Human Energy Podcast

Paul Rainey is director of the Department of Microbial Population Biology at the Max Planck Institute. Rick Michod has a lab at the University of Arizona. Both study single-celled organisms that evolve into simple multicellular forms under certain conditions. Importantly, those conditions can be manipulated in the lab. Paul’s lab studies a bacterium called Pseudomonas fluorescens that you eat on y...

Athena Aktipis is the director and principal investigator at the Cooperation and Conflict Lab at Arizona State University, where they “explore how cooperation and conflict shape life, from human societies to cellular interactions”. Michael Levin is principal investigator at the Levin Lab at Tufts University, where they study, among other things, “bioelectrical signals that make up part of the lang...

Deborah Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University who “studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, and how these networks evolve in relation to changing environments.” The Gordon Lab at Stanford researches collective behavior in many forms, “such as emergence, self-organization, superorganism, quorum sensing, artifici...

On his website, Pete Richerson introduces himself by stating, “My main passion is cultural evolution.” It’s not only his personal passion — along with frequent collaborator Robert Boyd, he’s one of the pioneers in the field. Together, Richerson and Boyd developed the theory of gene-culture coevolution, also called dual inheritance theory. Understanding cultural evolution is central to understandin...

Tyson Yunkaporta is the author of Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. His short bio explains that “his work focuses on applying Indigenous methods of inquiry to resolve complex issues and explore global crises.” He is married to Megan Kelleher, who “is investigating whether blockchain technology can interface with an Indigenous knowledge system – and conversely whether an Indige...

When we think of psychology, it’s likely the first image that comes to mind is of a therapist in consultation with an individual patient. To explore the psychological aspects of the noosphere from a biological perspective—in keeping with Teilhard’s “plausible biological interpretation of human history” — we felt it was necessary to look at the psychology of human groups as organisms as well. Scien...

Josiah Ober writes about the evolution of democratic governance in classical Greece — the era from roughly 500-300 BC. His books on the subject include The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece and Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice. Why is Science of the Noosphere interested in learning about the rise democracy in Greece? One reason is that a concern voiced by many people r...

Central to our mission at Science of the Noosphere is an exploration of the modern scientific perspective on how the noosphere evolved and expanded over time, from its origins in small paleolithic human groups to our emerging global civilization. That is the central subject of this conversation between David Sloan Wilson and two experts from different fields, who approach these questions in intere...

The concept of humanity merging with technology to form a global superorganism began to take shape in Gregory Stock’s mind in the 1960s, though his book Metaman wasn’t published until 1993. He was unaware of Teilhard’s writings on the evolution of the Noosphere until he was well along in development of his own ideas, but when he did read Teilhard, he was impressed by his prescience: I was going, “...

Eörs Szathmáry is best-known in the world of evolutionary biology for a book he co-wrote with John Maynard Smith, titled “The Major Transitions in Evolution”. It was the first comprehensive explanation of the processes through which life has increased in complexity over billions of years, from its origin as the simplest protocells, to prokaryotic cells, eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms, e...