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It’s contagious and seems to serve no physiological purpose My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on yawning: Even as scientists get better at finding explanations for animal behavior-at the genetic, physiological, evolutionary and neural level-certain habits remain implacably mysterious. And this is true even when we’re the species in […]

Taleb on emergence and trial and error My review of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s new book in the Wall Street Journal:   You don’t need a physics degree to ride a bicycle. Nor, Nassim Nicholas Taleb realized one day, do traders need to understand the mathematical theorems of options trading to trade options. Instead traders discover […]

Ray Kurzweil’s new book My latest Mind and Matter column is on Ray Kurzweil’s new book: When an IBM computer program called Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, wise folk opined that since chess was just a game of logic, this was neither significant nor surprising. Mastering the subtleties of human language, including […]

It is not the peacock with big-enough tail that gets to mate, but the one with the biggest tail My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the connection between our interest in relative inequality and the theory of sexual selection: Evolution by sexual selection is an idea that goes […]

Burning wood is the worst thing you can do for carbon dioxide emissions I have an opinion article in The Times today: Never has an undercover video sting delighted its victims more. A Greenpeace investigation has caught some Tory MPs scheming to save the countryside from wind farms and cut ordinary people’s energy bills while […]

More and more evidence that it was warm and global My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on the Medieval Warm Period: A flurry of recent scientific papers has tried to measure the warmth of the “Medieval Warm Period” (MWP) of about 1,000 years ago. Scientists have long debated whether […]

All animal vision derives from one common ancestor My latest Mind and Matter column is on the origin of vision in animals and a vindication for Darwin: Until recently it was possible, even plausible, to think that the faculty of vision had originated several times during the course of animal evolution. New research suggests not: […]

The bureaucracy’s carbon obsession is distracting I have an article in this week’s Spectator about ash trees and exotic pests: I’m pessimistic about the ash trees. It seems unlikely that a fungus that killed 90 per cent of Denmark’s trees and spreads by air will not be devastating here, too. There is a glimmer of […]

The return of top predators is good for prey eaten by “mesopredators” My latest Mind and Matter column at the Wall Street Journal is on wolves and “mesopredators”: The return of the wolf is one of the unexpected ecological bonuses of the modern era. So numerous are wolves that this fall Wisconsin and Wyoming have […]

The surprising regularity of technological progress My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal:   In 1965, the computer expert Gordon Moore published his famous little graph showing that the number of “components per integrated function” on a silicon chip-a measure of computing power-seemed to be doubling every year and a half. […]