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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 […]

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 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. […]

Epigenetics matters, but not between generations This week’s award of the Nobel Prize for medicine to John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka effectively recognizes the science of epigenetics. Dr. Gurdon showed that almost any cell (in a frog) contains all the genetic information to become an adult. What makes the cell develop a certain way is […]

After 15 years, the ecological and economic dividends are big My latest Mind and Matter column in the Wall Street Journal is on genetically modified crops: Generally, technologies are judged on their net benefits, not on the claim that they are harmless: The good effects of, say, the automobile and aspirin outweigh their dangers. Today, […]