Steve Jones

In the Genetic Toyshop

April 23, 1998 Issue

Clone: The Road to Dolly and the Path Ahead

by Gina Kolata

The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and remaking the World

by Jeremy Rifkin

I write as a clone, the son of a clone, and one of the few British citizens legally entitled to commit incest. A clone, of course: we are all one of those, for the billions of cells that we contain are—each one of them—copies of the fertilized egg that made …

The Set Within the Skull

November 6, 1997 Issue

How the Mind Works

by Steven Pinker

If you want to find schizophrenia, go to a psychology department. Not among the staff (although some do seem to hear voices inaudible to the rest of us) but within the subject. It has gone from describing varieties of religious experience to censusing them, from phrenology to scanning brains and …

Go Milk a Fruit Bat!

July 17, 1997 Issue

Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality

by Jared Diamond

Two of the memorably worst lines of English poetry, composed in 1799 by one John Hookham Frere: The feather’d race with pinions skim the air— Not so the mackerel, and still less the bear. Hookham Frere’s insensitivity to bathos is impressive; but however inferior his verse it has …

Crooked Bones

February 6, 1997 Issue

Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution

by John Evangelist Walsh

“You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull.” …

Not Cricket

A Letter from the December 19, 1996 Issue

Up Against the Wall

October 17, 1996 Issue

Dinosaur in a Haystack: Reflections in Natural History

by Stephen Jay Gould

FULL HOUSE: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin