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In the process, fit has become a catchall used to justify hiring people who are similar to decision makers and rejecting people who are not.

The concept of fit first gained traction in the 1980s. The original idea was that if companies hired individuals whose personalities and values — and not just their skills — meshed with an organization’s strategy, workers would feel more attached to their jobs, work harder and stay longer.

in many organizations, fit has gone rogue. I saw this firsthand while researching the hiring practices of the country’s top investment banks, management consultancies and law firms. I interviewed 120 decision makers and spent nine months observing

While résumés (and connections) influenced which applicants made it into the interview room, interviewers’ perceptions of fit strongly shaped who walked out with job offers.

Crucially, though, for these gatekeepers, fit was not about a match with organizational values. It was about personal fit. In these time- and team-intensive jobs, professionals at all levels of seniority reported wanting to hire people with whom they enjoyed hanging out and could foresee developing close relationships with

To judge fit, interviewers commonly relied on chemistry. “

Many used the “airport test.” As a managing director at an investment bank put it, “Would I want to be stuck in an airport in Minneapolis in a snowstorm with them?”

interviewers were primarily interested in new hires whose hobbies, hometowns and biographies matched their own. Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not

it has become a common feature of American corporate culture. Employers routinely ask job applicants about their hobbies and what they like to do for fun, while a complementary self-help industry informs white-collar job seekers that chemistry, not qualifications, will win them an offer.

Selection based on personal fit can keep demographic and cultural diversity low

In the elite firms I studied, the types of shared experiences associated with fit typically required large investments of time and money.

Class-biased definitions of fit are one reason investment banks, management consulting firms and law firms are dominated by people from the highest socioeconomic backgrounds

Also, whether the industry is finance, high-tech or fashion, a good fit in most American corporations still tends to be stereotypically masculine.

Perhaps most important, it is easy to mistake rapport for skill. Just as they erroneously believe that they can accurately tell when someone is lying, people tend to be overly confident in their ability to spot talent. Unstructured interviews, which are the most popular hiring tools for American managers and the primary way they judge fit, are notoriously poor predictors of job performance.

Organizations that use cultural fit for competitive advantage tend to favor concrete tools like surveys and structured interviews that systematically test behaviors associated with increased performance and employee retention.

For managers who want to use cultural fit in a more productive way, I have several suggestions.

First, communicate a clear and consistent idea of what the organization’s culture is (and is not) to potential employees. Second, make sure the definition of cultural fit is closely aligned with business goals. Ideally, fit should be based on data-driven analysis of what types of values, traits and behaviors actually predict on-the-job success. Third, create formal procedures like checklists for measuring fit, so that assessment is not left up to the eyes (and extracurriculars) of the beholder.

But cultural fit has become a new form of discrimination that keeps demographic and cultural diversity down

On Tinder, there are no questionnaires to fill out. No discussion of your favorite hiking trail, star sign or sexual proclivities. You simply log in through Facebook, pick a few photos that best describe “you” and start swiping.It may seem that what happens next is predictable (the best-looking people draw the most likes, the rest are quickly dismissed), but relationships experts for Tinder say there is something entirely different going on.

“Research shows when people are evaluating photos of others, they are trying to access compatibility on not just a physical level, but a social level,” said Jessica Carbino, Tinder’s in-house dating and relationship expert. “They are trying to understand, ‘Do I have things in common with this person?' ”

She discovered that Tinder users decoded an array of subtle and not-so-subtle traits before deciding which way to swipe. For example, the style of clothing, the pucker of the lips and even the posture, Ms. Carbino said, tell us a lot about their social circle, if they like to party and their level of confidence.

Men also judge attractiveness on factors beyond just anatomy, though in general, men are nearly three times as likely to swipe “like” (in 46 percent of cases) than woman (14 percent).

Mr. Finkel worked for more than a year with a group of researchers trying to understand how these algorithm-based dating services could match people, as they claim to do. The team poured through more than 80 years of scientific research about dating and attraction, and was unable to prove that computers can indeed match people together.

while computers have become incalculably smarter, the ability of machines and algorithms to match people has remained just as clueless in the view of independent scientists.

dating sites like eHarmony and Match.com are more like modern snake oil. “They are a joke, and there is no relationship scientist that takes them seriously as relationship science.”

“There is this idea that attraction stems from a very superficial outlook on people, which is false,” Mr. Rad said. “Everyone is able to pick up thousands of signals in these photos. A photo of a guy at a bar with friends around him sends a very different message than a photo of a guy with a dog on the beach.”

some dating sites are starting to acknowledge that the only thing that matters when matching lovers is someone’s picture. Earlier this year, OKCupid examined its data and found that a person’s profile picture is, said a post on its Oktrends blog, “worth that fabled thousand words, but your actual words are worth... almost nothing.”

this doesn’t mean that the most attractive people are the only ones who find true love. Indeed, in many respects, it can be the other way around.

a graduate student, published a paper noting that a person’s unique looks are what is most important when trying to find a mate.

“There isn’t a consensus about who is attractive and who isn’t,” Mr. Eastwick said in an interview. “Someone that you think is especially attractive might not be to me. That’s true with photos, too.” Tinder’s data team echoed this, noting that there isn’t a cliquey, high school mentality on the site, where one group of users get the share of “like” swipes.

As an economist, I look at it this way: Every profession produces both private returns — the fruits of labor that a person enjoys — and social returns — those that society enjoys. If I set up a shop on Etsy selling photographs, my private returns may be defined as the revenue I generate. The social returns are the pleasure that my photographs provide to my customers.

People in some professions provide a surplus of social returns. Inventors are a good example. Take the modern semiconductor. It made possible countless other inventions — nearly every piece of computing we interact with today.

countries suffer when talented people become what we economists call “rent seekers.” Instead of creating wealth, rent seekers simply transfer it — from others to themselves.

Job titles don’t tell you whether someone is primarily a rent seeker. A lawyer who helps draft precise contracts may actually be helping the wheels of commerce turn, and so creating wealth. But trial lawyers in a country with poorly functioning tort systems may simply be extracting rents: They can make money by pursuing frivolous lawsuits.

In this respect, finance is a vexing industry.

arbitrage is valuable only to a point. It has a gold rush element with prospectors racing to get to the gold first. While finding gold has value, finding gold before someone else does is mainly rent-seeking.

Booth, have shown in a study how extreme this financial gold rush has become in at least one corner of the financial world. From 2005 to 2011, they found that the duration of arbitrage opportunities in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange declined from a median of 97 milliseconds to seven milliseconds

correcting mispricing at this speed is unlikely to have any real social benefit: What serious investment is being guided by prices at the millisecond level? Short-term arbitrage, while lucrative, seems to be mainly rent-seeking.

This kind of rent-seeking behavior is widespread in other parts of finance. Banks sometimes make money by using hidden fees rather than adding true value. Debt collection agencies may use unscrupulous practices. Lenders to poor people buying used cars can make profits with business models that encourage high rates of default — making money by taking advantage of people’s overconfidence about what cars they can afford and by repossessing vehicles. These kinds of practices may be both lucrative — and socially pernicious.

The poor face a tremendous problem every day juggling money and expenses. Their pay often fluctuates week by week, yet they must pay rent no matter what they earn. Right now, poor people often use expensive payday loans or must incur expensive late fees.

Surely we could do better. Finding ways to smooth out these shocks is the kind of important, socially valuable problem that finance could solve. Many other crucial social problems have finance at their root, from saving for college to insuring unemployment risk.

Instead of finding clever ways to hide fees, banking innovations could solve these real and important problems.

So how should I feel about my students going into finance? I hope they realize that they have the potential to do great good and not simply make money. It may not be how the industry is structured now, but idealism and inventiveness are two of the best traits of youth, and finance especially could use them.

And Mr. Peterson simply ignores several decades worth of recent studies in cognitive science by researchers such as David Povinelli, Bruce Hood, Michael Tomasello and Elisabetta Visalberghi, which have elucidated very real differences between human and nonhuman minds in the realm of conceptual reasoning, particularly with respect to what has been termed "theory of mind." This is the uniquely human ability to have thoughts about thoughts and to perceive that other minds exist and that they can hold ideas and beliefs different from one's own. While human and animal minds share a broadly similar ability to learn from experience, formulate intentions and store memories, careful experiments have repeatedly come up empty when attempting to establish the existence of a theory of mind in nonhumans.

This not only detracts from the argument Mr. Peterson seeks to make but reinforces the sense of intellectual parochialism that is the book's chief flaw. Modern evolutionary psychology and cognitive science have done much to illuminate the evolutionary instincts that animate complex human mental processes. Unfortunately, in his determination to level the playing field between human and nonhuman minds, Mr. Peterson has ignored at least half his story.

emergence

path dependence. This refers to the notion that often “something that seems normal or inevitable today began with a choice that made sense at a particular time in the past, but survived despite the eclipse of the justification for that choice.

Einstellung Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms.

the Focusing Illusion, which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.”

Supervenience. Imagine a picture on a computer screen of a dog sitting in a rowboat. It can be described as a picture of a dog, but at a different level it can be described as an arrangement of pixels and colors. The relationship between the two levels is asymmetric. The same image can be displayed at different sizes with different pixels. The high-level properties (dogness) supervene the low-level properties (pixels).

the Fundamental Attribution Error: Don’t try to explain by character traits behavior that is better explained by context.

the distinction between emotion and arousal.

emergence

emergence.

We often try to understand problems by taking apart and studying their constituent parts. But emergent problems can’t be understood this way. Emergent systems are ones in which many different elements interact. The pattern of interaction then produces a new element that is greater than the sum of the parts, which then exercises a top-down influence on the constituent elements.

in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. page views, but, by 2010, they accounted for 75 percent of them.

The Internet has created a long tail, but almost all the revenue and power is among the small elite at the head.

Advances in artificial intelligence will accelerate this centralizing trend. That’s because A.I. companies will be able to reap the rewards of network effects. The bigger their network and the more data they collect, the more effective and attractive they become.

As a result, our A.I. future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.”

engineers at a few gigantic companies will have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices. If you think this power will be used for entirely benign ends, then you have not read enough history.

The second implication is philosophical. A.I. will redefine what it means to be human. Our identity as humans is shaped by what machines and other animals can’t do

On the other hand, machines cannot beat us at the things we do without conscious thinking: developing tastes and affections, mimicking each other and building emotional attachments, experiencing imaginative breakthroughs, forming moral sentiments.

For the last few centuries, reason was seen as the ultimate human faculty. But now machines are better at many of the tasks we associate with thinking — like playing chess, winning at Jeopardy, and doing math.

In the age of smart machines, we’re not human because we have big brains. We’re human because we have social skills, emotional capacities and moral intuitions.

I could paint two divergent A.I. futures, one deeply humanistic, and one soullessly utilitarian.

In the cold, utilitarian future, on the other hand, people become less idiosyncratic. If the choice architecture behind many decisions is based on big data from vast crowds, everybody follows the prompts and chooses to be like each other. The machine prompts us to consume what is popular, the things that are easy and mentally undemanding.

In this future, there is increasing emphasis on personal and moral faculties: being likable, industrious, trustworthy and affectionate. People are evaluated more on these traits, which supplement machine thinking, and not the rote ones that duplicate it

In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgery so we can focus on higher and happier things. In this future, differences in innate I.Q. are less important. Everybody has Google on their phones so having a great memory or the ability to calculate with big numbers doesn’t help as much.

In the current issue of Wired, the technology writer Kevin Kelly says that we had all better get used to this level of predictive prowess. Kelly argues that the age of artificial intelligence is finally at hand.

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?

First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like.

Yet because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.

Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.

Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.

But the question is whether such infinitesimal differences, perceptible only in a laboratory, qualify as worldviews — cultural standpoints or ways of thinking that we consider important. I think the answer is no.

experiments do show that a language can have a fascinating effect on how its speakers think

If a language dies, a fascinating way of thinking dies along with it.

One psychologist argued some decades ago that this meant that Chinese makes a person less sensitive to such distinctions, which, let’s face it, is discomfitingly close to saying Chinese people aren’t as quick on the uptake as the rest of us. The truth is more mundane: Hypotheticality and counterfactuality are established more by context in Chinese than in English.

extrapolating cognitive implications from language differences is a delicate business.

But if a language is not a worldview, what do we tell the guy in the lecture hall? Should we care that in 100 years only about 600 of the current 6,000 languages may be still spoken?

The answer is still yes, but for other reasons.

First, a central aspect of any culture’s existence as a coherent entity is the fact of its having its own language, regardless of what the language happens to be like

because language is so central to being human, to have a language used only with certain other people is a powerful tool for connection and a sense of community.

Second, languages are scientifically interesting even if they don’t index cultural traits. They offer variety equivalent to the diversity of the world’s fauna and flora.

As with any other feature of the natural world, such variety tests and expands our sense of the possible, of what is “normal.”

Cultures, to be sure, show how we are different. Languages, however, are variations on a worldwide, cross-cultural perception of this thing called life.

That’s it in a nutshell: public policy driven by visceral reaction to videos.

And for the cherry on top of that dollop of honesty, consider the candid cynicism of Representative Jack Kingston, of Georgia, explaining the Republican strategy on Obama’s initiative. “We can denounce it if it goes bad, and praise it if it goes well, and ask him what took him so long,” he said.

No person of conscience could watch the Ray Rice video without feeling revulsion. But that shouldn’t be the new standard for outrage and action. Trying to sway someone with an old-fashioned appeal — e.g., figures on the number of women who are kicked cold every day — is largely fruitless.

“The world has always been messy,” said Obama, a smart man, making a smart observation to a public that doesn’t reward that trait. “In part we’re just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through.”

in most parts of the world, languages and genes occupy the same areas and even appear to have traveled along similar trajectories.

These data have been available for some time, but never examined in the same place. “The thing we’ve done that no one else has is match worldwide genetic populations to their languages, so that you’re looking at a comparable set,”

Another finding is related to isolation: When small populations separate from the gene pool, genetic diversity falls. In language, the opposite is true. The study shows that isolation leads to more diversity in phonemes.

. Modern marriage is a partnership, and both men and women expect their partners to be at least their equal intellectually and personally.

Any psychologist will state that appearance is still the number one factor in bringing two people together, and that it takes more than a singular trait (in this case, intelligence) to create a strong, long-lasting bond.

And it's important to note that these statistics are heteronormative, applying purely to straight couples and not addressing gays and lesbians at all.

For millennia, a woman's value in a marriage was largely limited to birthing children and caring for a household. That's changed now, and men's desires have changed accordingly. Men want their wives—partners, really—to be much more independent, with lives and careers outside of the home.

First, campaigners have to present their case as a simple, compelling story that everyone can understand. This argument, like any political argument, won’t be won with data and graphs but with a narrative. It has to address our hearts, not our heads.

Next, the case for the climate has to be at least as much about remedy as diagnosis.

But that still leaves what may be the largest political challenge. Right now, climate change has become an issue of the left.

In the US, climate scepticism has become one of the defining traits of the right, a more reliable marker even than attitudes to abortion or gun control.

based on the correlations presented here, knowing the scores of one identical twin gives you a pretty good indication of the scores of the other.”

the Democratic Party — supportive of abortion rights, same-sex marriage and the primacy of self-expressive individualism over obligation to family — is irreconcilably alien to a segment of the electorate.

If these predispositions are, as Friesen and Ksiazkiewicz argue, to some degree genetically rooted, they may not lend themselves to rational debate and compromise.

concluded from their study comparing identical and fraternal twins that “the correlation between religious importance and conservatism” is “driven primarily, but usually not exclusively, by genetic factors.” The substantial “genetic component in these relationships suggests that there may be a common underlying predisposition that leads individuals to adopt conservative bedrock social principles and political ideologies while simultaneously feeling the need for religious experiences.”

the outcome of the 19 presidential elections since 1940: Nine Republican victories; 10 for Democrats. In those races, the winner received less than 53 percent of the vote in 10 elections. This equilibrium suggests that political opinion may be less volatile, and more firmly grounded, than is sometimes suspected.

“To the extent that my political opinions can be predicted by my genome, or by an identical twin separated from me at birth who grew up halfway across the world,” Pinker writes, “I have reason to question whether those opinions are justifiable by reason or evidence rather than a reflection of my temperament.”

“the discovery that political ideologies are partly heritable points our attention to what the common psychological threads of competing ideologies are – namely temperamental differences such as authoritarianism, conscientiousness, and openness to experience, together with intellectual differences such as intelligence. These could help pinpoint some of the common denominators beneath competing ideologies which cut across the particular hot buttons of the particular era.”

such research can enhance our understanding of the larger framework within which public discourse and debate shape key outcomes.

We need every tool available to increase our understanding of our systems of self-governance and of how we came to be the political animals that we are.

Expectations surrounding education have spun out of control. On top of a seven-hour school day, our kids march through hours of nightly homework, daily sports practices and band rehearsals, and weekend-consuming assignments and tournaments. Each activity is seen as a step on the ladder to a top college, an enviable job and a successful life. Children living in poverty who aspire to college face the same daunting admissions arms race, as well as the burden of competing for scholarships, with less support than their privileged peers.

Yet instead of empowering them to thrive, this drive for success is eroding children’s health and undermining their potential. Modern education is actually making them sick.

Nearly one in three teenagers told the American Psychological Association that stress drove them to sadness or depression — and their single biggest source of stress was school. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a vast majority of American teenagers get at least two hours less sleep each night than recommended — and research shows the more homework they do, the fewer hours they sleep. At the university level, 94 percent of college counseling directors in a survey from last year said they were seeing rising numbers of students with severe psychological problems.

At the other end of the age spectrum, doctors increasingly see children in early elementary school suffering from migraine headaches and ulcers. Many physicians see a clear connection to performance pressure.

chosen to start making a change. Teachers are re-examining their homework demands, in some cases reviving the school district’s forgotten homework guideline — no more than 20 minutes per class per night, and none on weekends. In fact, research supports limits on homework. Students have started a task force to promote healthy habits and balanced schedules.

A growing body of medical evidence suggests that long-term childhood stress is linked not only with a higher risk of adult depression and anxiety, but with poor physical health outcomes, as well.

Paradoxically, the pressure cooker is hurting, not helping, our kids’ prospects for success. Many college students struggle with critical thinking, a fact that hasn’t escaped their professors, only 14 percent of whom believe that their students are prepared for college work, according to a 2015 report.

At Irvington, it’s too early to gauge the impact of new reforms, but educators see promising signs. Calls to school counselors to help students having emotional episodes in class have dropped from routine to nearly nonexistent. The A.P. class failure rate dropped by half. Irvington students continue to be accepted at respected colleges.

Rousseau wrote about “amour-propre,” a kind of self-love based on the opinions of others. He considered it unnatural and unhealthy, and believed that arbitrary social comparison led to people wasting their lives trying to look and sound attractive to others.

Narcissus falls in love not with himself, but with his reflection. In the modern version, Narcissus would fall in love with his own Instagram feed, and starve himself to death while compulsively counting his followers.

If our egos are obese with amour-propre, social media can indeed serve up the empty emotional carbs we crave. Instagram and the like doesn’t create a narcissist, but studies suggest it acts as an accelerant — a near ideal platform to facilitate what psychologists call “grandiose exhibitionism.”

No doubt you have seen this in others, and maybe even a little of it in yourself as you posted a flattering selfie — and then checked back 20 times for “likes.”

A healthy self-love that leads to true happiness is what Rousseau called “amour de soi.” It builds up one’s intrinsic well-being, as opposed to feeding shallow cravings to be admired.

First, take the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test.

Here is an individual self-improvement strategy that combines a healthy self-love (for Valentine’s Day) with a small sacrifice (possibly for Lent).

Cultivating amour de soi requires being fully alive at this moment, as opposed to being virtually alive while wondering what others think. The soulful connection with another person, the enjoyment of a beautiful hike alone (not shared on Facebook) or a prayer of thanks over your sleeping child (absent a #blessed tweet) could be considered expressions of amour de soi.

Second, get rid of the emotional junk food that is feeding any unhealthy self-obsession. Make a list of opinions to disregard — especially those of flatterers and critics — and review the list each day. Resolve not to waste a moment trying to impress others,

Third, go on a social media fast. Post to communicate, praise and learn — never to self-promote.

As for clinically significant narcissism—along with greed, invidious prejudice, and habitual lying—it is simply another one of our anti-social behaviors that mutated from our basic genetic drives…in this case the drive to survive. The opposite of narcissism is empathy, a brain-wiring that evolved much later and in parallel with our increased reliance on social interaction as a means to improve the chances of sending our genes down the line (the drive to reproduce). There is thus a certain irony in the fact that the misnamed “social” media are encouraging a decline in empathy. Your thoughts?

Sure you're not confusing narcissism with vanity? If you've ever had the misfortune of having someone with narcissistic personality disorder in your life, you would know it's about more than selfies and seeking constant approval. They are truly sick individuals that destroy the lives of those they claim to love.I would say people's addictions to social media "likes" and posting selfies is vanity

Perhaps we need to distinguish between Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) and the adjective "narcissistic." We all know lots of people with way too much self-regard. NPD on the other hand ruins lives and certainly families. People who have NPD are way beyond self centered. They see the world as black and white and all people they interact with become reflections. People with NPD go to extreme lengths to control those around them and will lie, cheat and steal to do that. They are never wrong the other person is always wrong. I have worked for Narcissists and lived with one. Let's not throw around this term without defining it, please.

it is as if two magic coins, flipped at different corners of the cosmos, always came up heads or tails together. (The spooky action takes place only in the context of simultaneous measurement. The particles share states, but they don’t send signals.)

fashion, temperament, zeitgeist, and sheer tenacity affected the debate, along with evidence and argument.

The certainty that spooky action at a distance takes place, Musser says, challenges the very notion of “locality,” our intuitive sense that some stuff happens only here, and some stuff over there. What’s happening isn’t really spooky action at a distance; it’s spooky distance, revealed through an action.

Why, then, did Einstein’s question get excluded for so long from reputable theoretical physics? The reasons, unfolding through generations of physicists, have several notable social aspects,

What started out as a reductio ad absurdum became proof that the cosmos is in certain ways absurd. What began as a bug became a feature and is now a fact.

“If poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility, then science is tranquility recollected in emotion.” The seemingly neutral order of the natural world becomes the sounding board for every passionate feeling the physicist possesses.

Musser explains that the big issue was settled mainly by being pushed aside. Generational imperatives trumped evidentiary ones. The things that made Einstein the lovable genius of popular imagination were also the things that made him an easy object of condescension. The hot younger theorists patronized him,

There was never a decisive debate, never a hallowed crucial experiment, never even a winning argument to settle the case, with one physicist admitting, “Most physicists (including me) accept that Bohr won the debate, although like most physicists I am hard pressed to put into words just how it was done.”

Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this account, almost the way “Rock Around the Clock” displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts.

The same pattern of avoidance and talking-past and taking on the temper of the times turns up in the contemporary science that has returned to the possibility of non-locality.

the revival of “non-locality” as a topic in physics may be due to our finding the metaphor of non-locality ever more palatable: “Modern communications technology may not technically be non-local but it sure feels that it is.”

Living among distant connections, where what happens in Bangalore happens in Boston, we are more receptive to the idea of such a strange order in the universe.

The “indeterminacy” of the atom was, for younger European physicists, “a lesson of modernity, an antidote to a misplaced Enlightenment trust in reason, which German intellectuals in the 1920’s widely held responsible for their country’s defeat in the First World War.” The tonal and temperamental difference between the scientists was as great as the evidence they called on.

Science isn’t a slot machine, where you drop in facts and get out truths. But it is a special kind of social activity, one where lots of different human traits—obstinacy, curiosity, resentment of authority, sheer cussedness, and a grudging readiness to submit pet notions to popular scrutiny—end by producing reliable knowledge

What was magic became mathematical and then mundane. “Magical” explanations, like spooky action, are constantly being revived and rebuffed, until, at last, they are reinterpreted and accepted. Instead of a neat line between science and magic, then, we see a jumpy, shifting boundary that keeps getting redrawn

Real-world demarcations between science and magic, Musser’s story suggests, are like Bugs’s: made on the move and as much a trap as a teaching aid.

In the past several decades, certainly, the old lines between the history of astrology and astronomy, and between alchemy and chemistry, have been blurred; historians of the scientific revolution no longer insist on a clean break between science and earlier forms of magic.

Where once logical criteria between science and non-science (or pseudo-science) were sought and taken seriously—Karl Popper’s criterion of “falsifiability” was perhaps the most famous, insisting that a sound theory could, in principle, be proved wrong by one test or another—many historians and philosophers of science have come to think that this is a naïve view of how the scientific enterprise actually works.

They see a muddle of coercion, old magical ideas, occasional experiment, hushed-up failures—all coming together in a social practice that gets results but rarely follows a definable logic.

Yet the old notion of a scientific revolution that was really a revolution is regaining some credibility.

David Wootton, in his new, encyclopedic history, “The Invention of Science” (Harper), recognizes the blurred lines between magic and science but insists that the revolution lay in the public nature of the new approach.

What killed alchemy was the insistence that experiments must be openly reported in publications which presented a clear account of what had happened, and they must then be replicated, preferably before independent witnesses.

Wootton, while making little of Popper’s criterion of falsifiability, makes it up to him by borrowing a criterion from his political philosophy. Scientific societies are open societies. One day the lunar tides are occult, the next day they are science, and what changes is the way in which we choose to talk about them.

Wootton also insists, against the grain of contemporary academia, that single observed facts, what he calls “killer facts,” really did polish off antique authorities

once we agree that the facts are facts, they can do amazing work. Traditional Ptolemaic astronomy, in place for more than a millennium, was destroyed by what Galileo discovered about the phases of Venus. That killer fact “serves as a single, solid, and strong argument to establish its revolution around the Sun, such that no room whatsoever remains for doubt,” Galileo wrote, and Wootton adds, “No one was so foolish as to dispute these claims.

everal things flow from Wootton’s view. One is that “group think” in the sciences is often true think. Science has always been made in a cloud of social networks.

There has been much talk in the pop-sci world of “memes”—ideas that somehow manage to replicate themselves in our heads. But perhaps the real memes are not ideas or tunes or artifacts but ways of making them—habits of mind rather than products of mind

science, then, a club like any other, with fetishes and fashions, with schemers, dreamers, and blackballed applicants? Is there a real demarcation to be made between science and every other kind of social activity

The claim that basic research is valuable because it leads to applied technology may be true but perhaps is not at the heart of the social use of the enterprise. The way scientists do think makes us aware of how we can think

People who took their time got selected out,

hypersensitive agency-detecting device, or HADD,

facilitated the rapid decision-making process that humans had to go through when they heard a rustling in the grass. (Lions act of their own accord. Better run.)

HADD may have planted the seeds for religious thought.

humans started attributing agency to things that really didn't have agency at all.

tendency to explain the natural world through the existence of beings with supernatural powers — things like gods, ancestral spirits, goblins and fairies — formed the basis for religious beliefs, according to many cognitive scientists.

They started attributing meaning to the actions of things that weren't really acting of their own accord.

they started anticipating what other beings' actions might be and planning their own actions accordingly.

"You might think that raindrops aren't agents," Clark said. "They can't act of their own accord. They just fall.

enabled them to discern other people's positive and negative intentions

thereby increasing their own chances of survival.

attributing purpose to the actions of nonactors, like raindrops, ToM took a turn toward the supernatural.

Theory of Mind

refer to HADD and ToM as the "god faculty,"

human beings haven't evolved past this way of thinking and making decisions,

"You can be educated out of some of these beliefs, but you can't be educated out of these cognitive faculties. We all have a hyperactive agency-detecting device. We all have a theory of mind."

a trait that stuck around because the people who possessed it were better able to survive and pass on their genes.

Religion may have naturally sprung up from this need to keep everybody on the same page,

Humans' predisposition to attribute intention to just about everything (e.g., volcanic eruptions, lunar eclipses, thunderstorms) isn't necessarily the reason religion came about,

Psychologists think of willpower as a “limited resource” – essentially, you can use it up over the course of a day.

Self-control often involves suppressing some difficult emotions, as you keep your eye on the prize. Fortunately, mindful contemplation helps you to balance your feelings

ways to restore it. One option is comedy. A recent study found that people who watched funny videos were better at controlling their impulses later on.

Self-control uses up the brain’s energy reserves, meaning that you are more weak-willed when you are hungry. One study found that judges are more likely to make rash judgements before lunch for this very reason

The mind automatically associates guilt with pleasure – meaning that we find our vices even more enticing when we know we’re not meant to enjoy them. Conversely, a little guilt-free indulgence may just be the rest you need to help you maintain your resolve.

The bones in its hands and feet are curved, “spitting images” of the toes and finger bones that belonged to the ancient Australopithecus, Piper said. These hominids, such as the 3 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, had digits well-suited for climbing.

This species lived at the same time as humans with modern anatomy, who first appeared in the fossil record 200,000 years ago (or perhaps as long as 350,000 years ago). ″We continue to realize that few thousands of years back in time, H. sapiens was definitely not alone on Earth,”

Though these fossils are the oldest in the Philippines, evidence for habitation is even older; 700,000 years ago, ancient butchers on Luzon carved up a rhinoceros with stone tools. Which species did the butchering is unknown.

A few “mammal species you find on Luzon appear to have come from the mainland,” Piper said. The Asian continent is 400 or more miles away through the Luzon strait. But in the Middle Pleistocene, when glacial sheets locked up vast amounts of water, sea levels dropped by as much as 400 feet, Piper said.

“I would just say that when humans could see land or they could smell it or they knew the signs, that birds were coming from it, they sought it out,” he said. “That’s not a Homo sapiens trait. It’s something our ancestors and extinct relatives had.”

The cartoon version of evolution, in which a hunched ape becomes a tall and jaunty biped, suggests a journey with a destination. The reality is messier,

An island’s confines can rapidly spark evolutionary change; Charles Darwin saw this in finches’ beaks.

“Isolation plays games,” Potts said. Homo floresiensis showed anthropologists that an island could be an “odd little laboratory of human evolution,” he said. These bones reinforce that lesson.

“It’s beginning to look like the evolutionary process is really fluid,” Potts said. “And it’s surprising that it is so fluid where each species of Homo may actually be a history or a record.” The result is a fusion of the modern and ancient: molars that could be yours alongside toes with millions-year-old curves.

Fifteen years ago, Hawks said, anthropologists chalked up the worldwide success of Homo sapiens to our modern anatomy. These new discoveries, in far-flung corners, suggest exceptionalism is not built into our brains or skeletons.

“The archaeological record is now showing us that ancient human forms were much more adaptable, and I would say clever, than we imagined,”

“This isn’t ‘Flowers for Algernon,’ where, suddenly, we’re super smart and everyone else in the world is behind us.” Scientists are now plumbing genomes for other clues to Homo sapiens’ survival, looking at our metabolisms or resistance to disease, he said. “I’d say the doors have opened, and we haven’t figured out where they lead.”