World historian William McNeill argued that humans had evolved for synchronous ritual: dancing, chanting, marching in time. The anthropological data seem to support this. For example, researchers recently found that Sufis engaged in the dhikr, […]
Tag: biology
On Misanthropy
My buddy the engineer clings to the nobility of man, presumably because we invented mathematics. He accuses me of misanthropy. But I am not a misanthrope. A misanthrope hates mankind, which I do not. Neither […]
(Fiction) Cleaning Agent Blues
Nio adjusted the heavy bag on her shoulder as she paced around the bus stop, stepping carefully over an icy sidewalk pockmarked in frozen footprints, like the fossil of a prehistoric riverbed. It was […]
(Art) The Hyper-Real Dream Girl
Look closely at the cover image. Now this one: And finally this one: Georgian artist Irakli Nadar makes hyper-real digital portraits from photographs of models and celebrities. “Hyperrealism” is a genre of art distinguished by […]
(Curiosity) Against Popular Science
RC Lewontin’s short collection of essays “Biology as Ideology” was formative for me. As you might expect of a nearly 30-year-old book, parts of it have not aged well. His rant against the Human Genome […]
A hull of words we secrete constantly
The dangers of life without death are avoided — they say — for ever. Not because from the mud of the boiling swamps the first clot of undivided life cannot again emerge, but because we […]
(Curiosity) The Biological Basis of Story
The eminent neuroscientist Jaak Panskepp, who pioneered the study of emotion in mammals, is famous for, among other things, tickling rats in the lab to make them laugh, but his work wasn’t a joke. He […]
(Curiosity) Immunity & Disease in the Internet of Things
As far as we know, the alphabet was invented only once* — in Phoenicia (covering modern-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel). It spread and persisted because with it, you can render any word in any language. […]
Fun! *now with Biology
I forget sometimes that not everyone has the same background I do. A while back, I had a conversation about fat that made it clear the speaker had no clue what she was talking about. […]
(Curiosity) How to Think About: Monogamy (and not be an idiot)
When we complain that people are generally bad at something, often we’re not saying they don’t understand it, as in they don’t understand it at all. What we’re saying is that they have missed (what […]
