Jessica Riskin

Great Adaptations

Turtles All the Way Up

The idea that living beings have no free will might sound scientific today, but it remains as dogmatic as it has always been.

Every Creeping Thing

In his late writings and correspondence, Charles Darwin was thinking about how mortal beings strive to make what they can of themselves.

Name Dropping

A Sort of Buzzing Inside My Head

Whether ChatGPT passes the Turing Test is a less troubling question than what Alan Turing meant by “intelligence.”

A Poisonous Legacy

Two new books reveal the story of Stanford University’s early years to be rife with corruption, autocracy, incompetence, white supremacy, and murder.

‘Why Biology Is Not Destiny’: An Exchange

An Evolving View of Inheritance

“Instead of aiming for purity, science should aspire to self-awareness and engagement in a larger project of understanding.”

Why Biology Is Not Destiny

In The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Harden disguises her radically subjective view of biological essentialism as an objective fact.

Nature’s Evolving Tastes

In a new collection of essays on Darwin’s Descent of Man, a number of scientists claim that human and animal cultures emerge from the “purposeless process” of natural selection. Darwin himself said the opposite.

When Engineers Were Humanists

During the Renaissance, mechanical inventions served as a medium for experimental thinking about all aspects of the cosmos.

Just Use Your Thinking Pump!

What is the scientific method, and when, where, and how did it become, as the kids say, a thing?