It’s demography stupid!

The protestors on the streets of London, New York, Madrid and Tel Aviv do not understand the economic and political problems they face.  The developed world is suffering from a demographic crisis.  Railing against financiers and the richest 1% misses the underlying cause of the crisis: the costs of paying for their own parents' and grandparents' retirements.

First Class Mutations

Beasts on a plane!

It almost feels like a fool’s errand to isolate something that can help us make light of ourselves from the litany of improbable happenings taking place in X-Men: First Class. Any film with a sapphire coloured beast piloting a stealth fighter jet will struggle to poignantly frame questions about the evolution of humanity. But if you squint a little, the band of ‘mutant’ heroes, whose variety of supernatural traits are powered by a single mutation in the fictitious ‘X gene’, actually epitomise a core mechanism central to the field of population genetics.