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Five mass extinctions have occurred since life began on Earth. Some 99.9 percent of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct. Are humans causing the next mass extinction? And what does evolutionary theory predict for the world we will leave to our descendants?
In evolutionary terms, sex is more important than life itself. Sex fuels evolutionary change by adding variation to the gene pool. The powerful urge to pass our genes on to the next generation has likely changed the face of human culture in ways we're only beginning to understand.
PBS Evolution - The Mind's Big Bang
Fifty thousand years ago, something happened -- the modern human mind emerged, triggering a creative, technological, and social explosion. What forces contributed to that breakthrough? Where might our power of mind ultimately lead us?
PBS Evolution - The Evolutionary Arms Race
Survival of the fittest: Raw competition? Intense cooperation? Both are essential. Interactions between and within species are among the most powerful evolutionary forces on Earth, and understanding them may be a key to our own survival.
PBS Evolution - Great Transformations
What underlies the incredible diversity of life on Earth? How have complex life forms evolved? The journey from water to land, the return of land mammals to the sea, and the emergence of humans all suggest that creatures past and present are members of a single tree of life.
PBS Evolution - What about God?
Of all species, we alone attempt to explain who we are and how we came to be. This final episode explores the struggle between science and religion. Through the personal stories of students and teachers, it offers the view that they are compatible.
PBS Evolution - Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Part 1
PBS Evolution - Darwin's Dangerous Idea - Part 2
Why does Charles Darwin's "dangerous idea" matter more today than ever, and how does it explain the past and predict the future of life on Earth? The first show interweaves the drama of Darwin's life with current documentary sequences, introducing key concepts of evolution.
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From The Times, August 8, 2009
Harriet Harman has extolled the strengths of women as political leaders, the London School of Economics has flagged the autonomy of women as public company directors, and now Goldman Sachs has highlighted the rising spending power of women in the world’s fastest-growing economies, while considering what this could mean for the stock market.
The US investment bank’s take is engagingly straightforward: a narrowing of gender inequalities and a widening of the middle classes in countries ranging from Brazil to Bangladesh will have profound effects on global patterns of consumption and saving over the next decade or so. It claims that women are increasingly wielding the purse rather than just carrying it — and that means households will not only spend more, they will also spend differently.
So what’s the evidence? Goldman contends that most of the key indicators in the so-called Bric nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and the 11 next-most important emerging economies point towards increasing parity between the sexes.
In education, girls now fare nearly as well as boys in primary and secondary school enrolment, with China, Egypt, India and Iran having made especially strong gains over the past decade.
In employment, the number of countries where more women are participating in the labour force now exceeds those where their proportion is declining. In Pakistan, for example, females aged between 15 and 64 make up 21 per cent of the working population, against 11 per cent in 1990. Equally, women are working less in the lower-paying and less productive parts of the economy, like subsistence-level agriculture, where they once dominated. Agriculture now accounts for half of female employment in Turkey, for example, against three quarters in 1990.
In terms of health, female life expectancy has improved dramatically: women born today in Bangladesh, Egypt and Indonesia can expect to live ten years longer than those born in the same countries in 1990. Conversely, fertility rates have tumbled: the average number of children born per woman has fallen by 30 per cent or more in most of these countries in the past 20 years, and by nearly 60 per cent in the case of Iran.
In politics, 20 per cent or more of parliamentary seats in China, Mexico, Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam are now held by women — more than in the US and much more than in Japan.
Further, Goldman finds encouragement in a range of legal and cultural changes. Women’s standing in property and inheritance laws, divorce rights and access to capital is steadily improving. The age at first marriage is rising, especially in India, while adolescent fertility rates are falling, reflecting the impact of girls’ education. Meanwhile, female-headed households are becoming more prevalent.
So how does this progress translate into purchasing power? For a start, says Goldman, the sexes tend to spend differently. Whereas men use up more of their income on their own consumption — alcohol, cigarettes and high-status consumer goods — women are more likely to buy products and services for their families, including food, healthcare, education, clothing and personal-care items.
In the UK, for example, women are responsible for more than three-quarters of household spending on childcare, food and education, but less than half the spending on tobacco and about one-quarter on alcohol — and what applies in developed countries holds true in their developing peers.
But women also tend to save more than men — a precautionary measure that Goldman in part attributes to their higher economic vulnerability. On average, every one percentage point increase in a woman’s share of household wages boosts aggregate savings by one quarter of that amount.
The broader picture is that the global “middle class” — defined as annual income of between $6,000 (£3,600) and $30,000 — is set to grow from 1.7 billion people today to about 3.6 billion by 2030, around 85 per cent of whom will live in the 15 countries that Goldman has tracked.
Critically, given that women account for three-quarters of all spending in consumer markets, their growing independence is likely to produce incremental growth in consumption on top of the increased demand that can be pinned on rising income alone.
What will women buy? Higher-quality and protein-intensive food; healthcare, which will benefit spending on diagnostic technology, therapeutic equipment and private health insurance; other financial products, such as credit cards and savings vehicles; education, which augurs well for textbook publishers; and consumer durables and clothing. According to Goldman, those London-listed companies most exposed to growing gender equality include HSBC, Prudential, Standard Chartered, Cadbury, Kingfisher, Tesco, Unilever and GlaxoSmithKline.
But the bank also suggests that women’s negative influence on alcohol expenditure will be more than offset by the broader trend of rising incomes — which means Diageo makes the list, too.
Torture is wrong. The deliberate infliction of pain is a repugnant practice that produces deeply suspect information. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, have denied that British intelligence agents use torture or collude in its use by other states. That is the only reputable position for any British government. But it prompts the additional question whether Britain’s security services should even consider intelligence gained from the use of torture by other states. Moralising gets the discussion only so far. There are malign people overseas who do not have Britain’s interests at heart. And while the security services ought heavily to discount information gained from torture, they have to consider it nonetheless.
Physical pressure in interrogations was last an issue in British politics during the peak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The security services used harsh methods of sensory deprivation against prisoners. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain was guilty of inhuman and degrading treatment of the internees, though not of inflicting suffering so cruel that it met the definition of physical torture.
Britain’s security services are now in a quandary: they accept more exacting standards while contending with a still more ferocious terrorist enemy. The methods of today’s terrorists, who plant bombs in trains and bars, are familiar from the Provisional IRA’s campaigns. But the millen- arian aims of these Islamist terrorists are new. And because the activities of al-Qaeda and similar groups are international, other states are involved in trying to interdict them. The security services of those states may not be scrupulous in adhering to the rule of law.
The physical abuse of terrorist suspects is a brute fact of international politics, about which this country can do little. The question then arises what use should be made of information gained on foreign soil.
The immediate response of any civilised person to torture is revulsion at the practice and determination to have no part in inflicting it. That must be the policy of this country. Britain’s security services must not use torture and must not tacitly contract out such interrogation techniques to other parties. The campaign against Islamist terrorism will last for decades, even on the most hopeful assumptions. If a civilised state allows temporary departures from its norms, these are likely to become persistent.
The Government should also acknowledge publicly that information gained this way by other states will be treated sceptically. A prisoner who suffers torture is liable to say anything and implicate anyone if it will spare him further pain. There must always be a presumption that intelligence gained from such methods is of low value. Exposing the use of torture by nominally allied though autocratic states would also put pressure on its perpetrators.
But it would be incredible to say that torture cannot ever yield valuable information. To treat intelligence sceptically does not mean you must disregard it completely. Jamal Beghal, a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist, provides an instructive example. He was detained in Dubai in October 2001, and subjected to beatings over weeks. He eventually gave information that prevented an attack on the US Embassy in Paris.
That intelligence was appallingly won; it saved lives nonetheless. A civilised state must abjure torture and explain why information gained that way is heavily qualified. But a democracy must work with all available intelligence. Refusing to do so offers the comfort of moral certainty at the expense of public safety. It is the type of stance described by Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant ethicist, as “perfectionism without pity”.
