You can’t patent snow, eagles or gravity, and you shouldn’t be able to patent genes, either. Yet by now one-fifth of the genes in your body are privately owned.

The results have been disastrous.

Patenting Life

This one is merely amusing.

Dear Guest: The shower curtain in this bathroom has been purchased with care at a reputable “big box” store in order to provide maximum convenience in showering. After you have read these instructions, you will find with a little practice that our shower curtain is as easy to use as the one you have at home.

How To Operate The Shower Curtain | The New Yorker

Steve Martin is funny. Fans of the old "101 Reasons to Attend ..." may enjoy this.

Seventy-Two Virgins, by Steve Martin | The New Yorker

Compulsory vaccination has a legitimate place in our health care system. But why should the government restrict its vaccinations to the victims? Why not include the carriers?

Requiring a Vaccine for Young Girls

Gen. David H. Petraeus formally took command of American troops in Iraq on Saturday, declaring that the mission here is hard but not hopeless.

Petraeus ... will oversee 132,000 American troops currently in Iraq and thousands more on their way as part of a so-called surge that is widely considered the last, best effort to bring peace to a country increasingly riven by sectarian violence, crime and corruption.

Iraqi officials, faced with such relentless violence, seemed unsure of whether a new American commander and the new plan could clot the bloodshed. Among American military officers, General Petraeus is considered an imaginative leader with a deep understanding of Iraq's problems, culled from two tours here. But for some in Baghdad, his assumption of control looked routine.

Iraq Mission 'Hard But Not Hopeless', says Petraeus

Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard professor, is famous for his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. He was interviewed by Amina R. Chaudary of Islamica Magazine.

The Clash of Civilizations Revisited

Congratulations to Texas for becoming the first state to require vaccinating young schoolgirls — ages 11 and 12 — against a sexually transmitted virus that causes cervical cancer and genital warts. Other states would be wise to follow the same path.

A Vaccine to Save Women’s Lives

(Read more for links to full text)

I missed this book when it first came out; maybe you did, too. Here's the Starred Review from Publishers Weekly:

There are many things one might expect to find within the covers of a collection of essays by a Stanford professor of biology and neurology: a rich understanding of the complexities of human and animal life; a sensitivity to the relationship between our biological nature and our environmental context; a humility in the face of still-to-be-understood facets of the human condition. All these are in Sapolsky's new collection, along with something one might not expect: wry, witty prose that reads like the unexpected love child of a merger between Popular Science and GQ, written by an author who could be as much at home holding court at the local pub as he is in a university lab. In this collection (the majority of pieces ran in Discover, others in Men's Health, the New Yorker and Scientific American), Sapolsky ranges wherever his formidable curiosity leads, from genetic determinism as seen through the eyes of People magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People" to the reasons why crotchety old people are neurologically disinclined to like whatever passes for music among young people nowadays. Each essay brings its own unexpected delight, brief enough that you can dip a toe in, yet insightful enough to encourage you to pursue the topic further (and Sapolsky helpfully appends to each essay a list of suggested further readings).

The publisher offers an excerpt:

Well, I have some terrible news for 99 percent of us never destined to make People's Most Beautiful issue and thus get to be featured in essay one. This news is so terrible that it's even been reified with a cover story in Newsweek. But first, a Martian joke ...

The NYT review is cited by Amazon. The reviewer, Jamie Shreeve, writes:

"Nursery Crimes," the longest essay in the book, investigates the personality disorder called Munchausen's by proxy. ... In this case, where a behavioral phenomenon so utterly violates our deepest assumptions about ourselves both as humans and as animals, Sapolsky's game pursuit of the question "why" takes us to another emotional level.

Most of the essays in "Monkeyluv" are engaging. This one is a masterpiece.

The above link provides the full text of the essay in the original publication venue, The Sciences, the official magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences. (You'll also find an article by Jaron Lanier in the same issue.)

Powell's provides the ... [ Read More (0.3k in body) ]

Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals

If you don't already own this book, the new edition is a good reason to check it out.

Updated for the first time, the classic book on why cooperation is not only natural but also the best survival strategy

The Evolution of Cooperation addresses a simple yet age-old question: If living things evolve through competition, how can cooperation ever emerge? Despite the abundant evidence of cooperation all around us, there existed no purely naturalistic answer to this question until 1979, when Robert Axelrod famously ran a computer tournament featuring a standard game-theory exercise called The Prisoner's Dilemma. To everyone's surprise, the program that won the tournament, named Tit for Tat, was not only the simplest but the most "cooperative" entrant. This unexpected victory proved that cooperation--one might even say altruism--is mathematically possible and therefore needs no hidden hand or divine agent to create and sustain it. A great roadblock to the understanding of all sorts of behavior was at last removed. The updated edition includes an extensive new chapter on cooperation in cancer cells and among terrorist organizations.

The Evolution of Cooperation, by Robert Axelrod (Updated!)

Publishers Weekly concludes: "This superb tale of scientific discovery is required reading for everyone interested in the nature of human morality."

In a world supposedly governed by ruthless survival of the fittest, why do we see acts of goodness in both animals and humans? This problem plagued Charles Darwin in the 1850s as he developed his theory of evolution through natural selection. Indeed, Darwin worried that the goodness he observed in nature could be the Achilles heel of his theory. Ever since then, scientists and other thinkers have engaged in a fierce debate about the origins of goodness that has dragged politics, philosophy, and religion into what remains a major question for evolutionary biology.

The Altruism Equation traces the history of this debate from Darwin to the present through an extraordinary cast of characters-from the Russian prince Petr Kropotkin, who wanted to base society on altruism, to the brilliant biologist George Price, who fell into poverty and succumbed to suicide as he obsessed over the problem. In a final surprising turn, William Hamilton, the scientist who came up with the equation that reduced altruism to the cold language of natural selection, desperately hoped that his theory did not apply to humans.

Hamilton's Rule, which states that relatives are worth helping in direct proportion to their blood relatedness, is as fundamental to evolutionary biology as Newton's laws of motion are to physics. But even today, decades after its formulation, Hamilton's Rule is still hotly debated among those who cannot accept that goodness can be explained by a simple mathematical formula. For the first time, Lee Alan Dugatkin brings to life the people, the issues, and the passions that have surrounded the altruism debate. Readers will be swept along by this fast-paced tale of history, biography, and scientific discovery.

Read the first chapter online:

This book is about one of Darwin’s problems. It began as a small difficulty with honeybees. At first glance, it did not seem like the sort of complication that could sink a theory that many have characterized as the most important one that biology has ever produced. But it turned into a problem that troubled biologists, fascinated naturalists, engaged popular writers and the general public, and even worked its way into political discourse for the next 145 years.

...

The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness