Are you a war pessimist? Odds are you are. For almost a decade now, I’ve been asking people if they think war will ever end. I’ve surveyed thousands of people, young and old, liberal and conservative, hawks and doves, male and female. Almost nine times out of 10, the answer to my question is “No,” [...]

In Remaking Eden (Harper Perennial, 1998), geneticist Lee Silver envisioned a future in which humanity has split into two species: “Naturals,” the poor slobs who muddle along with the genes that nature gave them, and the “GenRich,” who can afford to boost their physical and mental talents via genetic engineering. Silver warns that over time, [...]

In my classes, I often ask my students to wrestle with what I call damned-if-you-do-or-don’t dilemmas, which offer no easy solutions. Every choice would pose certain risks and violate one valued principle or another. We often must choose what we deem to be the “least bad” option, and hope things work out. Research involving the [...]

What’s the point of the humanities? I mean, in addition to supplying jobs for humanities teachers? I am a faculty member within the College of Arts & Letters, a.k.a. CAL, of Stevens Institute of Technology, a university dedicated primarily to engineering and the hard sciences. And so naturally I and my CAL colleagues—who include professors [...]

I just started teaching my spring classes, and on the first day a student asked me if my work as a science journalist had taken me to any cool places. I said that in 1985 I rode a trolley into a tunnel at the Nevada Test Site in which a nuclear bomb would be detonated [...]

Driving through my hometown recently, I passed half a dozen neighbors holding antiwar signs. One declared, “BRING ALL OUR TROOPS HOME,” with “ALL” underlined. I honked and gave them a thumbs-up. Like many doves, I’m glad that the U.S.—after eight bloody years and the deaths of 4,500 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis—has finally [...]

In 1995, I critiqued evolutionary psychology in “The New Social Darwinists,” an article in the December issue of Scientific American. Afterwards I got a scathing letter from Robert Trivers, whose work on altruism, parent-offspring conflict and other tendencies helped lay the foundations for evolutionary psychology, which like its precursor sociobiology attempts to explain human thought [...]

Environmentalism, like politics in general, is depressingly polarized these days. On one side, alarmists like the activist Bill McKibben, climatologist James Hansen and blogger Joe Romm warn that if we don’t cut way back on fossil fuels—now!—civilization may collapse. On the other side, deniers, including most of the current GOP candidates for president, won’t even [...]

I just realized today is Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year. To celebrate it, I’m posting the following column, adapted from something I wrote for The New York Times nine years ago: Three years ago, my wife, who is a pagan, decided that our family should celebrate Winter Solstice. To be honest, I [...]

What does it say about particle physics that the Higgs boson has generated so much hullaballoo lately? Physicists at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland have reportedly glimpsed “tantalizing hints” of the Higgs, which might confer mass to quarks, electrons and other building blocks of our world. Not actual “evidence,” mind you, but “hints” of [...]