rba

The Piltdown man was the most successful artifactual hoax of all time. The relevant skull was a chimeric melange of orangutan and human bone fragments from several individuals “discovered” in England in 1912, and meant to represent a transitional form between apes and humans. Given the intense interest in evolutionary...

Theater kids may sit at their own lunch table, but discrete, socially excluded classes of people aren’t culturally universal. Not even close. To the Western imagination, examples of such are supposed to have historical roots in India and other places, not in France, where modern European egalitarianism was born. Everything...

It really is Sydney Sweeney’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Human female breasts are an evolutionary mystery along several dimensions. First, breast permanence is unique to humans. All other mammals develop breast prominence during pregnancy or nursing, and the mammary tissue recedes after weaning. This process is...

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, before #MeToo and Harvey Weinstein, before misinformation and disinformation, Larry Summers got fired. He was the president of Harvard, and had the temerity to suggest maybe men were different from women, at least in a distributional sense. > “There is...

I was at a party a few years ago. It was a bunch of technical nerds. Somehow the conversation drifted to human communication with animals, Alex the grey parrot, and the famous Koko the gorilla. It wasn't in SF, so there had been cocktails, and one of the nerds (it...

As soon as modern data analysis became a thing, the US government has had to deal with people trying to use open source data to uncover its secrets. During the early Cold War days and America’s hydrogen bomb testing, there was an enormous amount of speculation about how the bombs...

“There was an old bastard named Lenin Who did two or three million men in. That’s a lot to have done in But where he did one in That old bastard Stalin did ten in.” —Robert Conquest The current administration’s rollup of USAID has caused an amount of outrage that...