126 | David Stasavage on the Origin and History of Democracy

There is so much we don't know about our universe. But our curiosity about the unknown shouldn't blind us to the incredible progress we have made in cosmology over the last century. We know the univer...

25 Okt 20211h 27min

Games are everywhere, but why exactly do we play them? It seems counterintuitive, to artificially invent goals and obstacles just so we can struggle to achieve them. (And in some games, like Twister, ...

18 Okt 20211h 24min

Welcome to the October 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of que...

14 Okt 20212h 59min

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those law...

11 Okt 20211h 25min

Traditional physics works within the "Laplacian paradigm": you give me the state of the universe (or some closed system), some equations of motion, then I use those equations to evolve the system thro...

4 Okt 20211h 35min

In the question to understand the biology of life, we are (so far) limited to what happened here on Earth. That includes the diversity of biological organisms today, but also its entire past history. ...

27 Sep 20211h 14min

It's pretty clear that our genes affect, though they don't completely determine, who we grow up to be; children's physical and mental characteristics are not completely unrelated to those of their par...

20 Sep 20211h 25min

Welcome to the September 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of q...

16 Sep 20213h 38min