Posts

May 22, 2013

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3:41 PM | We Fit Nature to Us: Evolution’s 2-Way Street

It is in our nature to fit nature to us. We are best at it, but other species do it. This obvious but overlooked factor contradicts the dominant one-way-street gene-centric view of adaptation. A better framework for evolution is needed. Its shape isn’t clear, but it must incorporate: extracorporeal gene effects, “gene-culture coevolution,” “niche construction,” [...]

May 15, 2013

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3:52 PM | Tools Are in Our Nature

Tools have changed our genes for millions of years. Paleo-people were not possible without them. Artificial aids preceded and enabled our bigger brains. The slings and arrows of our evolutionary fortune have not been entirely random. We have long intelligently designed factors in our own evolution. Chipped-stone hand axes testify that our ancestors used tools [...]

May 08, 2013

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2:00 PM | It is in our nature to need stories.

It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our survival. Like our language instinct, a story drive—an inborn hunger for story hearing and story making—emerges untutored [...]

May 01, 2013

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4:01 PM | Our Ruly Nature

It is in our nature to need rules. By enabling better social productivity rules beats no rules. We can clarify our biological rule dependence by analogy with language and tools. Also by noticing that we are apt to ape more than apes. We are born able to automatically absorb the rules of our mother tongues [...]

April 25, 2013

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9:15 PM | Inheriting Second Natures

It is in our first nature to get second natures. Born with the habit of acquiring new habits we access a behavioral toolkit that is nowhere in our genes. A weakness of this otherwise wise strategy is that we often act without consciously thinking. You, at this precise moment, are using an easy and a [...]

April 19, 2013

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4:27 PM | It Is in Our Nature to Be Self-Deficient

It is in our nature to be self-deficient. This applies initially, chronically and inalienably. Now those once self-evident truths are obscured by errors of biology defying individualism. Though the opposite is often said, no human has ever been “born alone” and survived. Being human starts being unable to feed ourselves and being unable to avoid [...]

April 09, 2013

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11:08 PM | Science’s Cult of Calculation

E. O. Wilson says great scientists need be “no more than semiliterate” mathematically. He says: doing the math is often easier than generating ideas; the math is usually out-sourceable; we have more mathematicians than useful ideas; and science advances by better ideas which typically don’t come from mathematical reasoning. In this Wilson revives two old [...]

April 04, 2013

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12:01 PM | Better Models of Our Nature

The human condition is more conditional than many think. Iffy ideas and popular errors bedevil our view of ourselves, but violence can lead to better models of our nature. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Stephen Pinker, cognitive scientist, big-idea-big-book builder, and noted metaphor-breaker, has amassed armies of reason, deployed over 800 pages, to [...]

October 23, 2012

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1:50 PM | What Competition in Nature Should Teach Us about Markets: Should We Be as Dumb as Trees?

Though the free-market faithful have long preached that competition creates efficiency, as if it were a law of nature, nature itself teaches a different lesson. The seductively simple story of the virtues of competition contains some general theoretical truth, but execution is how theory dies, and we can’t let blind faith prevent us from seeing [...]