Robert Chernomas, Gregory Chernomas, and Ian ...

In this episode we discuss the paper "The Unreasonable Likelihood of Being: Origin of Life, Terraforming, and AI" (arXiv, 2025) with Robert Endres. Paper Abstract: The origin of life on Earth via the spontaneous emergence of a protocell prior to Darwinian evolution remains a fun ...  Show more

While we tend to think of biological individuals in terms of paradigmic cases – a dog, a starfish, a bacterium – our ordinary criteria for distinguishing one individual from another are inadequate for making these distinctions in general. If a starfish can literally split itself ...  Show more

How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you'd expect.

That's the conclusion that <a href= "https://cos.northeastern.edu/pe ...

From Skepticism to Competence: How American Psychiatrists Learn Psychotherapy (U Chicago Press, 2024) offers an examination of how novice psychiatrists come to understand the workings of the mind - and the nature of medical expertise - as they are trained in psychotherapy. While ...  Show more

Your emotions do not reflect an irrefutable truth. Psychologist Kristen Lindquist explains how important that is for connecting across cultures.When it comes to obtaining an objective understanding of the world around us, emotions may not be as reliable as we think, explains Kris ...  Show more

WIRED FOR WHY: How We Think, Feel and Make Meaning. (Self-Published 2025) spans eighteen chapters exploring everything from how we manage to stay alive against all odds, to why language separates us from other species, to whether death might be a metaphor. It's a journey through ...  Show more