The New Atlantis - A Journal of Technology & Society

We need creative breakthroughs in energy, medicine, and transportation. How can we plan for them? Great inventions are often unpredictable and serendipitous — and so curiosity-driven research remains essential for technological progress. EUROfusion

The Decent of Man

Essays on Evolution, Altruism, and Cooperation

Michael Ruse

Darwin Made Me Do It

Our evolved nature provides us with the resources to live morally decent lives, even if the theory of natural selection undermines the project of moral philosophy.

Kevin N. Laland

On the Origin of Cooperation

Both cultural and genetic evolution worked together to help make us the most cooperative species on earth.

Wikimedia

The University the King Built

by Waleed Al-Shobakky

A Saudi experiment in education aims to solve the West’s science malaise — and become a global research powerhouse.

Aditya Prabaswara (CC)

Must Science Be Useful?

Letters from scientists and policy experts on our widely read article “Saving Science,” with a response from Daniel Sarewitz.

Morgan Ray Schweitzer

Till Tomorrow

by Adam Roberts

Three recent books go a long way toward humanizing the abstract “time” of physicists.

by Joseph E. Davis

Why do we have an “epidemic” of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder? The common explanations miss the underlying reasons our society is disposed to medicalize ADHD.

by James K. A. Smith

Social science’s big flaw isn’t relativism or the idea that social situations shape human action. The real arguments are over competing visions of the Good — and how the pursuit of the Good shapes our motivations.

by Aaron Rothstein

The emphasis on patient satisfaction can turn doctors into little more than customer-service providers. Reform in medicine must bring both better curing and caring.

by Murillo Pagnotta

The concept of information has become central to modern biology, especially to the field of genetics, where DNA is often taken to be simply an organism’s instruction manual. But, Murillo Pagnotta argues, much “info-talk” is faulty or oversimplified — a failing with implications for how we think about nature, nurture, growth, and evolution.

Evolution and the Purposes of Life

by Stephen L. Talbott

Modern biology has tried to abolish purpose from living things — even as biologists implicitly attribute purposes and goals to molecules, genes, and the evolutionary process of natural selection. Stephen L. Talbott exposes the hidden assumptions behind the view that purpose in nature is just an illusion, and shows why purpose cannot be ignored or explained away.

Wokeness and Myth on Campus

by Alan Jacobs

The standard critique of college protests cries “free exchange of ideas!” But the students are motivated by social needs more fundamental than the ones affirmed by liberal norms.

Middlebury College