This View of Life
Magazine

After initially accepting the metaphor of mental immunity as a useful gift from a cherished friend, my more deeply ingrained worldview now appears to be casting doubts upon it.

The decision making rules of fisherman.

Scientists respond to the media buzz about their research that went viral.While scientists increasingly have become interested in publicizing science and publishing popular books, media have played important roles in translating science from the field or laboratory to the public domain. Thus, scientists, media, and the public flanked by industry, business, and government define the consortium of producers, consumers, and sponsors of discovery.

A study recently published in the journal <em>Science</em> puts a time period on the eruptions that is far more concrete than any estimate thus far.

For millennia, group boundaries have organized our identities, motivated allegiances, and inspired feats of coordination the likes of which are unparalleled in the animal kingdom.We hypothesize that psychological adaptations exist that structure the way we think about groups, and that regulate cooperative and competitive behavior in the context of specific coalitional dynamics; specifically, we argue that humans are endowed with an evolved “coalitional psychology.”

We ought to look to nature—and its 3.5 billion years of adaptations for survival—for how to better protect ourselves from terrorist attacks, natural disasters and infectious disease.

Shouldn't our society have a wellness program like we do as individuals?

A better metaphor for economics is that of a giant organism continually reacting to and also modifying its own environment.

The evolved emotion of disgust neutralizes many pathogens by helping us avoid what makes us sick. We need to adapt our behavioral immune system to counter new threats.

An evolutionary perspective on psychological biases tells a very different story about decision making.If we have learned anything from recent years in the behavioral sciences, it is that humans have numerous but systematic psychological biases that steer our judgment and decision-making away from what one might expect if we were even-handed in weighing up costs, benefits and probabilities.