From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The laws of cause and effect which govern our universe don't care about our beliefs – so we'd better find out what those laws are and try and align our beliefs to them to eliminate guesswork.
Biology doesn't need to be obeyed, but it always needs to be considered. If we discuss gender differences, we cannot act as if biology doesn't exist. We live at a time where a group of people – for ideological reasons – have made it clear that they think we can shove biology aside, that everything is culturally constructed, and we can act like biology doesn't exist. That's not going to work, that's not how the world works.
A regional war in say, South Asia, which involved as few as one hundred nuclear bombs would result in firestorms in their urban centres that would put so much smoke and particulate into the atmosphere that the earth would be covered in a cloud that would reflect sunlight back into space and reduce global temperatures but two to three degrees for several years. This would kill most food crops on the planet, resulting in massive famines and starvation.
Truth is an aspiration which none of us can ever know that we have attained. Nobody has a pipeline to the truth; nobody is imbued with divine revelation. We seek truth through institutions like science, journalism, governance, justice systems and record keeping.
We are literally right now living through one of the biggest revolutions in human history, certainly in medicine, and most people aren't even aware that it's about to happen.
I've known many individual monkeys and apes, and I'm struck by how much diversity and gender diversity there is which I have been ignoring. We always look for typical behaviours… a typical male does X… a typical female does Y. We overemphasise the typicality of men and women. If we start looking in primates, we'll almost certainly find the same sort of gender diversity we find in humans.
Life is a masterpiece of complexity. We will never understand, in a near future, the extraordinary complexity of the simplest forms of life.
MIT was one of the places where molecular biology was born, and I could participate in this enterprise with my own hands.
Consciousness lies beyond the framework of quantum mechanics. It must be regarded as a primitive of the universe itself, not merely of brains. If consciousness is a universal primitive, then the entire totality of what exists is conscious and desires self‑knowledge.
The role of science is to educate us about our reality – and we shouldn't be afraid of it. Once we recognise reality, we can adapt to it. If you don't recognise reality, you act irresponsibly, and your actions won't match the environment.
Open-source evidence is essentially public information available to anyone and can be traced back to its original source. We've always maintained transparency in our methodologies and the step-by-step processes we employ.
For the first time since life began, a single animal is utterly dominant: the ape species Homo sapiens. Evolution has equipped us with huge brains, stunning adaptability and brilliantly successful technical prowess.