Like the English under Victoria, we were trying to fool ourselves with the notion that weapons are the real source of strength. In the 1800s, the British lost their preeminence. They did it by forgetting what counts the most in the pecking order of nations. To stay in place, you have to run. To get anywhere, you have to run even harder!

It was the fault of their sex-crazed enemy, without whom sexuality would never have crossed their minds. Of such rejected pieces of ourselves are our devils made.

If our actions are geared to increasing the odds that our personal genes or those of our near relatives will make it into the next generation, what is the reason for suicide’s existence? And what about the other bits of death-in-life built into the human psyche? Why do humans get depressed? Why do they sometimes feel like crawling off into a corner

Once Bismarck was confident that his military buildup was complete, he did not flinch from confrontation. Far from it. He sought it out.

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Then, three years after Goodall’s book was printed, a series of incidents occurred that horrified her. The tribe of chimps Goodall had been watching became quite large. Food was harder to find. Quarrels broke out. To relieve the pressure, the unit finally split into two separate tribes. One band stayed in the old home territory. The other left to c

Roman military engineers pored over the battered vessel, examining every detail. They took it apart and noted each trick of the boat’s construction, then built a copy of their own. When the Roman technicians tested their warship, it worked as well as the original. So the Romans rapidly hammered together an entire fleet, turning out 220 ships in onl

A conventional computer also stores a sizable batch of information in a kind of holding pen but has to shoot it, one small bit at a time, through a processor where the real work of computation and comparison is accomplished. This is called serial processing. Neural nets function in a radically different way. They don’t use the narrow, railroad-trac

Each of us is sewn by invisible threads into the superorganism. We are cells in the beast of family, company, and country. If those social ties are severed we begin to shrivel and die. There’s more. Hard work and the pursuit of challenge have seldom been demonstrated to hurt us, but we can be damaged powerfully by the lack of control. And without s