In 1991, when I was a staff writer for Scientific American, I wrote a letter to Thomas Kuhn, then at MIT. I said I wanted to profile him for Scientific American and “tell readers how you developed your views of the process of science.” When he didn’t respond, I called. Kuhn was reluctant to do [...]

Evolutionary psychology, which traces what we do and think to instincts embedded into our ancestors by natural selection, is a dangerous meme. It can make even the smartest intellectuals say not-so-smart things. One is Steven Pinker, whose recent book The Better Angels of Our Nature (Viking Adult, 2011), while in many ways a monumental scholarly [...]

When I teach history of science at Stevens Institute of Technology, I devote plenty of time to science’s glories, the kinds of achievements that my buddy George Johnson wrote about in The Ten Most Beautiful Experiments (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008). George helps us appreciate what Galileo did with inclined planes, Newton with prisms, Pavlov with [...]

A recent Scientific American post on lethal chimpanzee violence has me mulling over an incident that took place two summers ago when I was surfcasting for bluefish on Nantucket Island. My younger brother Matt and I were fishing on Great Point, a sandy spit protruding from Nantucket’s northern end. I was hurling my fluorescent orange [...]

My girlfriend Valerie loves videos of animals, especially cute ones, like baby hippos, talking porcupines, lionesses that nuzzle baby antelopes. Wanting to share her delight, Valerie insists that I look at her computer to check out her latest discovery. Being a cold-hearted jerk, I typically mutter, “Yeah, that’s nice,” scarcely looking up from my own [...]

When predicting something that science will never do, it’s wise to recall the French philosopher Auguste Comte. In 1835 he asserted that science will never figure out what stars are made of. That seemed like a safe bet, but within decades astronomers started determining the chemical composition of the Sun and other stars by analyzing [...]

I’ve been bashing determinism and fatalism a lot lately, so I thought I’d write about an “ism” I like: optimism. For most of my career as a science journalist, I’ve been a pessimist, harping on all the goals that scientists will probably never attain. Researchers won’t discover a “theory of everything,” explain the origin of [...]

I spent this morning pondering whether I should attack neuroscientist Sam Harris for attacking free will. I thought, haven’t I spent enough time hassling Harris? I already knocked him, twice, for arguing in The Moral Landscape (Free Press, 2010) that science can help us discover moral principles as true—True with a capital T!—as heliocentrism or [...]

I met Christof Koch in 1994 at the first of series of big conferences on consciousness held in Tucson, Ariz. A professor at Caltech, Koch had helped popularize consciousness as a topic for serious scientific investigation—instead of windy philosophical supposition—through his collaboration with the great Francis Crick, who had already cracked the genetic code and [...]

Water, water, everywhere. But will we always have enough to drink? Wash away our waste? Grow crops and raise livestock? Some prominent progressives are warning that, as our population grows and our planet warms, water will become increasingly scarce, and humans will inevitably start fighting over it. War-correspondent-turned-antiwar-firebrand Chris Hedges expressed this idea during a [...]