Hunter–gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists

Hunter-gatherers have less famine than agriculturalists.

The idea that hunter-gatherer societies experience more frequent famine than societies with other modes of subsistence is pervasive in the literature on human evolution. This idea underpins, for example, the 'thrifty genotype hypothesis'. This hypothesis proposes that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were adapted to frequent famines, and that these once adaptive 'thrifty genotypes' are now respons...

Were Early Agriculturalists Less Healthy than Food-collectors?

Do children have one third less peripheral vision than adults?

The following report is a case study example of how problematic information can invade and percolate through the literature on forensic human factors and ergonomics. Initially, a highly doubtful assertion was used to bolster an argument made in a legal case of wrongful death. The assertion was supported through reference to a number of cited works. When the trail of evidence was pursued, howeve...

Less Than Perfect Procedure

G iven the high prevalence of coronary artery disease in Western countries, selection of the optimal therapeutic strategy for individual cardiac patients has become an issue of utmost costbenefit importance. During the past two decades, large clinical trials have established the respective roles of medical treatment versus coronary artery bypass surgery in the management of patients with corona...

Less Would Have Been More1

Stephen Jay Gould, remarkable paleontologist and revered popularizer of science, died of cancer on May 20, 2002. With his death, he passed into the history that he loved; a history, as he well knew, whose mills grind exceedingly fine. Those mills have started work on his writings, just as he ruminated memorably over books by Lamarck, Cuvier, Goethe, Geoffrey St. Hilaire, Darwin, Weismann, de Vr...