The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

Peony had arthritis and was very old, so she could barely move. She would try to climb into a climbing frame where a bunch of chimps were s...

Growing Up in the Anthropocene - my recommendations for Five Books Ken Caldeira, who is mentioned in the piece, has this: How far can c...

When does a monkey turn down a free treat? When it is offered by a selfish person, apparently . Given the choice between accepting goodi...

It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is t...

I'm about a third of the way into The Company of Strangers by Paul Seabright (2010), one of several books I wish I had read before w...

During the year or so that [the lives of my old dogs Nina and Tess] overlapped with that of my [new young] son, I was alternately touched,...

Not sure I agree with the framing or the assumptions of this, which is from the preface to Religion in Human Evolution by Robert Bellah, bu...

Julian Savalescu and Ingmar Persson write : Modern technology provides us with many means to cause our downfall, and our natural moral psy...

...are reciprocity (fairness) and empathy (compassion).' There is little new in this presentation if you're already familiar with ...

Peter Singer and Agata Sagan argue that the possession of emotions or consciousness should be a key concern when thinking about how to hand...

Foer relates how, one night, he sneaked onto a California turkey farm with an animal-rights activist he calls C. Most of the buildings were ...

In On Kindness , Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor write: If the religious question is: how can it be that people created by a good God can d...

Give us a century or two and we may turn the whole planet into a place from which many people might be happy to depart. Lawrence Krauss prop...

...assuming that the answer to the first one is "to be", is: What do we want to be when we grow up? -- or so suggests Andy Revkin...

Here, slightly edited, is a comment I just posted in response to Stephen Fry's article Why turtles make me cry : Stephen Fry says "...

What [the] drive to mastery misses is an appreciation of the gifted character of human powers and achievements . -- Michael Sandel in his t...

Yes, the differences between Man and other animals are less than philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Nagel supposed, says Mark Vernon [1]...

James Lovelock has an unsentimental view of nature. [1] "Gaia", as Lynn Margulis put it, "is one tough bitch". Yet he t...

I spent a little time last week at the final meeting of HERMES , a Europe-wide research project on the deep seas, where participants delight...

Some day, perhaps, my biological colleagues will be using [computers] to simulate many processes including the chemical complexities within ...