Essays
The game of folly
Have you ever thought about human affairs as games? Imagine you can play games with our serious stuff like work, politics or science, but also with some less serious stuff like food and love. This […]
Philosophy
Philosophy
The Astrobiological Cat
Published in the December 2019/January 2020 issue of Philosophy Now A little-known magazine, Bioastronomic News, published, in one of its 1995 issues, a memorable debate between two famous scientists. The echo of the debate still […]
Philosophy
Flora or Mona Lisa?
Published in the August/September 2019 issue of the Philosophy Now magazine The boundaries between the parts and the whole are almost non-existent on the canvases of the Renaissance painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527-1593). Arcimboldo composed portraits […]
Biology
The Honeybee Algorithm
In the philosophy of science there is a segment, not so familiar, but with sufficient identity that it deserves the name: evolutionary epistemology (EE). One of the goals of EE is to explain how biological […]
Biology
Cosmic “Looney Tunes”
We suffer from the feeling of cosmic loneliness. Enrico Fermi (1901-1954), one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, summed up our geeky nature by asking a simple question: Where is everybody? All predictions […]
Philosophy
Rock’n’roll is dead but Mr Tambourine man is not
Dedicated to Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) an epitome of a rebel Lynn at Boston University c. 1980; Boston University Archives (courtesy of Dorion Sagan) The exuberant rebellion of youth against all sorts of conformity, ordinarily […]
Biology
Technical intelligence of insects
Is the man technically the most intelligent species on the planet? Judging by our technologies, from the Internet through building skills to the military industry, medicine and artificial intelligence, there is no doubt that Homo […]
Biology
Riders on the storm
Welcome to my blog! I am a professional scientist with over 25 years of working experience at Leiden, St Andrews, Cambridge and Brunel universities. I’m interested in biomolecules, cells, organisms, how organisms form societies, and […]