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• Psychology Frans de Waal claims that psychology is bound to become more Darwinian.
  
• Back to Stone Age sex Rape is a 'natural' act, according to a new book causing uproar in the US. Its authors are Evolutionary Psychologists, a group that takes Darwin to extremes. Critics accuse them of peddling 'scientific porn' and having a 'Flintstonian' approach to sexuality. But their influence is growing fast, says Dave Hill.
  
• It's only natural - Red Pepper archive The bioglogical differences between men and women are no threat to feminism, says Helena Cronin.
  
• The mystery of female beauty Evolutionary psychology suggests that a woman's sexual attractiveness might be based on cues of reproductive potential.
  
• Ring-breaker drives dove love Leonida Fusani and colleagues discover the role of aromatase in courtship behaviour.
  
• Japan's ape sequencing effort set to unravel the brain's secrets The genetics and neurology of apes could pave the way to a better understanding of the relationship between the human genome and the brain.
  
• You've got a lot to answer for, Charlie Darwin Is psychology frozen in the Pleistocene era? Hilary and Steven Rose are sure it must have evolved since then.
  
• Surprising brain Gregory S. Berns and colleagues are beginning to reveal the biological basis of the human attraction to surprising events.
  
• Longevity Ageing and our own mortality could be the price we pay for human fertility, says Tom Kirkwood.
  
• Mental calculation in a prodigy is sustained by right prefrontal and medial temporal areas We found that the expert could switch between short-term effort-requiring storage strategies and highly efficient episodic memory encoding and retrieval, a process that was sustained by right prefrontal and medial temporal areas.
  
• Malthus on Man - In Animals no Moral Restraint A paper was presented to a conference on 'Malthus, Medicine and Science' organised by Roy Porter at the Wellcome Institute, London, on 20 March 1998.
  
• Palaeoanthropology and politics Norman Levitt reflects on the Kennewick Man affair.
  
• IQ and longevity Results of an intelligence test, given to all 11-year olds attending Aberdeen schools in 1932, were used to determine survival up to 76 years. Of 2,230 subjects traced, those who died before 1 January 1997 had a significantly lower IQ at age 11 years than those who were alive or untraced. This suggests that high mental ability in late childhood reduces the chances of death up to age 76.
  
• Genes, culture and human freedom Like every other organism, humans are shaped by both nature and nurture. But unlike any other organism, we are defined by our ability to transcend both. Article by Kenan Malik.
  
• The Functions of Postpartum Depression An online paper by Edward Hagen.
  
• Natural Selection: Evolving evolvability In yeast, a modified protein known as a prion generates variation in growth rate across diverse environments. Is this an example of an agent that has evolved in order to promote its possessor's adaptability?
  
• Evolutionary naturalism, theism, and skepticism about the external world Online paper by J. Wesley Robbins.
  
• Man, the utterly exceptional beast Scientists increasingly see mankind as just another animal, but they are leaving out the thing that makes us special, writes Kenan Malik.
  
• How Hardwired Is Human Behavior? Abstract and electronic delivery of Nigel Nicholson's paper in the Harvard Business Review.
  
• The Human Limits of Nature 'The Limits of Human Nature' was the title of the London Institute of Contemporary Arts winter lecture series for 1971-72. The distinguished group of contributors, included Alan Ryan, Arthur Koestler, David Bohm, Raymond Williams and John Maynard Smith. This contribution was published in J. Benthall, ed., 'The Limits of Human Nature' (Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 235-74.
  
• Men Show Feelings In Lower Left Quadrant Of Face When it comes to emotions men and women are equally expressive, but men display most of their joy, disgust or other sentiments in the lower left quadrant of their face. Women, on the other hand, show their emotions across their entire countenance.
  
• Scholarship and the History of the Behavioural Sciences A paper that first appeared in History of Science 2: 1-51, 1966.
  
• Steven Pinker: the mind reader In room 10-250 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the brightest undergraduates in America are filing in for the start of their Thursday afternoon lecture. These students, taking psychology 101, are drawn from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, and all of them, men and women, are dressed in the same baggy, designer-labelled sportswear. They are fresh-faced and polite, chattering about assignments and movies, and seem overwhelmingly confident that life will go well for them.
  
• Sex: what men and women want, naturally Scientists have solved the age-old mystery of why the human male is monogamous.
  
• Evolutionary Ethics and Biologically Supportable Morality A paper by Michael Byron.
  
• Survival of the clearest There are no fossils to show how language evolved. But evolutionary game theory is revealing how some of the defining features of human language could have been shaped by natural selection. Article by Steven Pinker.
  
• We are bigger than our genes - thank God John Humphreys asserts that 'Free will may be an illusion, but it is a valuable one'.
  
• For Fathers and Newborns, Natural Law and Odor Swedish scientists find that babies smell appealing, and speculate on a method to pacify aggressive men.
  
• The adaptive nature of the human neurocognitive architecture: An alternative model PNAS -- Cerra and Bingham 95 (19): 11290 The model of the human neurocognitive architecture proposed by evolutionary psychologists is based on the presumption that the demands of hunter-gatherer life generated a vast array of cognitive adaptations. Here we present an alternative model.
  
• Origins of the specious Andrew Brown explains why 'Introducing Evolutionary Psychology', the latest in Icon Books' popular series of comic books on important subjects, has been withdrawn from sale while 10,000 stickers are pasted over the face of Steven Rose.
  
• Talking about the genome Biologists must take responsibility for the correct use of language in genetics.
  
• Stone Age bosses aren't all that bad Applied to business, as Nigel Nicholson does in his book Managing The Human Animal (Texere, £18.99), Evolutionary Psychology suggests that most organisational practice runs directly against the grain of human programming.
  
• Prediction and Accommodation in Evolutionary Psychology Ketelaar and Ellis have provided a remarkably clear and succinct statement of Lakatosian philosophy of science and have also argued compellingly that evolutionary theory fills the Lakatosian criteria of a progressivity.
  
• Imagery neurons in the human brain We found single neurons in the hippocampus, amygdala, entorhinal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus that selectively altered their firing rates depending on the stimulus the subjects were imagining.
  
• Individualism and Evolutionary Psychology Online paper by David Buller.
  
• Unconscious Philip Wong and Howard Shevrin have uncovered neurobiological evidence for the human unconscious state.
  
• The Darwin Debate This essay appeared in Marxism Today 26 (no.4), April 1982, pp. 20-22.
  
• Genetic enhancement of inflammatory pain by forebrain NR2B overexpression Our study implicates a molecular mechanism by which forebrain activity could modulate behavioral responses to inflammatory pain.
  
• Why women will always favour the brave Women will always love a hero, according to a study that found females value bravery above altruism when selecting men, whether it is for marriage, an affair, or a platonic relationship.
  
• Chance would be a fine thing A long-dead clergyman enters the race to make computers think for themselves.
  
• Why we're all getting brighter Dumbing down? Don't believe it. Scientists have proved we are smarter now than ever before, largely because we watch TV, surf the net, and spend hours chatting to friends.
  
• Evolution and the Origins of Disease: November 1998 Nesse and Williams' Scientific American article on evolution and the origins of disease.
  
• Animal Soul A history of the idea and a critique of reductionism. It appeared in Paul Edwards, ed., 'The Encyclopedia of Philosophy'. N.Y.: Macmillan and London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967, Vol. 1, pp. 122-27.
  
• Darwin's darling A profile of Helena Cronin.
  
• The Meanings of Darwinism: Then and Now? Charles Darwin grew up in Shrewsbury, Shropshire and attended Shrewsbury School for seven years. The school held a Millennium Conference on 'Darwinism and Ethics for the Next Millennium' on 16 October 1999. Papers were given by Mary Midgley, Matt Ridley, Colin Tudge and Robert M. Young.
  
• Art and Sexual Selection - Philosophy and Literature 24:2 A paper by polymath Denis Dutton.
  
• Mozart 'can cut epilepsy' Music, particularly Mozart, could have a therapeutic effect on epilepsy, say scientists.
  
• Human genome - overview - press releases Comprehensive information on the first draft of the human genome from Nature.
  
• Science -- Human genome The special issue on the first draft of the human genome.
  
• Homo Deceptus - Never trust Stephen Jay Gould. by Robert Wright An article in Slate.
  
• Great ape DNA sequences reveal a reduced diversity and an expansion in humans The extent of DNA sequence variation of chimpanzees is several-fold greater than that of humans.
  
• Altruism and social cheating in the social amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum D. discoideum is highly attractive as a model system for social evolution.
  
• Humans and Other Animals How much do we share with the birds of the air and the beasts of the field? Article by John Wilson at Christianity Today.
  
• Neurons derived from radial glial cells establish radial units in neocortex Here we show that clones consist of mitotic radial glia and postmitotic neurons, and that neurons migrate along clonally related radial glia.
  
• Fear memories require protein synthesis in the amygdala for reconsolidation after retrieval Here we show that consolidated fear memories, when reactivated during retrieval, return to a labile state in which infusion of anisomycin shortly after memory reactivation produces amnesia on later tests, regardless of whether reactivation was performed 1 or 14 days after conditioning.
  
• Building a Brainier Mouse By genetically engineering a smarter than average mouse, scientists have assembled some of the central molecular components of learning and memory.
  
• Sociobiology Sanitized: The Evolutionary Psychology and Genic Selectionism Debates Socio-political overview of the circumstances leading to the development of Evolutionary Psychology as distinct from Sociobiology, by Val Dusek. This web page is associated with the Science-as-Culture mailing list and journal.
  
• Neuroanatomical basis for first- and second-order representations of bodily states Our findings provide empirical support for a theory proposing a hierarchical representation of bodily states.
  
• The sweet smell of the immune system Manfred Milinski and Claus Wedekind find evidence for the hypothesis that "perfumes are selected "for self" to amplify in some way body odors that reveal a person's immunogenetics".
  
• Boundary disputes The brain still resists researchers' attempts to divide it into neat parcels.
  
• Animal cognition and animal minds A paper by Colin Allen.
  
• How Stephen Jay Gould is wrong about evolution In The Boston Review, John Alcock, professor of biology at Arizona State University, provides a detailed look at Gould's approach to adaptationism.
  
• Evolutionary Biology and Ideology: Then and Now A paper contributed to a conference on 'The Social Impact of Modern Biology'. It appeared in Science Studies 1: 177-296, 1971.
  
• Developmental biology: Control by combinatorial codes Studies in fruitflies support the idea that regulatory regions of genes control development by acting as molecular 'computers', calculating cell fate according to the combined effects of several signalling pathways.
  
• The Drosophila Netrin receptor Frazzled guides axons by controlling Netrin distribution Frazzled-dependent guidance of one pioneer neuron in the central nervous system can be accounted for solely on the basis of this ability of Frazzled to control Netrin distribution, and not by Frazzled signalling. We propose a model of patterning mechanism in which a receptor rearranges secreted ligand molecules, thereby creating positional information for other receptors.
  
• Evolutionary biology: Deja vu A long-term study of fruitflies adds to the evidence that evolution can run backwards. To what extent the genetic underpinnings revert to the original is unclear.
  
• Sexual conflict and speciation Sexual conflict occurs because males are selected to produce as many offspring as possible, even if this means lowering the overall reproductive output of individual females. A new model proposed by Gavrilets suggests that strong asymmetries between males and females in the costs and benefits of mating will create runaway coevolution between the sexes, promoting rapid divergence between populations and hence speciation.
  
• Adaptive regulation of neuronal excitability by a voltage- independent potassium conductance Investigations of a neurotransmitter receptor required for 'background' neuronal inhibition in mice show the importance of such inhibition in keeping neuronal excitability under control.
  
• Sexual selection and the mind A talk with Geoffrey Miller on sexual selection and the mind at 'The Edge'.
  
• Brain Terrain Mapping the functions of various areas.
  
• Pinker and the Brain Cognitive scientist Steven Pinker plumbs the evolutionary origins of language and behavior while keeping his detractors at bay.
  
• Women's genes tell them to become mothers early WOMEN can hear their biological clock ticking as they approach the menopause because they are genetically predisposed to have their first child at an early age.
  
• Into the mind of a killer Brain imaging studies are starting to venture into the legal minefield of research into criminal psychopathy. Alison Abbott reports from one of the most controversial frontiers of neuroscience.
  
• "The Mind as the Software of the Brain" by Ned Block Cognitive scientists often say that the mind is the software of the brain. This chapter is about what this claim means.
  
• Genetics The British Medical Journal publishes a special edition "putting genetics into perspective".
  
• A Host with Infectious Ideas Paul W. Ewald argues that most cancers, heart disease and other chronic ills stem from infections. If correct, his theory will change the course of medicine.
  
• Evolution, Teleology, Intentionality Online paper by Daniel Dennett.
  
• Association of Ideas This essay appeared in Philip P. Wiener, ed., 'Dictionary of the History of Ideas'. N.Y.: Scribner's, 1968, vol. 1, pp. 111-18.
  
• Teenage boys are embracing fatherhood Scientists have found that boys aged between 11 and 14 unconsciously change the way they cradle babies, a sign of their emerging parental instincts.
  
• An Evolutionary Hypothesis For Eating Disorders Abed, Riadh T (1998) The sexual competition hypothesis for eating disorders. British Journal of Medical Psychology 71(4):525-547.
  
• Evolutionary theory and the psychology of eating Online paper by A. W. Logue.
  
• Richards et al. 97 (13): 7663 Neanderthals were predators.
  
• The Genetic Archaeology of Race | Olson The study of human genetic variation has become the most contentious area in modern science. A detailed article by Steve Olson.
  
• An altitude problem People in Tibet and the Andes have evolved different strategies of coping with altitude.
  
• Behavioral inferences from the Skhul/Qafzeh early modern human hand remains These results support the inference of significant behavioral differences between Neanderthals and the Skhul/Qafzeh hominids and indicate that a significant shift in human manipulative behaviors was associated with the earliest stages of the emergence of modern humans.
  
• Impressing the birds really takes brains Joah Madden has found evidence that brains increased in size during evolution so that men could impress choosy women with their artistic prowess.
  
• Testing Hamilton's rule with competition between relatives Here we report thatcontrary to Hamilton's original prediction but in agreement with recent theory-the level of fighting between males shows no correlation with the estimated relatedness of interacting males, but is negatively correlated with future mating opportunities.
  
• Neuroethology and the philosophy of cognitive science Online paper by Brian L. Keeley.
  
• Swanson et al. 98 (5): 2509 A new study by Willie J. Swanson and colleagues provides evidence of sperm competition and sexual conflict.
  
• Deep down, women prefer men with a booming voice Research into women's sexual preferences showed that men with deep, booming voices are perceived as being more attractive, stronger and taller than men who speak with a high-pitched squawk.
  
• Dominant rams lose out by sperm depletion Here we show that constraints on sperm production mean that those males that are most successful in overt contests can become ineffectual in covert sperm competition.
  
• Maternal age and traits in offspring The timing of a mouse's first litter influences the development of her pups.
  
• Mammoth Kill Did humans hunt giant mammals to extinction? Or give them lethal disease?
  
• A short history of stature Woe unto the shorter people, for the taller the man, the more girlfriends he had. Richard Wiseman reports.
  
• Get Real Daniel Dennett responds to his critics.
  
• The problem of variation One genetic source of the sex-specific variation in pigmentation patterns of different fruitfly species has been identified. This study illustrates the power of bringing together developmental and evolutionary biology.
  
• The Naturalization of Value Systems in the Human Sciences This essay first appeared as an Open University Course Unit for 'Science and Belief: from Darwin to Einstein', Block VI: Problems in the Biological and Human Sciences. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1981, pp. 63-110.
  
• An evolutionary approach to the analysis, assessment and treatment of behaviour problems in companion animals These pages describe research on behaviour undertaken by staff at the School of Agriculture.
  
• Darwin and the Genre of Biography Published in G. Levine, ed., 'One Culture: Essays in Science and Literature'. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, pp. 203-24.
  
• Darwinism is Social This essay appeared on David Kohn, ed., 'The Darwinian Heritage'. Princeton and Nova Pacifica, 1985, pp. 609-638.
  
• Paleolithic Pit Stop A French site suggests Neandertals and early modern humans behaved similarly.
  
• Real-time prediction of hand trajectory by ensembles of cortical neurons in primates Here we recorded the simultaneous activity of large populations of neurons, distributed in the premotor, primary motor and posterior parietal cortical areas, as non-human primates performed two distinct motor tasks.
  
• Bees and minds Honeybees can conceptualize "sameness" and "difference." Researchers say honeybees may serve as a good model system for determining how nervous systems learn concepts.
  
• The Development of Herbert Spencer's Concept of Evolution A paper delivered to the Eleventh International Congress of the History of Science, Warsaw, August 1965 and published in Actes du Xle Congres International d'Histoire des Sciences Warsaw: Ossolineum, 1967, vol. 2, pp. 273-78.
  
• From Prototools to Language Technology is by no means a recent invention. Philip & Phylis Morrison trace its origins back through our prehistoric ancestry.
  
• Reproductive greontology The relationship between aging and the risk of producing offspring with gene-influenced illnesses.
  
• Intelligence: Evolutionary psychology meets g An analysis by Neil Mackintosh.
  
• Psychological brain damage Martin Teicher and colleagues report four types of brain damage caused by psychological abuse.
  
• Reply: The mystery of female beauty Yu and Shepard reply We have proposed that cultural invariance in beauty preferences could be an artefact of exposure to a dominant culture, and also that evolutionary psychology should embrace variation because adaptive evolution is as likely to produce variable outcomes as fixed ones.
  
• Minimization of Boolean complexity in human concept learning The data reveal a surprisingly simple empirical 'law': the subjective difficulty of a concept is directly proportional to its Boolean complexity (the length of the shortest logically equivalent propositional formula)that is, to its logical incompressibility.
  
• There's more to life than genes Some scientists argue that genes predetermine our behaviour. But the human condition is not so simple, say Steven Rose and Hilary Rose.
  
• Domestication DNA is revealing that taming animals was not a simple process.
  
• Why do we adapt? The answer's in your genes Richard Dawkins discusses 'selfish genes'.
  
• Perfect pitch may help babies speak US researchers say everyone may be born with perfect pitch to help them learn the skills of language.
  
• Brain and mouth disease Lionel Tiger investigates diet and longevity.
  
• Women will lose as long as men make the rules All very well, but I have discovered a wrinkle in this argument. Nigel Nicholson, professor of organisational behaviour at the London Business School, has created a theory of evolutionary psychology that basically says that most businesses are run to satisfy distinctly masculine drives.
  
• The (Im)moral Animal A controversial outline of evolutionary psychology by Frank Miele of Skeptic Magazine.
  
• Functional Origins of Religious Concepts This is a profound essay on the role of religion from an evolutionary perspective. Pascal Boyer, the author, is one of the rising stars in evolutionary theory in the social sciences.
  
• Darwinism and the Division of Labour The founding conference of the British Society for the Social Responsibility in Science in November 1970, was on the theme, 'The Social Impact of Modern Biology'. The conference was attended by a number of eminent scientists, e.g., Nobel Laureates James Watson, Jaques Monod, Maurice Wilkins; David Bohm, Jacob Bronowski, R.G. Edwards (of Steptoe & Edwards, the pioneers of 'test-tube babies'), as well as some radicals, Hilary & Steven Rose, John Beckwith. It was, perhaps, the last moment when radicals and posh scientists were relatively united. The talk was published in The Listener, 17 August 1972, pp. 202-5 and in Science as Culture no. 9: 110-24, 1990.
  
• Variation in the reversibility of evolution Here we show that reverse evolution back to the ancestral state occurs, but is not universal, instead depending on previous evolutionary history and the character studied.
  
• Sport and genetics Stephen Jay Gould and Kipchoge Keino on why athletic achievement isn't in the genes.
  
• Sport What is the relationship between spatial ability, finger length, and sporting prowess?
  
• Why elephants don't forget A study of African elephants reveals that dominant females build up a social memory as they get older, helping the herd to survive.
  
• Behavior and the General Evolutionary Process Paper by William Baum.
  
• Queue here to join the human race Joseph Henrich and Robert Boyd have developed a mathematical model to measure human co-operation.
  
• Genetic control and evolution of sexually dimorphic characters in Drosophila A key challenge in evolutionary biology is to identify genetic events responsible for morphological change, and to understand how changes at the molecular level affect development and translate into phenotypic diversity.
  
• The Cavemans New Clothes From what they wore to how they hunted: overturning the threadbare reconstructions of Ice Age culture.
  
• The New Creationism by Robert Wright With this sentence, the newspaper of record has now granted official significance to the latest form of opposition to Darwinism. As the Times notes, adherents of 'intelligent design theory' are doing what creationists have long done, such as trying to change public-school science curricula. But there's a difference: Instead of being a bunch of yahoos, they are a bunch of 'academics and intellectuals' with new, 'more sophisticated' ideas.
  
• An investigation of agency The uniquely human ability to adopt someone else's viewpoint is now better understood - Jean Decety and colleagues have shown that when we imagine ourselves executing an action, the principal brain region that comes into play is the premotor cortex.
  
• A bottom-up approach with a clear view of the top Online paper by G. F. Miller and P. M. Todd.
  
• And Darwin created us all... As two of the world's great Darwinists prepare to debate whether science is killing the soul, Tim Radford asks if natural selection is the key to life, the universe, and everything.
  
• Cultural revolution in whale songs The song patterns of humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) depend on where they live, with populations inhabiting different ocean basins normally singing quite distinct songs. Here we record a unique and radical song change in the song of humpback whales in the Pacific Ocean off the Australian east coast.
  
• Darwin, Marx, Freud and the Foundations of the Human Sciences This is a talk on the grand view of the human sciences, presented to CHEIRON, the European Society for the History of the Behavioural Sciences and reprinted in its Newsletter, Spring 1988, pp. 7-12.
  
• Neanderthal DNA: Not just old but old and cold? The retrieval of ancient DNA from two Neanderthal skeletons found at Mezmaiskaya in Russia and Feldhofer in Germany has fueled demand for more of the same. But a group of British experts has warned the science community to beware.
  
• The Roots of Homicide The U.S. property crime rate matches those of most other industrialized countries, but its homicide rate exceeds western Europes by 4 to 1 and Japans by 7 to 1. The historical roots of this disparity may lie not in the Western frontier, as many believe, but in the institution of slavery and the unusual history of firearms in America.
  
• Social Power and Self Deception Social evolution and social influence: selfishness, deception, self-deception. A scholarly paper by Mario F. Heilmann, University of California at Los Angeles.
  
• Increased dopamine release in the human amygdala during performance of cognitive tasks These data provide evidence for sustained activation of the human mesolimbic dopaminergic system during performance of cognitive tasks.
  
• Short men are more likely to stay childless Tall men are likely to father more children than shorter men, according to scientists who have analysed the reproductive success of more than 3,000 males.
  
• In Favor of Animal Consciousness An excerpt from Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness by Donald R. Griffin, the creator of the field of cognitive ethology.
  
• Has psychology become respectable at last? The past decade witnessed the surge of "evolutionary psychology". Its most thoughtful exponents, such as Robert Plomin, are confident that economics, education and sociology will all benefit from evolutionary psychology and gene mapping.
  
• Self-recognition and the right hemisphere Our findings indicate that neural substrates of the right hemisphere may selectively participate in processes linked to self-awareness.
  
• Reiss and Marino - Bottlenose dolphins Bottlenose dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, an advanced intellectual ability observed previously only in humans and apes.
  
• Chimps touched by television Chimpanzees are moved by fearful or appealing television scenes.
  
• Temptation Island: Explaining Shannon and Andy by Robert Wright According to Robert Wright evolutionary psychologists "try to predict behavior only in an aggregate statistical sense, mindful that there will always be exceptions".
  
• An Evolutionary Hypothesis For Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Abed, Riadh T and de Pauw, Karel W (1999) An Evolutionary Hypothesis for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Psychological Immune System?. Behavioural Neurology 11:245-250.
  
• Darwin on the Evolution of Morality Paper presented for the session on the 19th century biology, International Fellows Conference (Center for Philosophy of Science, Univ. of Pittsburgh), May 20-24, Castiglioncello, Italy by Soshichi Uchii, Kyoto University.
  
• Evolution, Biology and Psychology from a Marxist Point of View This article is largely historical, but the issues remain timely.
  
• Herbert Spencer and Inevitable Progress Spencer is so grandiose that it is hard to summarize his ideas, yet he was one of the most influential thinkers in nineteenth-century Britain, and his ideas were an inspiration around the world. His version of evolution was utterly generalised in all the ways Darwin tried to be circumspect. The organic analogies which Spencer developed are the foundation-stones for the widespread idea of functionalism across the biomedical and human sciences, extending to architecture, systems theory, cybernetics and information theory. The essay was reprinted in a collection from the journal: G. Marsden, ed., Victorian Values. Longman, 1990.
  
• Assault on Evolution Larry Arnhart on the activities of "intelligent design theorists".
  
• More Than the Best Medicine: Hear the one about the baboon with the wooden leg? Laughing to make friends and influence others.
  
• Fear makes worms turn friendly A single gene influences the social behaviour of worms.
  
• Negative genetic correlation between male sexual attractiveness and survival Here I show that sexual attractiveness in male guppies (Poecilia reticulata) is heritable and genetically correlated with ornamentation.
  
• Womb Wars New evidence that a mothers and fathers imprinted genes battle to determine a babys size.
  
• Cognitive science: The logic of human learning There is a formal measure of complexity that determines how natural a category is and how difficult it is to learn.
  
• Behavioural economics Richard Thaler has led a revolution in the study of economics by understanding the strange ways people behave with their money.
  
• What Is Satisfying About Satisfying Events? Testing 10 Candidate Psychological Needs Kennon M. Sheldon and colleagues find out what makes people happiest.
  
• Intentionality detection and "mindreading": Why does game form matter? PNAS -- McCabe et al. 97 (8): 4404 By around the age of 4 years, children "can work out what people might know, think or believe" based on what they say or do. This is called "mindreading," which builds upon the human ability to infer the intentions of others.
  
• Feminism and evolutionary psychology Online paper by S. L. Hurley.
  
• Humans-Who Are We? - Official Web Site Humans are brimming with unique traits that do not fit the animal mold - according to the Jehovah's Witnesses.
  
• Ancestors Meave Leakey discusses her team's recent skull find suggesting a new human ancestor.
  
• Men fish for compliments The menfolk of the Meriam, a people who live on islands off the northeast tip of Australia, spend their time spear-fishing and turtle-hunting, but are they really fishing for compliments?
  
• Memes and the Exploitation of Imagination Online paper by Daniel Dennett.
  
• Is Out of Africa Going Out the Door? Reanalysis of gene studies and new fossil evidence cast doubts of a popular theory of human origins.
  
• Darwin: Man and Metaphor This is the text of a television documentary in the series 'Late Great Victorians', BBC1, 1988. It was also published in Science as Culture no. 5: 71-86, 1989.
  
• Chance and necessity Although simple filamentous and spherical forms may evolve wherever cellular life exists, the evolution of motile, modular mega-organisms might not be a universal pattern.
  
• Wealth Money can bring happiness, if you have a lot of it.
  
• Exorcising the Homunculus: There's No One Behind the Curtain The traditional view of the will as a kind of little man in your head needs to be replaced by a detailed account of how neural tissue gives rise to controlled behavior.
  
• Menarche Any decrease in average menarcheal age during the past 20-30 years has been small (almost certainly less than six months), particularly when compared with the reduction of a year or more that occurred in many European countries between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries.
  
• Gene-Trapping Method Powers Discovery of New Brain-Wiring Signals Marc Tessier-Lavigne and William C. Skarnes unveil a technique that "enables scientists to identify new genes and to determine which genes are responsible for defects in brain wiring that are observed during development".
  
• The Functions of the Brain: Gall to Ferrier (1808-1886) An online paper on mind, brain, and adaptation in the nineteenth century. It was published in Isis 59: 251-68, 1968.
  
• Cultural psychology meets evolutionary psychology Paper presented at the 8th conference of the International Society for Theoretical Psychology (ISTP), April 25-28, 2000, Sydney.
  
• Is There a Normal Phase of Synaesthesia in Development? A paper in Psyche by Simon Baron-Cohen.
  
• What if Human Nature Is Historical This essay moves from pure ideology about changing human nature to using biofeedback as a transitional topic to spelling out the desiderata for treating human nature as an historical project.
  
• Impaired recognition and experience of disgust following brain injury Here we describe evidence, from a patient with insula and putamen damage, for a neural system for recognizing social signals of disgust from multiple modalities.
  
• Dreams Matthew Wilson contends that animals do have complex dreams.
  
• To Love, Honour and Deceive Long-term relationships are fundamentally dishonest. And it's all women's fault, new research suggests.
  
• Neurophysiology: Good memories of bad events in infancy We found that very young rat pups exposed to various odours associated with shock treatment learn an approach response to that odour, whereas older pups learn odour avoidance.
  
• Neurobiology of laughter Did you hear the one about the prefrontal cortex?
  
• Darwin's Metaphor and the Philosophy of Science This was first presented to the Piaget Seminar, University of Geneva, about 1986 and published in Science as Culture (no. 16) 3: 375-403, 1993. It draws out the philosophical implications of 'Darwin's Metaphor' (Cambridge, 1985), in particular, the role of metaphorical and teleological language in Darwin.
  
• Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Why are some humans considered more beautiful than others? Theory suggests that sexually reproducing organisms should choose mates displaying characters indicative of high genotypic or phenotypic quality.
  
• How intellect helps pick up chicks Roger Highfield reports on Geoffrey Miller's 'The Mating Mind'.