Fires have raged across southern Europe during the exceptional heat of this summer but in Greece, where they have been particularly severe and widespread, they caught the authorities by surprise. They have been occurring over weeks from late June in the forests of the north to Crete in the south. They are doubly troubling because of Greece's dramatic biodiversity — more than 25 per cent of an e...

This paper, abstracted from the final report of the Kampuchea Inquiry Commission, analyses the population losses in Cambodia prior to 1979 and goes on to describe some of the unwanted side effects of the international relief programmes in both Thailand and in Kampuchea. The paper concludes that various opposition movements to the present Vietnamese backed regime in Kampuchea have been strengthe...

On 13 March six men were admitted to intensive care at Northwick Park Hospital, London, after suffering severe reactions while taking part in a phase 1 clinical trial of an experimental drug in a research unit run at the hospital by US-owned Parexel International, a contract research company. Two days later, the story hit the front pages, as successive editions of the London Evening Standard an...

Individual success in group-structured populations has two components. First, an individual gains by outcompeting its neighbours for local resources. Second, an individual's share of group success must be weighted by the total productivity of the group. The essence of sociality arises from the tension between selfish gains against neighbours and the associated loss that selfishness imposes by d...

Problem: In the study of conflicts, both economists and evolutionary biologists use the concepts ‘tragedy of the commons’ and ‘public goods dilemma’. What is the relationship between the economist and evolutionist views of these concepts? Model features: The economics literature defines the tragedy of the commons and the public goods dilemma in terms of rivalry and excludability of the good. In...