Charitable donations by private individuals and firms can help fund the Millennium Development Goals. What are the prospects for increasing donations for international development, whether from small-scale donors, the super-rich (as in the recent gifts by Bill Gates and Ted Turner), or the corporate sector? The paper starts by reviewing how large are the sums currently given in OECD countries (...

The motives underlying prosocial behavior, like charitable donations, can be related either to actions or to outcomes. To address the neural basis of outcome orientation in charitable giving, we asked 33 subjects to make choices affecting their own payoffs and payoffs to a charity organization, while being scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We experimentally induced a rewa...

InGameteDonorAnonymity andLimits ofNumbers ofOffspring:TheViews ofThree Stakeholders,1 Margaret K. Nelson, Rosanna Hertz, and Wendy Kramer, present empirical data on the attitudes of gamete donors,2 intended parents,3 and donor-conceived persons toward both donor anonymity and limits on the number of children produced using gametes from any one donor. Consistent with the assisted reproductive t...

Explaining the maintenance of sexual reproduction remains one of the greatest challenges in biology. The theoretical oddity of sex is based on at least three advantages that asexual organisms have over sexual ones: 1Asexuals, by not producing males, have a two fold advantage over sexuals, regarding the number of reproductive individuals; 2Sexuals have an evolutionary disadvantage over asexuals,...