The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

An additional note for chapter 13 : page 204: two states of...trying to live utterly in the moment, and...trying to live in memory of...

Chapter 8: Human   page 118: human hands have fine motor skills. They are also essential, in coordination with arms and shoulders, in...

...when we generate evolutionary explanations for why we behave the way we do, for why our bodies function as they do, we need to be cogniz...

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...

Much of what we take for granted about our inner lives, from visual perception to memories, is little more than an elaborate construct of ...

What a chimera is man! What a novelty, what a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, feeble ...

...Ethologists who study animal behaviour increasingly accept the idea that fear keeps animals away from predators, lust draws them towa...

Thirty-seventh in a  series  of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Chapter 27: Zebrafish page 374: singularity...

In Dreaming spires: Victorian chimneys Paul Dobraszczyk recalls an observation by Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space  (1964): to...

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...

Humans are as ritualistic today as they have ever been. This is not a comment on the changing fortunes of organised religion in differen...

We can contrast two distant relatives: the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli and its host, ourselves. We span the spectrum of comple...

Sixteenth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings Chapter 8: Human page 125: something very much li...

Fifteenth in a series of notes and comments on The Book of Barely Imagined Beings     Chapter 8: Human page 121: humans...appear t...

David Quammen cranks up his argument : We're unique in the history of mammals. No other primate has ever weighed upon the planet to an...

Sara Blaffer Hrdy’s gracefully written, expert account of human behavior focuses on the positive, and its most important contribution is ...

'Humans,' notes Brian Christian, 'appear to be the only things anxious about what makes them unique.'

There is no shortage of fantastical ways in which people imagine the end of humanity. Some of them lead to harmful behaviour. Putting asi...

The brain, [Bronowski] understands, is not just an instrument for action. It is an instrument for preparation; it both drives the human han...

A couple of small exercises in reframing and/or speculation channeled by Adam Gopnik: Perhaps our intelligence is not just ended by our m...