Now
Forthcoming: a quartet. The pre-volume, We Are a Black Species, is being posted on Substack; the trilogy How Blackness Made Us Human — Black Genesis, Black Genius, Soccer — follows.
The essays
These pages are from 2009, kept unchanged so links to them still work. What I think now is the quartet above.
- Smart brains — thank not only large size but also your prolonged childhood.
- Bipedality, dexterity and speech/song make us human — and amongst animals uniquely skilled.
- Vowels and Consonants — every word we say is "phonetic". No one knows why.
- Syntax — even Chomsky is mystified as to its origin.
- Science — there is more to rational persuasion than valid deduction.
- Crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis — when the gut mistakes microbial friend for microbial foe, problems arise.
- Autism — science has failed to find an explanation.