The single most important problem is our misguided focus on identifying the single most important problem!.

The King's 28 letters have been described by scholars as the world's best alphabet and the most scientific system of writing..

We can't manipulate some stars while maintaining other stars as controls; we can't start and stop ice ages, and we can't experiment with designing an….

In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it..

Eurasia's main axis is east/west, whereas the main axis of the Americas is north/south. Eurasia's east/west axis meant that species domesticated in o….

Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans..

It invites a search for ultimate causes: why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest ger….

Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique..

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. I….

With the MacArthur grant, I realized that people have high expectations of me, that they were placing me in this group of achievers. I compared what ….

In fact, everywhere in the world there has been a flux between big and small societies. Big political units are constantly being formed, later to fra….

Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are p….

Federal elections happen every two years in this country. Presidential elections every four years. And four years just isn't long enough to dismantle….

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use..

We study the injustices of history for the same reason that we study genocide, and for the same reason that psychologists study the minds of murderer….

Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capab….

Although native Africans domesticated some plants in the Sahel and in Ethiopia and in tropical West Africa, they acquired valuable domestic animals o….

The survival rate of Dr Burton's patients approximately doubled the maximum survival rate of conventionally treated patients. Had these findings pert….

It's striking that Native Americans evolved no devastating epidemic diseases to give to Europeans, in return for the many devastating epidemic diseas….

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that ev….

Measles and TB evolved from diseases of our cattle, influenza from a disease of pigs, and smallpox possibly from a disease of camels. The Americas ha….