Biology

It has only 473 genes, and many of them are a complete mystery. SCIENTISTS on Thursday announced the creation of a synthetic organism stripped down to the bare essentials with the fewest genes needed to survive and multiply, a feat at the microscopic level that may provide big insights on the very nature…

by John Law Sociobiology A book published back in 1981, The Ethnic Phenomenon, by Pierre van den Berghe, offers one of the earliest accounts of ethnocentrism from a sociobiological perspective. The essential finding of sociobiology on the subject of “ethnocentrism” is that all humans…

Human variation — that is, inequality — has always existed in fact, and science demonstrates it every single day. HUMAN VARIATION (Academic Press, N.Y.) is edited by R. Travis Osborne and Clyde E. Noble (pictured), psychologists of international repute based at the University of Georgia.…

The mysterious homing instinct of animals, and the human sense of home and homeland by Revilo P. Oliver THE Manchester Guardian may have been a liberal publication when it was founded in 1821. When I first began to glance occasionally at copies of it, a hundred and thirty years later, it had already become…

by Revilo P. Oliver IN MY YOUTH I met an amateur zoölogist who was studying the relative intelligence of various species of mammals, excluding men. Obviously, carnivores are more intelligent than herbivores, and he thus far had been able to observe only Felidae and Canidae. For him, intelligence was…

by David Sims IQ IS, pretty much, a fixed and unchanging quantity. Many people confuse intelligence with acquired mental skills, but the two aren’t the same thing. When someone first starts to play the game Minesweeper on the “intermediate” difficulty level, his time to finish is usually around…

Life could have emerged on Earth about 300 million years earlier than previously thought, according to new research. LIVING ORGANISMS could have existed on our planet 4.1 billion years ago: 300 million years earlier than was previously thought, according to scientists. It was a spate of ancient…

by Peter Goodchild IN ORDER to be fully human, I occasionally need to put my hands on the green things that grow on the surface of this planet, because those leaves and I are one. My personal loss is proportional to my ability to destroy that unity. “All flesh is grass.” This is the essential…

by David Sims RACE DOESN’T come from social inequality, but rather from biological inequality. The racists (the word by today’s standards would include practically everyone prior to 1950) actually had it right, and the liberals have been wrong about race the whole time. At least two…

by Andrew Hamilton IN TRYING to conceptualize what a current, or indeed ongoing, global head count of Whites would look like (no such reliable enumeration exists), it is imperative to keep in mind the age structure and reproductive profile of whatever population exists, as well as the dynamics of rapid…