Editorial Gananath Obeyesekere, a man larger than life, passed away today. His death marks the end of an intellectual force that reshaped the very foundations of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and the critique of
Editor’s note: This article, “Spontaneous Revolutions: Darwin’s Diagrams of Plant Movement,” was originally published in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. If you wish to reuse it, please see https://publicdomainreview.org/reusing-material/. It was
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How do we organize elements in a system? One way is through the lens of hierarchy, which presupposes levels, a top-down ranking of elements. Another is homoarchy, which permits one (and only
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by Durga Stephen J. Campbell’s Leonardo da Vinci: An Untraceable Life is not just another biography of the Renaissance polymath; it is, in fact, an anti-biography. Unlike the countless hagiographies that perpetuate
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For two centuries, archaeologists, historians, and social scientists studied human societies in search of the origins of hierarchy—a layered structure where power and privilege are concentrated in the top layer. Realizing that
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New frontiers The discourse on the emergence of Homo Technicus, as examined in Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope and The Human Spirit by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, and Craig Mundee, brings to the fore the epochal shift
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In the lush forests of southern Brazil, a group of researchers is delving into one of the most fascinating and mysterious prehistoric phenomena in South America: massive caves that appear to have
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No one knows why we dream. It stands to reason that dreams have some purpose because nearly everyone dreams, and we dream 3 to 6 times every night. People typically have several
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Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use
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The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises
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We used to have “balloon” debates in school: The hot-air balloon is losing height and, to avoid disaster, people must be jettisoned. To avoid this fate, everybody must justify why they should
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