How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address Final Things—eschatology—life after death and the ultimate transformation of the world? What are reincarnation and non-dual pure consciousness in Hinduism? What are rebirth and Nirvana in Buddhism?
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the ultimate essence of all things, the ground of being? What are transcendence, oneness, interconnectivity, ineffability? Compare Dao in Daoism to Brahman in Hinduism. Compare Wu in Daoism with Emptiness in Buddhism. Does God fit in?
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the perennial problems of suffering, ethics, ritual and contemplative practices? Why is suffering so important in Buddhism? Why karma in Hinduism? Why systems of nature in Chinese traditions?
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, and Hinduism address the essence of human sentience? What is consciousness? What is the self? What is qi? Do humans have souls or spirits? Are humans dualistic beings? Or pure souls/spirits?
How do Buddhism, Chinese traditions, Hinduism, and Shintoism address causality, consciousness, energies, God, ultimate reality? What is non- dualism? How is the world interconnected? How are metaphysics and morality related?
What could life be as we don’t know it? Three transitions in astrobiology. Non-life to life. Life to intelligent life. Intelligent life to technological civilization. For alien life, would Darwinian evolution hold? Fermi’s Paradox is profound: with at least 10^22 planets in the known universe, we find no evidence of alien life, anywhere, much less…
Race is obviously real—historically, socially, politically. What about biologically? We explore biological facts about race and their implications. What’s the relationship between color and race? Are human races subspecies of homo sapiens? Is race a “natural kind?” How to form a coherent theory of race?
Two big ideas in biology: the evolution of species via mutation, fitness and natural selection; and the embryological development of individuals, from fertilized egg to whole organisms. How do these two big ideas—“evo-devo,” as it’s called—relate? What novel ideas emerge?
What is information in biology? information is essential for analyzing data and testing hypotheses. But what is information in molecular genetics and neuroscience? What in evolution, population genetics and levels of selection? Why is computational biology transformational?
Philosophy of Biology has two sides: the process of science and the content of biology. We address key questions. What is the nature of life? How does evolution work and what are its challenges? How to consider race, sex/gender, cognition, culture, morality, healthcare, religion, alien life and alien intelligences.
Roger Penrose—mathematician, physicist, philosopher—was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics. We speak with Roger about our favorite, fundamental questions. What things exist? What is math and why does it work? What’s fundamental in the cosmos?
If life is a vast space of possibilities, then mathematics can engage with biology. Statistics analyze biological data, and mathematical models improve biological theories and reveal hidden commonalties. But could the mathematics of biology touch fundamental realities?