Natural History of the Present
Rob Brooks – Evolutionary Biologist & Author
It’s about time for me to rack up some of the more interesting reads I’ve encountered in recent days/weeks. Happy to receive recommendations from you, via comments, Facebook or Twitter. Sophie Fontanel writes at the Atlantic about the long period in…
News just in, guaranteed to stir smug nods from non-believers and incite irritation among the devout: intelligence correlates negatively with religious belief. You may have seen similar – or contradictory – reports in the past. That’s because scores of studies…
This week has seen an embarrassment of riches for a columnist with my interests. I’ve been torn between the “Gucci Handbags as a means of female-female competition” and the rather tragic unravelling of prominent ‘male feminist’ Hugo Schwyzer. I hope…
I wanted to post regular updates of great reads. Weekly. Or even monthly. I really did. But I must accept that I’m better suited to providing irregular postings.I hope you enjoy these nonetheless. For the first two articles, I must…
Today, I have just learned from Katherine Feeney’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald, is National Orgasm Day. What that is and how you celebrate it remains a little opaque to me*. Will there be organised pageantry and fireworks later…
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 week I’ve been wrestling with a particularly large writing project which has kept me away from posting in this column. But, staring into my Twitter feed in procrastination, I spotted much outrage about a paper on the adaptive basis…
Melinda Gates wrote a powerful piece for CNN on the occasion of the Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur. Empowered women make nations strong. The usually spot-on Hugo Schwyzer gets it dead wrong in the Atlantic: “What if Men Stopped…
What’s she doing with that snake? And what does that have to do with cereal? Sexcereal.com “This,” as I believe it is now fashionable to say, “is actually a thing.” Where by this I mean Sexcereal. A his and hers…