The human conceit that we are the masters of our own destinies may be one of those hard-wired illusions which served an adaptive function in the distant past. Whatever the evolutionary truth of it, despite the fact that Calvinism, Islam, and modern science lean against the position that our will is ...

While computational geneticists live in a world dominated by bytes, The 10,000 Year Explosion synthesizes seemingly disparate fields so as to generate a narrative of more insight than each part alone. With the long exile of biology from the human sciences there are many weeds to clear out, but the ...

I recently read Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century by Jeffry A. Frieden.  As in many books in this genre the first age of globalization which ended in 1914 receives a great deal of treatment.  This was a period of free movement of capital, goods and ...

Interacting with people in the sciences over my life one of the major issues I have noticed is an extreme hubris when it comes to their opinions in regards to non-scientific issues. Many individuals in the sciences consider all issues fundamentally scientific.  This engenders a certitude when ...