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Janet Browne – Darwin

    A Biography

    Many Minds | 03 July 2026 | 1h 19m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify

    Interview with Janet Browne about her book Darwin: A Biography. Traces Darwin’s intellectual journey from his formative Beagle voyage, highlighting how Lyell’s geology inspired his understanding of deep time and gradual change, which he then applied to biology. Discusses his work on species from pigeons and barnacles to plants and worms, his relationship with Alfred Russel Wallace, and the reception of Darwin’s later controversial works on human evolution and emotion. Notes Darwin’s remarkably forward-thinking ideas on plant intelligence and animal agency.

    Book cover

    Matt Longo – The Invisible Hand

      Many Minds | 7 May 2026 | 1h 10m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
      Interview with Matt Longo about his book The Invisible Hand: Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Human Hand Function. Discusses the human hand, distinguishing between its visible physical structure and the invisible hand – its complex representation in the brain. While the hand’s five-digit anatomy is a primitive trait shared across many species, its true power lies in cortical magnification and precise neural control. Explores co-evolution with culture, the rubber hand illusion, and pathologies like phantom limbs. Argues that the brain’s ability to abstract goals and adapt to tools defines our unique manual capabilities.

      Douglas H. Erwin – The Origins of the New

        Princeton UP Ideas Podcast | 6 April 2026 | 0h 46m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
        Interview with Douglas E. Erwin about his book The Origins of the New: Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life, Culture, and Technology. Traces how thinkers from Darwin’s time to the present day have sought to discover the driving mechanisms of evolutionary novelty. Makes the case for separating novelty from innovation, showing that novelty involves the emergence of unique characteristics, while innovation concerns the success of those characteristics over time. Outlines a unifying conceptual framework for these dynamics, demonstrating how they have shaped everything from the evolution of avian feathers and flight to the creation of human language and advances in digital computing.

        One of more than 75 episodes on evolution.

        Jessica Riskin – The Power of Life

          Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 23 March 2026 | 1h 15m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
          Interview with Jessica Riskin about her book The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Rehabilitates Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, contrasting his active mechanism with the passive model of organisms as externally designed machines. Explains that Charles Darwin shared Lamarck’s view that the “power of life” and inherited habits drive evolution. Discusses how later neo-Darwinists suppressed Lamarckian ideas for ideological reasons, including eugenics. But modern science – through epigenetics and the extended evolutionary synthesis – is rediscovering how behaviour and internal agency shape life.

          Rob Dunn – The Call of the Honeyguide

            Many Minds | 11 March 2026 | 1h 08m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
            Interview with Rob Dunn about his book The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life. Discusses the idea of mutualism – in which two or more species benefit each other – and how human life is sustained by mutualisms all the way down; considers how the benefits of mutualism are measured – whether in terms of biological fitness, or longevity, or pleasure; the best-documented cases of humans collaborating with other species to find honey or hunt; how our liaisons with yeasts have shaped human history – and how we might even say that yeasts domesticated us; our relationships with dogs and cats and the benefits we get from them; what it would mean to more fully embrace our mutualisms to create “a less lonely future.” Touches on cheese, worms, and maggots; bread, beer, and honey; face mites and armpits; parasites, inquilines, and commensals; what sauerkraut does to our immune systems; honeyguides and dolphins, leopards and house cats; morbid curiosity; and how dogs might give us a kind of access to our subconscious.

            See other episodes with Rob Dunn. I loved this and will be looking for more.

            Matthew Cobb – Crick: A Mind in Motion

              Ground Truths | 7 December 2025 | 0h 59m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
              Interview with Matthew Cobb about his book Crick: A Mind in Motion. Discusses Francis Crick’s life and work, his transition from physics to founding molecular biology; his collaborative discovery of DNA’s structure with James Watson; his later pursuit of the biological basis of consciousness; his Crick’s controversial personality, including his eugenics views; and his reliance on intense intellectual collaborations to challenge scientific dogmas and shape the modern understanding of life and mind.

              Vicky Oelze: The Diets of Great Apes, and the Evolution of Human Diets

                The Dissenter | 20 June 2025 | 1h 20m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
                Interview with Vicky Oelze about the diets of great apes and the evolution of the human diet. Discusses how we can study human diets through archaeological and fossil remains; the diets of other great apes, and what we can tell about our last common ancestor and the earlier hominins; the human diet in the Paleolithic, and whether there really is a “paleo diet”; and the changes to our diet brought about by agriculture.

                Matt Ridley – The Evolution of Everything

                  Free Thoughts | 27 November 2025 | 0h 41m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
                  Interview with Matt Ridley about his book The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge. Explains that much of the order we see in the natural world and in human culture and society is the result of unplanned, bottom‐up, emergent evolution. Discusses the bias to thinking that the world operates by design, from the top down; whether this has its origins in our evolutionary psychology; and whether it is reflected in how we view history.

                  I’ve been re-reading this recently. It is a delight – one of my all-time favourite reads. See also the EconTalk and The Seen and the Unseen interviews.