The “dangerous” realisation that there is no top-down meaning; that our actions aren’t found to be important by anyone (or One) other than ourselves. This idea destroyed and continues to destroy many ideas I embraced (and that I encounter). Based on this, one must ask what follows. One...

Investigating what is right or wrong often leads one into territory demarcated as a No-Man’s Land, to places forbidden, to territory thought too harsh, horrible or “dangerous” to explore. I am not smart enough to be a discoverer of these countries, but more a cartographer, mapping out...

What our sense connectedness has to do with the osmosis of rationality and intuition   “Some of the most creative leaps ever taken by the human mind are decidedly irrational, even primal. Emotive forces are what drive the greatest artistic and inventive expressions of our species. How...

The idea of being a parent should be thought through more carefully. When we assess the idea, it is clear that, given the current conditions of the world, there is no reason to create more children   I proposed this argument in 2010 and received vitriolic replies, which brought more heat...

It started when I was a child and has never stopped since then: the desire to know things and to question. I am in no sense a gifted person; this desire exists in every child in the world. But what stops many from following their natural curiosity is forceful indoctrination from their parents...

What clues to the way we live today will archaeologists unearth in the millennia to come? What will endure, and what will fade away?   When humans in the far future are piecing together a picture of the primitive civilisation of 2012, archaeology will surely be the best way to go about...

New research reveals more clues as to why our ginger brethren seem, well, just a little bit different. Specifically, redheads appear to feel pain differently. While redheads are more sensitive to the cold, they appear to have a higher pain threshold than the rest of us. A recent study showed...

The more optimistic we are about the future of our species the better we can focus on today’s challenges In the 21st century, it can feel as if the future has already arrived. But we’re only getting started. It’s fashionable to be pessimistic about our prospects, yet our...

Primates, philosophers, and how subjectivity ensures the absolute truth of our existence.   What does it mean to be human? Centuries worth of scientific thought, artistic tradition and spiritual practice have attempted to answer this most fundamental question about our existence. And yet...

You might someday be much, much smarter than you are now. That’s the hope of neuroscientists focused on understanding the basis of intelligence. They have discovered that the brains of people with high IQs tend to be highly integrated, with neural paths connecting distant brain regions,...

In November 2011, NASA launched its biggest, most ambitious mission to Mars. The $2.5 billion Mars Science Lab spacecraft will arrive in orbit around the Red Planet this August, releasing a lander that will use rockets to control a slow descent into the atmosphere. Equipped with a “sky...

More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci observed a particular relationship between the size of a tree’s trunk and the size of its branches. Specifically, the combined cross-sectional areas of a tree’s daughter branches are equal to the cross-sectional area of the mother branch. However,...

A Manifesto for Curiosity Curiosity. We’re all born with it. Albert Einstein dubbed it “holy,” Alistair Cooke called it “free-wheeling intelligence.” It’s that piquing force that nudges us to try it again, explore it some more, poke at it, question it and turn it inside out. From...

From coquetry to selfishness, or what the Sea of Wealth has to do with the City and District of Love   Nineteenth-century ideals of womanhood and beauty expressed as much about women as they did about the society in which they were germinated. At a time of radical sociocultural and...

Comparatively few people are privileged to get within a foot or two of the physical remains (actual or cast) of ancient or historic human ancestors… at least, not without the necessary scientific credentials and sanctions reserved exclusively for the scientists who are responsible for...

Caring for the Earth and for our environment seems to have been a notion dear to humankind since the dawn of time. Even to this day, many of those societies that are deemed “primitive” for having retained elements of a lifestyle that most human societies abandoned millennia ago exhibit, to...

A Large Hadron Collider for Human Civilization   As if re-creating the origins of the universe or reverse engineering the human brain weren’t hard enough, European scientists are also launching a brand new video game. The latest project in massive simulation is called the Living Earth...

A chapter excerpted from The Quantum and the Lotus   The Interdependence and Nonseparability of Phenomena The concept of interdependence lies at the heart of the Buddhist vision of the nature of reality, and has immense implications in Buddhism regarding how we should live our lives. This...

“If men cease to believe that they will one day become gods then they will surely become worms.” – Henry Miller Technology is an evolutionary force, sling-shooting the species forward as never before. We are fast approaching a new renaissance, an age of wonder and radical possibility. A...

When this year’s Miss USA contestants responded to a question about the value of teaching evolution in public schools, one thing was clear: There is a raging debate between Religion and Evolution, and these women had firmly planted themselves on the Bible’s side. However, the snag in this...

Hollywood is wrong about aliens. They don’t have oddly shaped heads, bulging eyes or even an eery green hue. Dimitar Sasselov is pretty convinced of that. He’s not even sure we’ll know them when we see them. Prof Sasselov, an astrophysicist, thinks that if life exists...

This year marks the seventh “billion-person” milestone in the planet’s history. On or around Oct. 31, 2011, the world’s 7 billionth person will be born, the United Nation estimates. Even more staggering is that of the 7 billion people on Earth, about 1.4 billion of them...

What’s the Big Idea? Language is so central to everything we are and do from toddlerhood on that unless you are a) a linguist or b) right now raising a toddler it’s easy to forget just how amazing our capacity to produce and decode speech actually is. For the most part, language just...

The sociology professor says we are moving away from seeing ourselves as ‘normal’ humans as we increasingly embrace technological and medical advances – if we can afford them Steve Fuller holds the Auguste Comte chair in social epistemology in Warwick University’s...

He has already revealed that early humans interbred with Neanderthals and discovered a whole new type of hominin from its DNA alone. Now Svante Pääbo is setting his sights on even more exotic discoveries. He tells Alison George why he thinks the bombshells will keep coming Last year you...

Peter Millican explains why we still study David Hume‘s 300-year-old work   He wrote copiously on many things, including economics, politics, psychology, religion, and especially history. Yet few historians – either students or academics – now read his monumental History of...

Pharaoh Khufu intends to secure his riches beyond the grave, and into the afterlife. He captures the greatest architect known in his kingdom, and forces him – through a threat to his entire people – to build him an impenetrable tomb: a Pyramid no thief can plunder. The architect sets to...

Some of the deepest questions humanity has grappled with are interwoven with the story of our frail humanity against the dramatic splendor of nature. It begins with the Big Bang and moves on to show swirling vortexes of exploding gas depicting the birth of stars, unformed planets, the shaping...

“We have confidence in our science-based civilization and think it has tenure. In so doing, I think we fail to distinguish between the life-span of civilizations and that of our species. In fact, civilizations are ephemeral compared with species. Humans have lasted at least a million...

Roger Highfield, an Editor, New Scientist; Coauthor, After Dolly  Everyone is familiar with the struggle for existence. In the wake of the revolutionary work by Charles Darwin we realized that competition is at the very heart of evolution. The fittest win this endless “struggle for life...

Timothy Leary and Buckminster Fuller called themselves “performing philosophers,” using the power of media communication to spread galactic-sized ideas about the state of the species in relation to the wider universe. Leary used to say, “In the information age, you don’t teach...

Humanity’s cognitive toolkit would greatly benefit from adoption of “interbeing,” a concept that comes from Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In his words: “If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in [a] sheet of paper. Without a...

The United Nations announced this week that the world population is expected to reach 10 billion by the end of the century—and then just keep on growing (more details in the pdf). That’s a big increase from the previous estimate of a peak of 9 billion that would then stabilize or...

The night sky is a time machine. Look out and you look back in time. But this “time travel by eyesight” is not just the province of astronomy. It’s as close as the machine on which you are reading these words. Your present exists at the mercy of many overlapping pasts. So...

Impending Apocalypses in Our Not Too Rosy, Not Too Distant Future These aren’t about World War III, some nuclear accident, or even the deadly impact of a meteor. If only we were so lucky. No, these apocalypses are the ultimate consequences of our actions, the culmination of decades, even...

The function and reason of human rights are similar to the function and cause of evolution. Human rights help develop and maintain functional, self-improving societies. Evolution perpetuates the continual development of functional, reproducible organisms. Just as humans have evolved, and will...

When people can learn what others think, the wisdom of crowds may veer towards ignorance. In a new study of crowd wisdom — the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average...

During the seven years that I worked as a management consultant, I spent a lot of time trying to look older than I was. I became pretty good at furrowing my brow and putting on somber expressions. Those who saw through my disguise assumed I made up for my youth with a fabulous education in...