The Editor-in-Chief’s parting words

Parting Words: Trauma, Silence, and Survival

Words from the Editor

Reptile Conservation (ARC) has made many advances since our last published issue. A quick glance at this issue verifies again our continued commitment and resolve to publish a journal of the highest standards devoted exclusively to the conservation of amphibians and reptiles worldwide. To review let me elaborate further. The journal is now open access. This means anyone with an Internet connect...

20 Life Without Chiefs

Can humans exist without some people ruling and others being ruled? To look at the modern world, you wouldn’t think so. Democratic states may have done away with emperors and kings, but they have hardly dispensed with gross inequalities in wealth, rank, and power. However, humanity hasn’t always lived this way. For about 98 percent of our existence as a species (and for four million years befor...

Parting Thoughts

It has been said that there is no stronger urge than the urge to edit someone else's writing. Upon my retirement from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and concurrently from my position as co-editor-in-chief of Environmental Health Perspectives, I find that perhaps the stronger urge is not to edit but rather to editorialize. Therefore, I would like to provide some...

Parting with illusions in evolutionary ethics

I offer a critical analysis of a view that has become a dominant aspect of recent thought on the relationship between evolution and morality, and propose an alternative. An ingredient in Michael Ruse’s ‘error theory’ (Ruse 1995) is that belief in moral (prescriptive, universal, and nonsubjective) guidelines arose in humans because such belief results in the performance of adaptive cooperative b...