The United States has long thought of itself as the land of infinite plenty, and historically we did have abundant resources. But now we are graduall….

In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume….

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healt….

AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion...….

But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have ….

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean — once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. The….

With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without a….

The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovere….

We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast ….

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….

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

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….

[W]hat makes patriotic and religious fanatics such dangerous opponents is not the deaths of the fanatics themselves, but their willingness to accept ….

All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing technology. There is no basis for believing that tec….

Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened..

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farmi….

When you have seen the errors in which you live, you will understand the good that we have done you by coming to your land by order of his Majesty th….

Some people have much more pull than other people. But when I say that the public has ultimate responsibility, I'm not saying it in a moral sense. I'….

Technology causes problems as well as solves problems. Nobody has figured out a way to ensure that, as of tomorrow, technology won't create problems.….

Thousands of years ago, humans domesticated every possible large wild mammal species fulfilling all those criteria and worth domesticating, with the ….

Lest those islands still seem to you too remote in space and time to be relevant to our modern societies, just think about the risks... of our increa….