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"Reductionism!" is a charge often flung at geneticists, from accusers in the popular press and also, not infrequently, from many fellow scientists. What is it that leads so many people to so fundamentally misunderstand what genetics is about?

Behaviour can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory, animal studies suggest.

Human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. Unlike other creatures, people frequently cooperate with genetically unrelated strangers, often in large groups, with people they will never meet again, and when reputation gains are small or absent. These patterns of cooperation cannot be explained by the nepotistic motives associated with the evolutionary theory of kin selection and
the selÆsh motives associated with signalling theory or the theory of reciprocal altruism. Here we show experimentally that the
altruistic punishment of defectors is a key motive for the explanation of cooperation. Altruistic punishment means that individuals punish, although the punishment is costly for them and yields no material gain. We show that cooperation nourishes if altruistic punishment is possible, and breaks down if it is ruled out

In the last two decades, dozens of scientific papers have been published on the biological origins of homosexuality - another announcement was made last week. It's becoming scientific orthodoxy. But how does it fit with Darwin's theory of evolution?