Daniel Rourke /stream

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With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences.

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With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences.

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Could future humans evolve to have venom glands? In new research, scientists close a long-open door by causally linking early salivary glands with what eventually became venom glands in many animals.

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This is a piece about failures. My failures, mostly, as a thinker and a scholar, but also the failure of my field and the failure of all of us to think…

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On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch. Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told.

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My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title…

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Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings. To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use,…

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For David Reich, research can be a harrowing experience. The 44-year-old Harvard University geneticist says he now goes to bed terrified he will wake up to find his team’s recent, stunning…

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Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

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From Modern Mythology: Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to…

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The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.

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Ever since Microsoft's chatbot Tay started spouting racist commentary after 24 hours of interacting with humans on Twitter, it has been obvious that our AI creations can fall prey to human…

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“ Ido plan to bring back my father,” Ray Kurzweil says. He is standing in the anemic light of a storage unit, his frame dwarfed by towers of cardboard boxes and…

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The Anthropocene renders visible new architectures of time and matter, both sedimenting existing genealogies of global-world-space and radically reorganizing an imagination of the scope and material duration of what the human…

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Perhaps you’ve noticed, amid the hot invective and dry mockery of daily events in your social-media feeds, reports of the glaciers melting at each pole.

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My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title…

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Joachim Neander was a 17th-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and…

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Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological hardware – you’re using it now. Science and technology seem to be converging, from several directions, on the possibility of similar intelligence in non-biological systems.

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In 1984, the philosopher Aaron Sloman invited scholars to describe ‘the space of possible minds’. Sloman’s phrase alludes to the fact that human minds, in all their variety, are not the…

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Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s…

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When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with…

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With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences.

Bookmark

With this declaration in The Order of Things (1966), the French philosopher Michel Foucault heralded a new way of thinking that would transform the humanities and social sciences.

Bookmark

When humans started to tame dogs, cats, sheep, and cattle, they may have continued a tradition that started with a completely different animal: us.

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This is a piece about failures. My failures, mostly, as a thinker and a scholar, but also the failure of my field and the failure of all of us to think…

Bookmark

My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title…

Bookmark

As I was being wheeled out of the post-anesthesia care unit at Mount Sinai, three incisions across my abdomen freshly glued shut and fentanyl warm in my veins, a nurse bustled…

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For David Reich, research can be a harrowing experience. The 44-year-old Harvard University geneticist says he now goes to bed terrified he will wake up to find his team’s recent, stunning…

Bookmark

Preeminent scientists are warning about serious threats to human life in the not-distant future, including climate change and superintelligent computers. Most people don't care.

Bookmark

From Modern Mythology: Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to…

Bookmark

The end of the world is a growth industry. You can almost feel Armageddon in the air: from survivalist and ‘prepper’ websites (survivopedia.com, doomandbloom.net, prepforshtf.

Bookmark

Researchers who studied the bones of Homo floresiensis, a species of tiny human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores in 2003, say their findings should end a popular theory that…

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“ Ido plan to bring back my father,” Ray Kurzweil says. He is standing in the anemic light of a storage unit, his frame dwarfed by towers of cardboard boxes and…

Bookmark

Perhaps you’ve noticed, amid the hot invective and dry mockery of daily events in your social-media feeds, reports of the glaciers melting at each pole.

Bookmark

We have learned how to manipulate the code of life. Why this hasn’t received more attention is beyond me. Synthetic Biology is a multidisciplinary field that often defies definition. Yet despite…

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Joachim Neander was a 17th-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and…

Bookmark

Human-level intelligence is familiar in biological hardware – you’re using it now. Science and technology seem to be converging, from several directions, on the possibility of similar intelligence in non-biological systems.

Bookmark

Among the many stories that can be told about the origins of the environmental movement in the West, perhaps the most common is that it began with the emergence of Romanticism…

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Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s…

Bookmark

When my daughter was little, we played a game on the way to her preschool called Count the Dog Poo. It was a game about counting, as you would play with…

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Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about transhumanism. Need a primer? Catch up here. Charles…