Melvin Konner M.D. Ph.D.

The Official Website of Melvin Konner, M.D, Ph.D.

...Since the causes of human nature are not a one-way street, I also want to know how changes in our environment make their impact on us--how advances in biology and medicine change how we think about our lives. My knowledge and experience have often led me to comment publicly on medical ethics, health care reform, child care, child welfare, and other policy questions, and I will do that here as well.
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Posts Tagged ‘Darwin’

Human Nature in High Places

Saturday, August 14th, 2010 by Mel Konner

Statesmen understand human nature. Why not psychologists and social scientists?

Most psychologists don’t like human nature, or at least not the idea of it. Clinicians, life coaches, and corporate motivators dislike it because it implies unchangeability. Anyone who took college psychology knows how to modify behavior, from direct instruction to manipulative advertising.

And then, what fool surveying the huge variety of human personalities, needs, and tastes would dream of trying to characterize all that as one thing? Well, some fool might, but not the philosophers, evolutionists, historians and political leaders who have long used the phrase. They’ve always meant something complex, varied, and big-but not limitless.

 Barack Obama, for instance. (more…)

Darwin’s Digs

Sunday, October 18th, 2009 by Mel Konner

Portrait of the scientist as a college boy

Visiting Cambridge University this week, to speak in one of the countless conferences honoring Darwin’s anniversary year, I had a chance to see the rooms he lived in as a student there. He was at Christ’s College, (more…)

Darwinian News, Hot Off the Press

Sunday, June 7th, 2009 by Mel Konner

In the Darwin bicentennial, new insights into fossils, genes, birdsong, and cancer.

google-logo-fossil1The latest issue of Nature to land in my mailbox-the May 28th one-was not a tribute to Darwin in honor of his 200th birthday and the 150th of The Origin of Species; Nature has been there, done that. But it might as well have been another celebration for him, (more…)

Life Elsewhere

Monday, March 16th, 2009 by Mel Konner
Other planets surely harbor life. It’s only a question of time before we find it.

Kepler launchLast week the Kepler Mission blasted off into space—or as NASA nicely put it, “vaulted into the heavens on a column of thunder”—and within a few days passed the orbit of the moon. On March 12 its photometer was powered on, and as soon as it can be calibrated it will begin fulfilling the mission’s purpose: the search for other worlds.

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Lincoln and Darwin at 200

Sunday, February 15th, 2009 by Mel Konner

At the end of their second century, two strange, brilliant men shape our lives

February 12, 1809 was a great day in the history of the human species, since two of its best specimens took their first breaths that day on two sides of the Atlantic. Both those infants grew into odd boys.

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Evolution Revolution

Sunday, October 26th, 2008 by Mel Konner

Georgia: a fundamentalist backwater or a hotbed of evolutionary rebellion? Both.

In the past three days I somehow managed to give a lecture to medical students on medicine and anthropology, moderate a panel on evolutionary medicine, and conduct a seminar at a retreat for Emory Scholars–some of our most outstanding undergraduates–called "Religion, Science, Literature and Life."

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Sarah Palin: Evolutionary Psychology and Cultural Anthropology

Saturday, August 30th, 2008 by Mel Konner

McCain’s VP Pick Makes Darwinian and Boasian Sense

Sarah Palin takes aimShock and awe. That had to be one thought in McCain’s mind when he picked a little-known governor of Alaska–the state one pundit called an overgrown igloo–to stand a heartbeat away from his seat in the Oval Office, his age and cancer history be damned.
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Gene-Mining

Saturday, June 28th, 2008 by Mel Konner

Genes in chocolate trees, cancers, and sea water are confirming Darwin and changing the world.

I knew genomics had come of age when I heard they were sequencing the chocolate genome-or the tree chocolate comes from, anyway. That’s Theobroma (”food of the gods”) cacao, which is so beset by diseases that the world’s chocolate addicts, me included, could lose our fix.

(more…)


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