals of Native Americans as bellicose brutes.* When I was in grade school, my classmates and I wore paper Indian headdresses and Pilgrim hats and reenacted the "first Thanksgiving," in which supposedly friendly Native Americans joined Pilgrims for a [...]..
I’m writing this post for two reasons. One is to recommend a new book by Columbia astrobiologist Caleb Scharf (who also writes a terrific Scientific American blog, “Life, Unbounded“), and the other is to defend an old book of mine...
For a professional blowhard, there is no worse fate than being ignored. So I’m always—well, almost always—delighted when my posts get pushback, especially from people who are smart, well-informed and thoughtful...
In a previous post, I poked my nose into the debate over whether climate change will precipitate more conflict. I offered a half dozen objections to predictions that more warming means more war...
“To honor a fallen peer and adjust to life outside the war zones, four men linked by combat journey by foot from Washington, D.C., to Pennsylvania.” That is how HBO describes Sebastian Junger’s new documentary, The Last Patrol, which HBO is airing Monday night...
“There's a surprisingly strong link between climate change and violence.” That’s the headline of a recent article by journalist Chris Mooney in The Washington Post.
I met Stephen Hawking in the summer of 1990, when I spent five days in northern Sweden at a conference attended by 30 or so leading cosmologists.
In 2007 Garrett Lisi was a 39-year-old physicist, unaffiliated with any institution, toiling in obscurity on what he called "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything,” which could account for all of nature’s forces...
For more than 20 years, I’ve hammered behavioral genetics, and especially research linking genes to intelligence. Last spring, I proposed a ban on research into race and intelligence...
Yes, the Cold War ended long ago, but we still live in a nuclear-armed world, in which the possibility of nuclear war, terrorism and accidents is all too real.
Weight-loss research has generated headlines lately, leading me to wonder what my pal Gary Taubes is up to. Over the past dozen years, Taubes has transformed himself from a mere journalist into a major player in dietary science, who has helped raise millions for research...
Historian of science Naomi Oreskes, now at Harvard, first came to my attention 20 years ago, when she and two co-authors argued in Science that “verification and validation of numerical models of natural systems is impossible.” In The End of Science, I cited the Oreskes et al...
Is chimpanzee violence a product of nature or nurture? Genes or environment? Two weeks ago Nature published a report, "Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts," in which 30 primatologists came down on the side of nature...
I’ve been over-posting this month, so I’m going to make my monthly “Cool Sh*t” post short. (See last month’s candidates here.) Below are three articles that offer provocative takes by smart, informed authors on important topics...
Earlier this month, I posted a Q&A on the Ebola outbreak with a Stevens colleague, medical anthropologist Theresa MacPhail. MacPhail also put me in touch with someone who could provide more insight into the outbreak, Dr...
At a 1990 conference on cosmology, I asked attendees, who included folks like Stephen Hawking, Michael Turner, James Peebles, Alan Guth and Andrei Linde, to nominate the smartest living physicist...
In my last post, I critiqued "Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts," a new paper in Nature that represents a broadside in the old debate over whether war is innate...
On this blog, in my book The End of War and elsewhere (see Further Reading and Viewing), I have knocked the deep roots theory of war, which holds that war stems from an instinct deeply embedded in the genes of our male ancestors...
