Category Archives: Science & Technology

CHARLIE GARD AND OUR MORAL CONFUSIONS

July 20, 2017 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the New York Times on the contrasting cases of Charlie Gard and Noel Conway: Usually, a decision about a child’s best interests involves two alternative futures. Is he better off with his mother or father after a divorce? Is it in his interests to stay with parents who may be having difficulties, or to be taken into care? . In Charlie Gard’s case, though, the choice is between a possible future and a […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: assisted dying, charlie gard, death, ethics, law

THE WONDROUS BEAUTY OF INNER LIFE

March 12, 2017 by Kenan Malik

The Wellcome Image Awards are for images of living processes and structures using sophisticated microscopy and photography techniques – photographs, 3D models and digital illustrations. They are often extraordinarily beautiful. The 2017 winners have just been announced. Here is a sample of the work. The full set of images are at the Wellcome Image Awards website. . Vessels of a mini-pig eye A 3D model of a mini-pig eye using CT scanning and 3D printing. Created by ophthalmologist Peter Moloca, vascular biologist Ruslan […]

Categories: Photos, Science & Technology • Tags: photography, wellcome image awards

EMBRYO RESEARCH AND HUMAN BEING

July 6, 2016 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the article I wrote last month for the International New York Times on the debate about time limits for embryo research. (I cannot publish my INYT articles on Pandaemonium until a month after it is published in the newspaper.) It was originally published under the headline ‘Rethinking Embryo Research Rules’. Few areas of scientific investigation are more controversial than embryo research. Yet, few are more brimming with potential. The field promises valuable insights into early […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: abortion, embryo research, infanticide, peter singer, women's rights

ARBITRARY LINES AND EMBRYO RESEARCH

June 15, 2016 by Kenan Malik

An excerpt from my latest column for the International New York Times, on the debate about time limits for embryo research. It was published under the headline ‘Rethinking Embryo Research Rules’. It is a debate with important consequences not just for embryo research, but also for wider debates over abortion and infanticide. At the heart of all this lies a central question: Where do we draw the line between a blob of cells and a human being with moral status? […]

Categories: Human, Science & Technology • Tags: abortion, embryo research, infanticide

WHAT DOES SCIENCE TELL US ABOUT RACE?

November 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I took part last week in a discussion at the Royal Institution in London entitled ‘What does science tell us about race and racism?’. The other participants were geneticist Aoife McLysaght, sociologist Heidi Mirza, and the writer and broadcaster Adam Rutherford, who chaired the event. None of us gave a formal talk as the evening was more a free-flowing conversation. But here are roughly the points I was trying to make about the complex relation between scientific research and the reality […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: genetics, race, racial science

THE IRRATIONAL FEAR OF RADIATION

July 30, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is an essay by the science writer and broadcaster Geoff Watts who argues that irrational panic about radiation can cause more harm than radiation itself. It was first published in the terrific online science magazine Mosaic. Bad Gastein in the Austrian Alps. It’s 10am on a Wednesday in early March, cold and snowy – but not in the entrance to the main gallery of what was once a gold mine. Togged out in swimming trunks, flip-flops and a bath […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: chernobyl, fukushima, irrationalism, nuclear power, panics

BATTLES OVER ANCIENT BONES AND MODERN IDENTITIES

June 24, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Last week a paper in Nature by Rasmussen et al threw new light on the question of the genetic origins of Kennewick Man, a 8,500 year old skeleton whose bones were discovered in July 1996 by two teenagers in the Columbia River, near Kennewick, Washington State, in north-west USA. It was a rare find, nearly a complete skeleton, and one of the oldest human discovered in North America. The bones became the focus of an intense, fractious battle, both scientific and […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: anthropology, cultural ownership, cultural repariation, david hurst thomas, human remains, identity politics, indigenous culture, kennewick man, nagpra, native americans, racial science, unesco, vine deloria

ON FREEDOM AND FREE WILL

May 21, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This review of Julian Baggini’s Freedom Regained and John Gray’s The Soul of the Marionette is published in the summer 2015 edition of New Humanist. From Tunisia to Tibet, from Russia to Kurdistan, from Syria to the Paris office of Charlie Hebdo – the quest for freedom is central to people’s lives, a quest so vital that many are willing to give their own lives to ensure its success. For many intellectuals, however, freedom is but an illusion, a self-serving […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Human, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: determinism, free will, freedom struggles, gnosticism, human agency, john gray, julian baggini, materialism, morality, sam harris

HOW TO DO HISTORY (AND HOW NOT TO)

April 8, 2015 by Kenan Malik

This is a guest post by the historian and science writer Philip Ball, who draws on the discussion around physicist Steven Weinberg’s new history of science To Explain the World, and his list of best popular science books,to explore what it means to think historically, and why many scientists who attempt to write histories of their subjects fall short. A version of this essay was first published on Philip’s blog Homunculus. My thanks to Philip for allowing me to publish […]

Categories: History, Science & Technology • Tags: history of science, philip ball, popular science, steven weinberg

ON SCIENCE, MORALITY AND BEING HUMAN

March 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I took part in a discussion at the Cambridge Science Festival last week on ‘The science of morality’. Others taking part were Ray Tallis, Pater Cave and Alasdair Coles. I have here mashed up my introductory and concluding comments. Every year, I give a lecture to theology students on why I am an atheist. It is essentially a primer on why we don’t need God to explain the universe or to ground morality. And in talking of morality, I take […]

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: atheism, human nature, humanism, morality, religion, sam harris

STILL TO BOLDLY GO?

March 9, 2015 by Kenan Malik

There have been many tributes to Leonard Nimoy and to Star Trek in the wake of his death last week. Few have captured the spirit of wonder and discovery represented by the series or the role of Spock as ‘the conscience of Star Trek‘ as well as this essay by the writer Leigh Phillips; nor the loss of that spirit over the past three decades, and the growth of anti-modernist sentiment, of philistinism and of hostility to Enlightenment ideas. ‘The Romulans […]

Categories: Culture & Books, Science & Technology • Tags: enlightenment, jonathan israel, nasa, radical enlightenment, space travel, spinoza, spock, star trek

WHAT’S IMMORAL ABOUT ALLEVIATING SUFFERING?

February 23, 2015 by Kenan Malik

My latest column for the New York Times is on the debate about ‘three parent babies’, published in the NYT under the headline ‘The Three-Parent Baby’s First Step’. Here are the opening paragraphs. You can read the full article in the NYT. The British Parliament can be an archaic, backward-looking institution, wedded to tradition, and not known for taking a revolutionary stance. Yet its members have just made a groundbreaking decision, one that no other legislature has so far been willing to […]

Categories: Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: biotechnology, britain, ethics, mitochondrial transfer, playing god, three parent baby

EBOLA AND PANIC

August 4, 2014 by Kenan Malik

Ebola is a vicious disease. And the latest outbreak in West Africa has wreaked a terrible toll. It has also created considerable panic and scaremongering, particularly in the West, about worldwide pandemic. In Britain, the government convened a meeting of COBRA, its emergency response committee, worried about the threat of the virus spreading to the UK. In America, Donald Trump even suggested that US health workers helping contain the spread of the virus in West Africa who contract the disease […]

Categories: Science & Technology • Tags: africa, ebola, panics

THERE BE MONSTERS

July 11, 2014 by Kenan Malik

The philosopher John Gray, in his review of my book The Quest for a Moral Compass, claimed that I ‘airbrush, Soviet-style’ all ‘repugnant and troubling elements of rationalism’ that I ‘prefer not to know’ about ‘sleazy side of rationalism’, such as racial science or the history of slavery. It is a strange claim given that the thread that runs through virtually all my work has been the paradoxes of modernity, and the contradictions within rationalism and liberalism. Hence two books of […]

Categories: History, Human, Race & Immigration, Science & Technology • Tags: apes, blumenbach, buffon, edward tyson, great chain of being, kenan malik's books, linnaeus, racial science, scientific classification

INVISIBILITY MADE VISIBLE

July 8, 2014 by Kenan Malik

I took part last week in a discussion on BBC World Service’s The Forum on the scientific, philosophical and cultural meanings of ‘invisibility’ with Philip Ball and Susan Blackmore. You can listen to the broadcast (for a year) on the BBC website; it is also downloadable as a podcast. . The image is from Anthony Gormley’s 2007 show ‘Blind Light’ at London’s Hayward Gallery.

Categories: Kenan Malik, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: invisibility, philip ball, susan blackmore