Twenty-three million years ago, our distant ancestors gained trichromatic color vision through means of a random genetic mutation. Trichromatic color vision and trichromacy refer to the ability to perceive color through three receptors in the eye, known as cones, which are sensitive to different wavelengths...

Why should we explore caves and excavate fossils? Why should we seek more information about our origins? And what can the first women and men tell us about the human condition? Reading Georges Bataille (1897-1962) answers these questions profoundly. The French writer considerably influenced authors...

White tarp tents lined one side of Allston Way in Berkeley, California, on a sunny week in early April 2023, beneath which a cluster of people sat on ornate pillows, sipping from ceramic cups at the tea ceremony booth. Others filtered to and fro, sometimes...

The United States was founded on the declaration that all people are inherently endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what about the rest of life on the planet? ...

What do we know, and what can we support about the following? 1. The Psychology of the Scarcity Experience ...

We are alive in a unique time of challenges that arrive not one by one, but all at once, and on a global scale. Each enormous risk we (and not just “we” humans but “we” collective life-forms of planet Earth) currently face is entwined with...

New evidence and understandings about the structure of successful early societies across Asia, Africa, and the Western Hemisphere are sweeping away the popular assumption that early societies tended toward autocracy and despotism. ...

We live in a fast-moving, technology-dominated era. Happiness is fleeting, and everything is replaceable or disposable. It is understandable that people are drawn to a utopian vision. Many find refuge in the concept of a “return” to an idealized past—one in which humans were not...

Although the late Barbara Ehrenreich was best known for her 2001 bestselling book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America, which chronicled the real-life impacts of the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, she made an equally great contribution to economic justice with her subsequent...

The self-destructive delusion that we are the only species that has a right to life on Earth has led to the ecological crisis.