348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency
"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., becoming stronger through exercise) that would then be inherited by its descendants. This is a different story than the one ultimat ...Show more
347 | Andrew Guthrie Ferguson on How Your Data Will Be Used Against You
In the 18th century, philosopher Jeremy Bentham suggested the Panopticon as a model of a prison where inmates could be constantly observed by just a single prison guard. Although his original idea was never built, the word has come to indicate any system of social control through ...Show more
Modeling evolutionary processes goes way beyond the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium we all learned in biology class. Natural selection comes from many sources like resources availability, mate preferences, competition. Modeling entire populations of organisms of different species is t ...Show more
Synthetic Biology to Become a Major Economic Driver, Part 2 – Amy Webb : 914
Dr Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist, professor at the University of Chicago, and an author. Has ideology hijacked academia? In fields like evolutionary biology, the data should speak for itself, but what happens when scientific findings clash with cultural taboos? How do ...Show more
Agustín Fuentes, "Sex Is a Spectrum: The Biological Limits of the Binary" (Princeton UP, 2025)
Being human entails an astonishingly complex interplay of biology and culture, and while there are important differences between women and men, there is a lot more variation and overlap than we may realize. Sex Is a Spectrum offers a bold new paradigm for understanding the biolog ...Show more