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Statisticians tell us that people underestimate the sheer number of coincidences that are bound to happen in a world governed by chance.

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We really are creatures of a violent world, biologically speaking - watching violence and learning about it is one of our cognitive drives.

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The European wars of religion were more deadly than the First World War, proportionally speaking, and in the range of the Second World War in Europe. ...more

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Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage ...more

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Academics lack perspective. In a debate on whether the world is round, they would argue, 'No,' because it's an oblate spheroid. They suffer from 'the ...more

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Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history o...more

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Many people think that the theory of the selfish gene says that “animals try to spread their genes.” That misstates the facts and it misstates the the...more

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No society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give the...more

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A bumper sticker from the 1970s read, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.

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They are distinct enough that our crude instruments can pick up the differences, yet both are healthy instances of that staggeringly improbable, exqui...more