Tim Radford reassesses the independent scientist’s groundbreaking body of writing. Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence James Lovelock Allen Lane (2019) [He developed] a sustained and developing argument, in the face of sometimes dismissive criticism, that recast Earth as, in effect, a superorganism. Lovelock’s Gaia theory states that, for much of the past 3.8 billion years, a […]
Forget the Anthropocene: we’ve entered the synthetic age
An Anthropocene epoch requires one kind of psychological adjustment. A synthetic age demands something considerably more. One fact about our time is becoming increasingly well-known. No matter how far you travel, no matter in which direction you point, there is nowhere on Earth that remains free from the traces of human activity. The chemical and […]
Biological and Cultural Evolution
Six Characters in Search of an Author An EDGE Original Essay By Freeman Dyson In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, […]
What Saliva Reveals About North America
Anticipation of the near future gene census to understand the human gene pool as our common wealth. What do you do with 770,000 tubes of saliva collected from over 3 million AncestryDNA customers? Ancestry scientists have an unusual answer: Create a ground-breaking map of North America’s history-based diversity using the genetic data from the analysis […]