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The section, which was part of the unedited chapter on public attitudes toward science and technology, notes that 45% of Americans in 2008 answered true to the statement, "Human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals."

The same gap exists for the response to a second statement, "The universe began with a big explosion," with which only 33% of Americans agreed.

Urbanization is a factor. When you’re in the countryside, your kids are an economic resource very early. They can help in the fields, they can look after the animals; there are piles of stuff they can do from the age of 4 or 5. Kids are an economic resource, which is why rural families tend to be larger.

Feminism, I suspect, is as much a consequence of falling fertility as a cause, though I am sure they reinforce each other.

see the failure of the Catholic Church: It ends up encouraging patriarchal social norms that push women toward ultra-low fertility, such as in Italy.

Much of the reproductive revolution happened by keeping young kids from dying. Now we need another revolution to keep the old fitter for longer.

If chaos theory taught us anything, it’s that societies head off in all kinds of directions we couldn’t predict. Fifty years ago, if we had taken a slightly different path in industrial chemistry and used bromine instead of chlorine, we’d have burned out the entire ozone layer before we knew what the hell was going on, and the world would have been very different. There’s always scary stuff out there that we may not know about. You can’t predict the future. You can just try and plan for it.

The Brazils and Turkeys of the world are not likely to form a coherent new bloc, but they will be far less inclined than they were in the past to stay within the lines chalked in by the referees of the West.

There's no question that Brazil's interests, or Turkey's, overlap in many places with those of the U.S. and Europe; Turkey seeks nothing more ardently than full EU membership, for instance. But in many other places, interests diverge, and the middle powers are inclined to view the current world order as an instrument to advance Western designs, not theirs.

For Obama, the really important question is whether he should reconcile himself to an unavoidable clash of interests with rising powers, or try to win them over by offering a deeper and more substantive kind of engagement -- for example, by pushing for a greater democratization of the institutions from which those states now feel excluded. It may be that the only chance to get Brazil to act more like a global citizen is to treat it like one.

despite nationalist factions at home, Washington and Beijing continue to court stability and functionality.

But the strategic distrust is sharpening inevitably as China grows into its own. Beijing is compelled by its economic development to seek military tools to secure its vital supply lines and defend its coasts, the historic weak point where foreign states have invaded.

In the past several days Egypt has not witnessed a popular revolution but a carefully managed succession by the military.

It must be recognized that the succession crisis in Egypt was playing out between the country’s military elite and Mubarak well before protests began in Egypt on Jan. 25.

Though Tunisia had some domestic pro-democracy groups before unrest began in December 2010, Tunisia saw one of the region’s more organic uprisings.

The ouster of Ben Ali and his family and a reshuffling of the government for now have calmed most of the unrest. A sense of normalcy is gradually returning as Tunisians look ahead to as-yet unscheduled elections due sometime in 2011.

In all likelihood, Tunisia will end up with another government dominated by many of the former Ben Ali elites, albeit with a democratic face.

While the civil unrest will continue to capture the cameras’ attention, the real struggle in Algeria is not playing out in the streets. A power struggle has long been under way between the country’s increasingly embattled president, Abdel Aziz Bouteflika, and the head of the Military Directorate of Intelligence and Security (DRS), Gen. Mohamed “Toufik” Mediene.

Not by coincidence, one of the main organizers of the demonstrations, Saeed Saidi (a Berber) is known to be on excellent terms with Mediene, also a Berber. The call for Berber rights — Berbers make up roughly one-third of the Algerian population — has been one of the leading drivers of the demonstrations thus far.

Now, however, a recently-created Facebook group known as “Moroccans for Change” has called for a nationwide protest Feb. 20, something the government of King Mohammed VI has responded to by meeting with opposition parties and promising to speed up the pace of economic, social and political reforms.

In one of its main demands, the opposition has called for a new constitution that would strip power from the monarchy and from the network of state and business elites known as the Makhzen.

In sum, the planned demonstrations in Morocco are illustrations of opportunism as opposed to a serious potential popular uprising — much less regime change.

King Abdullah II acted quickly to pre-empt major civil unrest in the country by handing out millions of dollars in subsidies and by forming a new government.

Bahrain was the first among Persian Gulf countries to witness significant demonstrations, and protesters clashed with riot police early on. After two days of demonstrations led by Shiite opposition groups, a heavy crackdown was launched on Pearl Square in the heart of Manama late Feb. 16 on mostly Shiite protesters who were camping overnight.

The ruling Sunni family may be a minority in the Shiite-majority country, but some 54 percent of the population is made up of foreign guest workers, who are notably not taking part in the demonstrations.

Poor socio-economic conditions, high youth unemployment (around 26 percent) and disillusionment with the regime are all notable factors in the development of Iran’s opposition movement, but as STRATFOR stressed in 2009, the primarily youth-driven, middle- and upper-class opposition in Tehran is not representative of the wider population, a significant portion of which is supportive of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

The civil unrest in Libya is unlikely to pose a meaningful threat to the regime, but it could impact the country’s ongoing power-struggle between Gadhafi’s two sons.

In attempt to take the steam out of the political opposition, Saleh has announced that he will not run for re-election in 2013, and that he would do away with pending amendments that would have abolished presidential term limits.

Soon after the unrest in Egypt broke out, Syrian opposition youth activists (most of whom are based outside the country) attempted to organize their own “Day of Rage” via social media to challenge the al Assad regime.

Scientists know that certain bits of DNA on the end of chromosomes called “telomeres” shorten each time the cell divides, playing a role in cell aging and eventual cell death

New research has uncovered how stress levels and diet can affect the biological age of an organism as opposed to chronological age, or calendar years.

For years scientists thought that sequencing DNA would uncover the “gene-for” almost everything, unraveling the mysteries of disease and resulting in new drugs and gene-specific treatments. It didn’t exactly pan out that way.

So to uncover the calculus within the genome, it might take some looking beyond the genome. Genes may contribute a few elements to the inner clock, but they interact within a larger scaffolding of cell processes and environmental factors.

There is not a single use of instancing in the entire game

Unlike PS, you can capture any territory at any time, but you do get “significant bonuses” to capturing a territory adjacent to your own.

SOE is really pushing the idea of wanting to make PlanetSide 2 into a full “sandbox” game in the future

Expect to see a lot of influence from top modern shooters

The developers mentioned several times that they want to allow players to design their own structures in the future.

Game developers and players have critiqued gamification on the grounds that it gets games wrong, mistaking incidental properties like points and levels for primary features like interactions with behavioral complexity. That may be true, but truth doesn't matter for bullshitters. Indeed, the very point of gamification is to make the sale as easy as possible.

Exploitationware captures gamifiers' real intentions: a grifter's game, pursued to capitalize on a cultural moment, through services about which they have questionable expertise, to bring about results meant to last only long enough to pad their bank accounts before the next bullshit trend comes along.

The third strong hint was noticed, among others, by Pareto when, in his mammoth work investigating the relation between conduct and belief, Trattato di sociologia generale, he noticed that most moral philosophies were devoid of specific ethical content.

When we apply these insights to the Objectivist ethics, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Rand's moral system, like the moral systems of so many other philosophers, consists almost entirely of the rationalization of moral ideals that existed well before any set of abstractions was built around them.

Lacking a "technology" means that no Objectivist, including Rand herself, actually follows the Objectivist morality.

Other than a few vague hints, Rand and her disciples never bothered to explain how to distinguish those contexts in which such virtues as honesty, productivity, integrity, and rationality were absolutes from those contexts in which these fine virtues no longer applied.

If Rand's ethics were intended (as Rand insisted) to provide a manual for survival, how come the manual doesn't come with any instructions?

This is me. I don't want to maximise income. I want to maximise autonomy and time for unremunerative but satisfying creative work. Reihan Salam has written provocatively on the subject of threshold earners, in addition to introducing me to David Roberts' related idea of "the medium chill".

as Ronald Inglehart has documented, the achievement of high levels of widespread material well-being has precipitated a momentous shift toward "post-materialist" values across the entire developed world.

Whatever our level of education, if unemployment benefits and odd jobs add up to enough to keep us above a socially acceptable material threshold, we will not be in a hurry to accept any available employment, no matter how unpleasant or unsuitable.  

So, yeah, I'd like to see wage subsidies and a 4% inflation target. But I'd also like to see a shift away from economic policy that pushes us so insistently into the "employee" role. What does the government call you if you are working but not on somebody's payroll with social security and Medicare taxes automatically deducted from your wages? Self-employed!

But I don't want to be a tiny business that hires me. I don't want to be my own boss. I don't want to be a boss at all, or to have one. I just want to work and get paid for it, on terms agreeable to the parties involved.

4.  In the US this pattern has recently been hidden by health care, which is one aspect of the welfare state that was never completed in the statist era (although it was completed in all other developed countries.)

5.  During the megatrends, there are periods of consolidation, which are falsely viewed as countertrends.  They are not countertrends.  The trend is still intact.  In the US the 1920s and 1950s were falsely viewed as countertrends.  Don’t be fooled, we are only 1/3 of the way through the neoliberalism megatrend.

However (and this a very important point) even though Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hardy wrote "fatalistic" narratives, this is hardly proof positive that they were determinists.

The new military rulers also wish to see their country regain its status as the pre-eminent player in the Arab world. From their perspective, this can be achieved by engaging in radical moves vis-a-vis the Palestinians, Israel and Iran.

The American assumption in deciding to leave Iraq — and this goes back to George W. Bush as well as Barack Obama — was that over the course of four years, the United States would be able to leave because it would have created a coherent government and military. The United States underestimated the degree to which fragmentation in Iraq would prevent that outcome and the degree to which Iranian influence would undermine the effort. The United States made a pledge to the American public and a treaty with the Iraqi government to withdraw forces, but the conditions that were expected to develop simply did not.

The United States previously had an Iraq question. That question is being answered, and not to the American advantage. Instead, what is emerging is a Saudi Arabia question.

From the Saudi point of view, the critical element is a clear sign of long-term American commitment to the regime. American support for the Saudis in Bahrain has been limited, and the United States has not been aggressively trying to manage the situation in Yemen, given its limited ability to shape an outcome there.

One is to hold their position and hope for the best. The other is to reach out and see if some accommodation can be made with Iran.

The Obama administration appears to have adopted an increasingly obvious foreign policy. Rather than simply attempt to control events around the world, the administration appears to have selected a policy of careful neglect. This is not, in itself, a bad strategy. Neglect means that allies and regional powers directly affected by the problem will take responsibility for the problem. Most problems resolve themselves without the need of American intervention. If they don’t, the United States can consider its posture later. Given that the world has become accustomed to the United States as first responder, other countries have simply waited for the American response. We have seen this in Libya, where the United States has tried to play a marginal role. Conceptually, this is not unsound.

The pressure from Iran is becoming palpable. All of the Arab countries feel it, and whatever their feelings about the Persians, the realities of power are what they are. The UAE has been sent to ask the United States for a solution. It is not clear the United States has one. When we ask why the price of oil is surging, the idea of geopolitical risk does come to mind. It is not a foolish speculation.

The U.S. political leadership faced difficulty in shaping an exit strategy from Afghanistan with Petraeus in command because the general continued to insist that the war was going reasonably well.

We are not saying that bin Laden’s death and Petraeus’ new appointment are anything beyond coincidental. We are saying that the confluence of the two events creates politically strategic opportunities for the U.S. administration that did not exist before, the most important of which is the possibility for a dramatic shift in U.S. strategy in Afghanistan.

Petraeus is now being removed from the Afghanistan picture. Bin Laden has already been removed. With his death, an argument in the United States can be made that the U.S. mission has been accomplished and that, while there may be room for some manner of special-operations counterterrorism forces, the need for additional U.S. troops in Afghanistan no longer exists.

Skeptics contend that because the Eurozone was primarily a political creation, its economic logic is fundamentally flawed. A singular economic or political shock — such as the collapse of the Greek government — could therefore unravel the entire bloc by exposing a slew of economic problems.

Therefore if all else fails, the ECB will print money.

Monumental shifts are underway in Europe. We have no reason to believe that Greece is at the center of them. What is most interesting is that the focus, both in terms of risks and solutions, continues to be on both short-term effects and singular events. This myopia is in part because Eurozone member states, in particular Germany, have not offered a long-term solution or plan.

The question that needs to be asked is: what do Europeans, and specifically the Germans, plan to do with Europe’s security and political architecture in the long term? The answer to that question cannot be found in the financial databases of Eurostat or the Bank of International Settlement, nor especially in the coverage of 24-hour investor-news stations.