Новости за 07.04.2016

China’s one-child policy, abolished last year, “violated the most fundamental of human rights”, while bringing little, if any, benefit. It imposed forcibly a slowing of population growth that would almost certainly have happened voluntarily. There may have been some tiny contribution to economic growth at the time, but at the cost of an ageing population and a contracting labour force for decades to come

We overvalue innovation; we undervalue the routine work that keeps the built world going. Innovation is “only a small piece of what happens with technology”. Most of what happens is repair and maintenance, when innovation becomes infrastructure. Just as we celebrate innovators, so we should celebrate maintainers, “those individuals whose work keeps ordinary existence going rather than introducing novel things”

Parker peaked early, doing her best work as a theatre critic in the 1920s and her second-best work as a book critic in the 1950s. “She was too sensible to live in regret, but she certainly understood how much of her life she had spent carousing and just fooling around”. In her writing “would always rise to the challenges of greatness and of garbage; it was what fell in between that drove her crazy.”

If the brain generates intelligence, then more brain should mean more intelligence. But not so. “The elephant in the room is, well, the elephant”. An elephant brain is three times the size of a human brain. Why is the elephant not three times cleverer? The answer is found here with the aid of an elephant’s brain and a meat slicer. In brief: The elephant’s brain is big, but badly organised. The neurons are all in the back

The skeleton in the laboratory is an object of science, but also the remains of a person — and respect for the dead, at least the in-group dead, is a mark of civilisation. Public anger over the desecration of Native American graves has taught archaeologists to treat new discoveries of human remains with much greater sensitivity. But should we also rebury the human remains held in museums and research labs?

Taxonomy is the pursuit of perfect ordering in the natural world — and yet its practitioners are notorious for their arguments and enmities, which rage for decades in the journals and continue into the obituary columns precisely because they cannot be resolved within the science. The “principle of taxonomic freedom” gives any individual the right to change a classification, giving trolls and charlatans a licence to “wreak havoc”