Natural History of the Present
Rob Brooks – Evolutionary Biologist & Author
First published in The Conversation under the title Sex bots, virtual friends, VR lovers: tech is changing the way we interact, and not always for the better Twenty-first century technologies such as robots, virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) are…
Compared with our closest relatives, the common chimpanzee and the bonobo, humans are pretty good at focusing exclusively on one mate at a time.
Just how exclusively, however, is the subject of endless tabloid gossip, culture-war sabre-rattling, and scientific debate. The answer seemed to be that most people are exclusive most of the time, but new evidence has thrown the question wide open again.
How confident are you that the man you call dad is really your biological father? If you believe some of the most commonly-quoted figures, you could be forgiven for not being very confident at all. But how accurate are those…
Dads are important. Pardon the motherhood statement about … fatherhood. Just sometimes, even self-evident things need to be said. All else being equal, fathers who are involved in their children’s upbringing directly improve those children’s survival, health, social and educational…