Seven amazing things we take for granted most of the time, ordered from least to most weird

February 19, 2021

1. How much dogs love us. There is no way we've been good enough boys/girls/humans to deserve this. 2. Popcorn. It's freakily amazing that corn kernels turn into this stuff. And as a bonus, it's delicious. 3. That humans, working together, eradicated the last wild strain of smallpox in the 1970s. This was a mind-blowingly huge win for our species. It had plagued us since ~3rd century BCE and is estimated to have killed ~500 million people just during the last 100 years it w...

An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Traits

September 13, 2020

The rules of evolution are simple: (1) if a trait makes survival or breeding more likely, then that trait will tend to survive in the long term by being passed down the generations. (2) Gene mutation and gene mixing create new traits, which naturally vary in how much they promote survival. Yet, the consequences of these simple rules are profound. Various facets of the world are hard to understand without taking evolution into account. Since our brains and bodies (as well as the natural world...