Everybody knows that the great Scottish-Enlightenment philosopher, Adam Smith (1723–1790), popularized the concept of the “invisible hand” in his masterwork, The Wealth of Nations (1776). Most of us also know that the invisible hand works better than any human hands could possibly do. That is, we know that the free market, left to its own [...]

In the first four installments of this series, I looked at evidence leading us to reject the machine metaphor and Darwinism as an inadequate theoretical perspective on life. This evidence mainly consisted in examples of unexpected plasticity, or adaptive capability, in whole-organism behavior. In installment five, I began exploring an alternative view of life as [...]

Rosemary Redfield, from the University of British Columbia in Canada, has published an interesting paper on revamping the university introduction to genetics course. She suggests that the course needs to be changed from the traditional historical perspective to one that begins with a foundational knowledge of modern genetics, and then transitions into analysis. Her view is [...]