Debbie Foster

The picture, in the end, is of an odd species that stumbled into global dominance through a relatively quick succession of simple mistakes. A species forced to speak up, or let its helpless infants perish.

We are the result of a short series of discrete mistakes that made us what we are today. Our descent from other apes in the last few million years or so boils down to a mere handful of genetic and morphological turning points. These small changes incrementally built on each other, as in a multiplayer game in which the outcome is never quite

I will argue here that talking and caring for underbaked newborns co-evolved, in an episode of runaway selection initiated by the genetic anomalies we now know spurred our species' neurological growth.

Innocence is an illusion. We come into this world a bundle of disordered drives and desires, some good, some not. We are neither pure nor impure, we are only somewhat educable. There is an art to transforming raw youths into decent mature adults, and its tools are experience and knowledge. Some of it is pleasant, some less so. And for every gain in

…we are simultaneously confused about how to carry out our responsibilities to children and about what it means to be an adult. We seem to have settled instead on keeping everyone in the perpetual limbo of adolescence, rushing children into a state they are unprepared for, and allowing adults to remain there as long as they would like. Peter Pan

Dostoyevsky understood this psychological state better than anyone. In so many of his novels we meet seemingly wicked characters who are really only in despair, their original goodness having been robbed by someone or by circumstances beyond their control. And to cope with the trauma, they convince themselves that there is no such thing as

How we imagine children to be turns out to reflect how we imagine the world ought to be, which is what makes the death of an innocent child (or, for some, that of an unborn fetus) so hard to bear: a possible world, a better world, seems to have died with it.

Thinking is not a matter of planning to think X and then doing so; X suddenly appears in the mind, seemingly unbidden, inviting us to think it. Every moment of our conscious lives is a Eureka! moment.

It is no exaggeration to say that the history of Western populism—spiritual and political—began with Paul.