Tag: Sean Carroll’s Mindscape

Michael Tomasello on The Social Origins of Cognition and Agency

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 30 January 2023 | 1h 22m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Michael Tomasello about his book The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans. Argues that we developed agency and cognition and even morality in order to better communicate and cooperate with our fellow humans.

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Simon Conway Morris on Evolution, Convergence, and Theism

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 8 August 2022 | 1h 16m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Simon Conway Morris about his book From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds: Six Myths of Evolution. Makes the case for evolutionary convergence and adaptationism – even when there is a mass extinction, the resulting shake-up simply accelerates the developments that evolution would have made anyway. Also discusses the possible role of God in an evolutionary worldview.

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Brad DeLong on Slouching Towards Utopia

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 5 September 2022 | 1h 24m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Brad DeLong about his book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. Discusses the competing political and economic systems that dominated the “long 20th century” from 1870 to 2010, and how we managed to create such enormous wealth and still be left with such intractable problems.

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Ed Yong on How Animals Sense the World

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 20 June 2022 | 1h 09m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Ed Yong about his book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. Discusses examples of the different sensory modalities that animals have, from echolocation to direct sensing of electric fields, and considers what those different capabilities might mean for the animal’s-eye (and -ear, etc.) view of the world.

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Nick Lane on Powering Biology

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 23 May 2022 | 1h 25m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Nick Lane about his book Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death. Discusses the importance of the Krebs cycle to contemporary biology, as well as its possible significance in understanding the origin of life. The Krebs cycle is the sequence of reactions that functions as a pathway for energy distribution in aerobic organisms.

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Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 2 May 2022 | 1h 18m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Richard Dawkins about his book Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. Discusses the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why natural selection produces some but not others. Also discusses central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.

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Arvid Ågren on the Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution

Sean Carroll’s Mindscape | 21 February 2022 | 1h 25m | Listen Later | Podcasts | Spotify
Interview with Arvid Ågren about his book The Gene’s-Eye View of Evolution. Backgrounds the modern synthesis of Darwinian selection theory and population-oriented view of Mendelian genetics to explain evolution. Discusses the selfish gene view of evolution and group selection.

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