Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.

In fact, everywhere in the world there has been a flux between big and small societies. Big political units are constantly being formed, later to fragment. The individual pieces try to pull apart, and then they join together again. One sees that in Europe: There have been unifications and then dissolutions and reunifications. So in the long run, it's 10,000 steps toward amalgamation offsetting 9,999 steps toward falling apart again. In businesses and industries, I would guess that's also true.

All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.

Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.

Bird taxonomy is a difficult field because of the severe anatomical constraints imposed by flight. There are only so many ways to design a bird capable, say, of catching insects in mid-air, with the result that birds of similar habitats tend to have very similar anatomies, whatever their ancestry. For example, American vultures look and behave much like Old World vultures, but biologists have come to realize that the former are related to storks, the latter to hawks, and that their resemblances result from their common lifestyle.

I'd rather spend my leisure time doing what some people call my work and I call my fun.

African cavalry mounted on rhinos or hippos would have made mincemeat of European cavalry mounted on horses. But it couldnt happen.