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Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
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Treating our bodies in a manner consistent with how they evolved
Modern culture is intrinsically polygamist. The culture of sexual choice is precisely nothing but polygamy, polygamy without marriage, if you will. We live in a culture of multiple sexual and romantic and marital partners. According to the biologist's view, if we are indeed inherently ...
What's the Latest Development? Currently available on the online journal ArXiv is a paper in which its authors describe their application of Moore's Law -- which states that computers increase exponentially in complexity over a set period of time -- to the evolution of life on Earth. With this ...
What's the Big Idea? Sex isn't such a big deal, says Christopher Ryan, author Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality , which he coauthored with Cacilda Jethá. So why do we let sex get in the way of all the other important things? The point of marriage, after all, is to grow ...
In the climactic scene of Woody Allen's clever and self-consciously juvenile film Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask , Allen's character is a sperm cell who is waiting for his big moment. Allen's character is not happy with his assigned fate. Nor does he get to decide ...
In Voltaire's book Zadig, Or Fate, the titular character says that time “consigns to oblivion whatever is unworthy of being transmitted to posterity, and it immortalises such actions as are truly great.” In Midnight's Children, time is central as the title itself indicates. Salman Rushdie describes ...
Men have stronger sexual desires than do women…Women are the more monogamous gender…Homosexuality is an unnatural sexual behavior. Sexual beliefs, like these, are so widespread that we have collectively come to view them as being embedded in our biology. Cross-cultural data collected from pre ...
A couple of weeks ago a Dollars and Sex commenter wrote that the “origin of marriage was to create a legal contract by which a man could acquire a female slave.” Interesting point. Is there an economic story that explains the origin of this most-debated-of-all-institutions? The first humans ...
Scientists have discovered four new species of chameleon in Northern Madagascar, including the Brookesia micra, which now has the distinction of being the world's tiniest known lizard. Speedy runners, these chameleons are nearly impossible to catch during the day, so scientists waited until night ...
Scientists of all stripes have for years investigated the proclivities and behaviors of our primate cousins in order to gain insight into human behavior, and a recent study of rhesus macaques has added two more shared traits: the enjoyment of pornography and the worship of celebrities. Here’s ...
What's the Big Idea? Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology. According to Bill Nye, aka the science guy, if grownups want to "deny evolution and live in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that’s fine, but don ...
What's the Big Idea? On September 11, 2001, John Horgan saw the smoke where the Twin Towers had once been visible in the New York skyline, and he wondered what he would tell his kids, aged 6 and 8. In 2012, Horgan has a powerful message: his children will live to see a world without war ...
What's the Big Idea? The loss of a human limb is a tragedy. We know that once they’re gone, mammalian arms and legs can't ever be restored. But if you cut off a salamander's leg - or tail - it will reappear in just a few weeks. The enigma of amphibian organ regeneration has puzzled scientists ...
What's the Big Idea? Gone are the good old bad old days in which Ethics was the lonely elective in B-school that no one elected to take. We've all heard about the new wave of humanitarian businesses – so numerous in fact that special legal designations have been created to incorporate the idea ...
Editor's Note: Over the next 12 days, Big Think will be running excerpts from all the lessons that make up our first online course, Great Big Ideas. During this period, we are offering discounted subscriptions to Big Think readers. You can now subscribe and gift this course for $99. Please sign ...
The paleolithic diet movement is starting to take hold in Europe, as the first restaurant serving food fit for a caveman opened in Berlin. The restaurant, a former brothel called Sauvage Berlin, only offers food that was available over ten thousand years ago, before the age of agriculture. That ...