Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction

... morphological and behavioural innovation that had their origin in Africa, and then spread to Eurasia, and ultimately to all parts of the world. Researchers claim that the modern human geno- type retains ... back of the brain case: this is called a sagittal torus. At the back of the cranium the sharply angulated occipital region has a well-defined sulcus above it. The walls of the brain c...

... parents can afford to be egalitarian. In contrast, Becky’s household can always afford enough food. Her parents allocate food equally every day – again, allowing for differences in nutritional ... due care has been taken by insurees against bad outcomes (protection against moral hazard). By being able to take advantage of the Law of Large Numbers, markets and the government, taken together, a...

... Von Neumann’s toy model abstracts all such complications away. Alice and Bob are each dealt a number between 0 and 1. Both aim to maximize their average dollar earnings on the assumption that 90 Information all ... capable of sustaining high levels of reciprocal altruism? How would humans be capable of the same feat if we always had to spend half an hour or more calculating what to do befor...

... probable that we are alive at the same time as, say, 10 per cent of the human race. This is another way of saying that humans will cease to exist long before they have any chance to spread across ... waves, earthquakes, tsunamis, and wildfires. Many urban centres in Europe, Africa, and Asia appear to have collapsed almost simultaneously around 2350 bc, and records abound of flood, fire, quake,...

... is an index of a speaker; writing of a hand employing a pen or moving over a keyboard; traffic signs of both a fabricator and an act of planning. What is particular, and peculiar, about photographs is ... a distinction between actual and virtual phenomena.) Assuming a good, flat mirror with a clean surface, there are three factors that enable a beholder to determine that what...

... is moral; offense is immoral.’ Ironically, three and a half decades later, James M. Lindsay and Michael E. O’Hanlon argued a national security policy that deliberately leaves the American people ... Watkins concluded, to have a long-range programme to ‘develop systems that would defeat a missile attack’. Reagan gravitated to Watkins’s missile defence idea as a way to alleviate...

... gods and beasts. Yet Aristotelian man, as Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, is a stranger to love. 27 The assumption that the meaning of life is primarily an individual affair is still alive and ... Nicomachean Ethics, available in Penguin Classics in an edition by Jonathan Barnes (Harmondsworth, 1976). Jonathan Barnes has also published a useful introduction to Aristotle in the V...