May 21, 2019
The Man Who Re-Invented DNA: Steve Benner on Hachimoji DNA
Iconoclast, polymath, renegade and world-class chemist, Steve Benner engineered a new breed of DNA with 8 nucleotide options instead of four. This exponentially increases its data capacity and it’s called Hachimoji DNA. What are the implications of this? Steve sounds off about the conflict between research and advocacy, and...
May 1, 2019
Ways to Go Beyond the Status Quo in Science: Rupert Sheldrake in Conversation with Perry Marshall
While working in plant research at Cambridge, Rupert Sheldrake became dissatisfied with existing materialistic theories of science. This led him to develop his theory of morphic resonance. Sheldrake has become a leading proponent of switching from a reductionist scientific paradigm to a holistic paradigm. In this conversation, we discuss scientific...
April 24, 2019
Ken Wilber, Involution, and Evolution as a Function of the Divine: Frank Visser and Perry Marshall in Conversation
Frank Visser discovered Ken Wilber's work in 1982 and contacted him in 1995 by fax, after which they became friends. Frank has written the first popular academic book on Wilber: "Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion" (SUNY 2003).In this conversation, we discuss Frank’s departure from Ken Wilber’s insistence that life itself...
April 18, 2019
“Darwin Devolves” Review – Perry Marshall and Bill Cole discuss Michael Behe’s controversial new book
Michael Behe's "Darwin Devolves" asks: Has Darwin solved the design problem in biology? Behe says absolutely not, and backs his position with detailed examples. Furthermore, nobody has really solved the famous problem of "irreducible complexity" that Behe described in "Darwin's Black Box." But Perry Marshall insists Behe has still omitted...
April 11, 2019
“It Keeps Me Seeking” – Interview with Andrew Briggs and Andrew Steane at the University of Oxford
Two world-class physicists from Oxford, together with philosophy professor Hans Halvorson from Princeton, integrate faith and science in their new book "It Keeps Me Seeking." Andrew Briggs specializes in nanomaterials and quantum information, and Andrew Steane made a key discovery which was necessary to make quantum computing possible. I sat...
February 8, 2019
The U.S.-China-AI Collision Course
Former president of Google China, Kai-Fu Lee, describes the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence (AI) technology in China. He discusses what AI is and is not capable of and how AI challenges us to get much more clarity about what it means to be human. His new book AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley,...
November 20, 2018
A Sacred Space is Never Empty: Interview with Victoria Smolkin
Many have claimed atheism was only incidental to the operation of communism under Lenin, Stalin, and the old Soviet Union. Victoria Smolkin's new book "A Sacred Space is Never Empty" is the first book to closely examine the role of atheism in Russia. She explains why the Soviet government promoted...
October 2, 2018
The Central Dogma and the Weismann Barrier: Does Genetic Information Flow Both Ways? Denis Noble Interview
For a century, the belief was that genetic information built organisms, never the other way around. A new paper by Denis Noble definitively proves otherwise. The paper is called “Central Dogma or Central Debate.” In this interview, Denis explains the revolution that is going on in genetics.
September 18, 2018
David Quammen Interview – The Tangled Tree: A New History of Life
David Quammen's book "The Tangled Tree: A New History of Life" tells the story of evolution through the eyes of Carl Woese, a not-terribly-famous but truly ingenious revolutionary who flipped evolution on its side, literally 90 degrees. He upended Darwin's famous tree of life, showing that genes can come from...
September 11, 2018
Claude Shannon: A Mind at Play Interview with Authors Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni
Claude Shannon made our modern digital world possible. He wrote a landmark paper called "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" which gave birth to computer networks, cell phones, compact discs, digital recording and video. It also lent huge insights into genetics and biology. Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni have written the...