There’s no grand plan and no reason why nature shouldn’t, like the rest of us, occasionally make terrible mistakes.
To claim attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is genetic is to dangerously simplify the nature of the condition.
One hundred and twenty-five years ago, a virtually unknown German country doctor called Robert Koch stood before the Physiological Society of Berlin and announced that he had discovered the cause of tuberculosis (TB). This was probably the most astonishing and significant statement in the history of medicine. Yet the disease he discovered still kills one to two million people per year.
Why do we bother with sex? I don’t, of course, mean just the physical act. Artificial insemination made that dispensable several centuries ago. We expend a lot of time and energy finding, seducing and mating with our mate, and as a method of making babies it just doesn’t seem to make economic sense. New research backs the idea that sex is a kind of Epsom salts for genomes, purging them of errors.