Studying sex differences seldom gets boring. While the origins of differences in behaviour and cognition remain fiercely – and quite rightly – disputed, we don’t sweat quite as much about why women and men differ in size and strength. The…
Over the last few evenings, I inhaled Robert Harris‘ novelisation of France’s infamous Dreyfus affair. Told from the point of view of Colonel Georges Picquart, the intelligence officer whose scrupulous honesty finally established Dreyfus’ innocence, An Officer and a Spy…
Few subjects more predictably animate furious disagreement and cross-purposes discussion than the origins of human warfare. Are people “naturally” belligerent? And what does that even mean? The question taps a deep old well of ideological intuition. Were the lives of…
By Rob Brooks That’s the message uber-cerebral Canadian rapper Baba Brinkman wants to spread. He’s Crowdfunding a music video and short documentary in support of what he calls the new Golden Rule of Sex. Video for Baba Brinkman’s “Don’t Sleep…
This weekend I gained a grudging appreciation for Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Governator, not the Terminator. Having watched Arnie’s political rise and fall from afar, he always seemed an odd chimera. Lines he’d delivered as the Terminator retrofitted to an ideology…
A few weeks ago I found myself reading up about the evolution of language in preparation for a talk I gave to the Applied Linguistics Association of Australia’s conference in Perth. It turns out the evolutionary forces that shaped humanity’s capacity…
I am unexpectedly moved this morning by the news that Mitch Lucker has died following a Halloween motorcycle accident. Mitch Lucker (1984-2012) performing with Suicide Silence Supkowski on Flickr Mitch was the “vocalist” for the American metal band…
You’ve no doubt heard that girls are entering puberty earlier than they ever have before. It’s one of those science-lite stories beloved of tabloid papers and current affairs programs. One recent article had 10 to 15 percent of American 7…
This is the full text of an article I published in ABC Science Online on 15 June 2011 (Where it stimulated some discussion). The article builds on some of the ideas in Chapter 8 of Sex, Genes & Rock ‘n’ Roll. Pressure…