Essay | Winter 2017
Evolution and the Purposes of Life
On biology’s unasked questions about the goal-directed activities of organisms
Contributing Editor
Stephen L. Talbott
Stephen L. Talbott, a New Atlantis contributing editor, is a senior researcher at The Nature Institute in Ghent, New York, where he leads the Biology Worthy of Life project. His most recent book is Organisms and Their Evolution: Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life (The Nature Institute, 2025).
He is also the author of Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines (O’Reilly, 2007), The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst (O’Reilly, 1995), and co-author of Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering (University Press of Kentucky, 2008). Mr. Talbott also serves as editor of In Context, the Nature Institute’s twice-yearly hardcopy journal.
Before coming to the Nature Institute, Mr. Talbott did software work and technical writing for engineering organizations of computer manufacturers, ran a family organic farm in Oregon, and completed academic work in philosophy.
In The New Atlantis
Essay | Winter 2011
Essay | Summer 2010
Correspondence | Winter 2008
Essay | Winter 2007
Essay | Spring 2005
Essay | Winter 2004
Books
- Devices of the Soul: Battling for Our Selves in an Age of Machines (O’Reilly, 2007)
- The Future Does Not Compute: Transcending the Machines in Our Midst (O’Reilly, 1995)
Other Publications
- “The Deceiving Virtues of Technology,” Netfuture, November 15, 2001
- “On Forgetting to Wear Boots,” Netfuture, February 1, 2001
- “The Many Voices of Destiny,” Netfuture, February 16, 2000
- “Computers, the Internet, and the Abdication of Consciousness,” C.G. Jung Page, 2000
- “Can Technology Make the Handicapped Whole?,” Netfuture, July 21, 1999
- “Between Discordant Eras,” Archetype, September 1998
- “Meetings with a Snake,” Research Bulletin of the Waldorf Education Research Institute, March 1997"