Новости за 06.01.2016

Book extract. Free markets reward enterprises that “manipulate or distort our judgment”. In the absence of government regulation, the easiest way to make money is to find and pander to human weaknesses and addictions. You can see this happening in finance, in food, in health, in politics. “Nobody wants to be ripped off. Yet we are, even in the most carefully considered purchases of our lives. They phish us for phools”

“Gender is the value system that ties certain desirable behaviours and characteristics to reproductive function. Once we’ve decoupled those behaviours and characteristics from reproductive function (which we should), what can it possibly mean to continue to call this stuff ‘gender’? What meaning does the word ‘gender’ have here, that the word ‘personality’ cannot capture?”

Korea’s industrial conglomerates — chaebols — monopolise the domestic economy and “have a greater say over economic policy than the state itself”. They “abhor” government regulation and social policy. They are “fairly modern economic institutions”, but with an “oddly pre-modern corporate governance system” and an “authoritarian organisational ethos” enforced by the founding families to maintain their control

In memory of Syd Barrett, co-founder of Pink Floyd, who would have turned 70 today. For a year or so in the late 1960s he was “one of the three best songwriters in the world”, until his extravagant use of psychedelic drugs deranged him. Expelled from the band, he spent most of the next 40 years in his mother’s house in Cambridge, painting and gardening. His death certificate in in 2006 described him as a “retired musician”

To call Robert Trivers an acclaimed biologist is “an understatement akin to calling the late Richard Feynman a popular professor of physics”. If there were a Nobel Prize in evolutionary studies, Trivers might well have five of them. In the 1970s he was a Black Panther and a good friend of Huey Newton. He is still something of a rough diamond today, well deserving of a place on any short list of America’s most colorful academics

Scientists can grow human organs in the bodies of living animals, by injecting stem cells into animal foetuses. It’s happening. And that’s good news for humans who need new organs. But it’s worrying for regulators, who fear that we may end up gestating animal-human hybrids. “The specter of an intelligent mouse stuck in a laboratory somewhere screaming ‘I want to get out’ would be very troubling to people”