Bullshit and lies that feed identity politics and turning away from the politics of bargaining to the politics of domination.

Bullshit: statements made for rhetorical effect without regard for the truth.

Let’s start with the claim that the various changes in favour of broadening women’s participation in society is an…

Ever since their inception, states have dominated the extraction of surplus.

Two concepts that, in their anti-commerce forms, get in the way of understanding social dynamics are commodification and alienation.

Regarding commodification (turning things into objects of exchange) we have been exchanging goods outside our immediate groups for perhaps as…

Property law rests on conventions that evolved before it and that can operate without it, or even against it.

Black markets, markets in illegal goods and services, demonstrate that state recognition and protection of property rights are not required for a market to operate. Black markets exist where the state…

The problem with using a distorting social lens.

A common trope of commentary, both inside and outside the US, for some years now (even before the Trump-apocalypse) was that the Republican Party had shifted rightwards. The trouble is, this is mostly not true.

The views of Republican voters has changed…

The evolutionary science behind why humans are so weird.

Part 1 of this investigation into the evolution of human mating touched on why ageing happens, the discovery advantages of sexual reproduction and how our genus evolved a cooperative subsistence strategy that selected for big brains. …

The evolutionary dynamics of sex and ageing are fascinating.

The fundamental choice of life is: approach or avoid? Search is therefore built into the structure of life at its most basic level.*

Natural selection is about successfully replicating so as to stay in the game of life. Selection pressure comes…

We are the cultural species par excellence, and so the species that creates its own niches.

The ecologist Paul Colinvaux, author of the classic text Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, made an observation in his deeply flawed book The Fates of Nations that is very useful for modelling human…

There have been four major out-of expansions by Homo sapiens.

Four great out-of population expansions have widely dispersed Homo sapien populations. The out-of-Africa expansion of foragers; the out-of-the-river-valley expansion of farmers; the out-of-the-steppe expansion of pastoralists; and the out-of-Europe expansion of settler empires and states.

Out of Africa: the expansion…