Tom Murphy

Inspired by author Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, I compare modernity to a prison whose bars few inmates can even detect. Academia is its own sort of prison.

Much of science is in the service of modernity, producing remarkable short-term advantages for humans generally at the expense of the rest of the community of life.

Frequent exposure to roadkill prompts my wife to say that this is why we should all live in cities. Leave the hinterlands to wild creatures.

Among economic stress, affordability, and climate change dread, is smartphone use another factor in the downward trend in fertility rates?

We’re taught that without rigid legal systems society would collapse into chaos. But for most of human history, people relied on communal norms, not codified law, while the rise of written rules, hierarchy, and possessions cleared the way for today’s sixth mass extinction.

Why do people with access to the same facts arrive at radically different conclusions about the future? Physicist Tom Murphy reflects on an impasse with Dave Murphy over modernity, ecological limits and humanity’s place in the living world.