As my kind indulgent regular readers will by now know very well, we humans evolved under conditions of scarcity and therefore conserving calories was the optimal strategy for making it through to another day. As thinking can consume up to 30% of the body’s blood glucose, and as that glucose was far more often needed to power muscles in the search for food or in flight from potential predators, we naturally evolved to do as little thinking as possible.

Unfortunately for us now, our modern world in no way resembles our evolutionary environment. And so we are highly maladapted and…

We’re in the middle of a long silly season for space exploration. Overly influenced by sci-fi dreams of cowboys in space, fanboy billionaires and politically-driven NASA planners alike are fixated on the entirely pointless pursuit of pushing humans out of Earth’s gravity well at huge expense in order to achieve precisely nothing whatsoever of scientific value. Mars is the ultimate goal, with a return to the Earth’s Moon seen (illogically) as a waypoint. Meanwhile, missions that would reveal countless wonders must beg for scraps, while many other missions of incalculable value will never get funded.

This is, to put it…

Early on in my career as a semi-sentient creature, I came to realize that the possession of a healthy sense of humor was a reliable guide to whether or not I’d want to spend time with a person. By this I don’t mean that I was looking for a sense of humor similar to mine, nor that I felt it necessary for people to share the same cultural references that facilitate a great many transiently popular jokes. …

As anyone who’s ever attended a scriptwriting class or seen a Hollywood writer’s group in action will know, the essence of popular entertainment is to dish up the same old formula but with miniscule cosmetic changes that will simultaneously enable the audience to believe (i) they’re getting something excitingly new, and (ii) there won’t be any unwelcome surprises to disturb their semi-somnolent viewing pleasure.

Story arcs and character arcs are so predictable that the day is not far off when popular entertainments will be auto-generated by cheap AI programs running on a producer’s laptop. Dialog is likewise so obvious that…

The world is awash with evidence of how readily we humans believe the most spurious nonsense. From established religions to trendy pseudo-Eastern spiritual nonsense, and from politics to entirely mistaken ideas about forensic science, our brains are full of absurd notions we think are true. The one distinguishing feature of all bogus ideas is their simplicity.

We humans evolved under conditions of scarcity and as thinking consumes up to 30% of the body’s blood glucose — and as that glucose was far more often needed to power muscles in the search for food or in flight from a potential predator…

It’s difficult not to be immensely proud of our modern Western civilization. We are, after all, the very first people in history to destroy ourselves purely for the sake of generating advertising revenues. And who doesn’t want to be first in something, even if it unfortunately happens to be catastrophic self-harm?

To understand why we’re blindly and compulsively self-harming on a global scale, we need to understand our evolutionary history.

We humans evolved under conditions of scarcity, a prey species clinging on to survival at the edges. Every new day brought risks, and even a minor loss could have lethal…

I’ve been living in the Britain for the last ten months and for the last two of them I’ve been trying to understand what makes the place so quintessentially British. It’s not afternoon cream tea, nor is it the absurdly anachronistic royal family. It’s not cricket, and it’s not mushy peas and chips. To understand the British we must go deeper.

The weather, which is famously awful for 350 days per year, certainly contributes to whatever lies at the core of Britishness. It’s difficult to be filled with a sense of joie de vivre when you have to trudge to…

It’s impossible not to be bombarded with stories and pictures about Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, each spending billions of dollars to design and build machines to blast people out of Earth’s gravity well. Musk pretends he’s doing it for the benefit of humanity. But as Musk claims everything he does is for the benefit of humanity (see his eight-hour-long TED talk on how his daily visit to his blockchain-enabled all-electric toilet makes an amazing contribution to the Earth’s biosphere) we can be excused a little skepticism. Bezos is less disingenuous, merely saying that he hopes to make space tourism…