Items to share (25 February)

• Fascinating extract from Robert Trivers' "Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others" (2011)

• And slightly related: Matt Ridley on how internet anonymity removes inhibitions.

• Bryan Appleyard on Rupert Sheldrake, a heretical biologist who nevertheless poses some challenging questions. (Sheldrake's site)

• It's taken a long time (13 years or more) for Jerry Fodor to review two books by Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin, but it's a platform for an interesting discussion (and rejection) of "psychological Darwinism".

• Another mind and brain piece: V S Ramachandran on what neurology can tell us about human nature.

• "The idea that the self can be split into body and mind is at the root of psychology, but there is no laboratory test, questionnaire or brain scan that tells us this – it is a product of our culture." Vaughan Bell briefly discusses alternative views.

• Dan Meyer's exploration of how text-books could develop when freed from the constraints of size and weight and printing; it's about maths teaching, but also applies much more generally.

• And a selection of pieces, largely by or about Stephan Collini, on what universities are for.  Here he is interviewed for Times Higher Education. Here he is in conversation with Laurie Taylor on Radio 4. Here is his book reviewed in the Guardian, and here in the Independent.  And coincidentally, it appears, here Jeffrey Williams surveys the emerging field of which Collini's book is a part, "critical university studies".

• Now back to something sensible.

...And on to something completely different. Another of Adam Curtis' quixotic takes on recent history.