Steven Rose was the first professor of biology at the Open University, where he taught for several decades. His many books include The Chemistry of Life, The Conscious Brain, The Making of Memory and, with his wife, Hilary, Alas, Poor Darwin: Arguments against Evolutionary Psychology, Genes, Cells and Brains: The Promethean Promises of the New Biology and Can Neuroscience Change Our Minds? They were among the founders of the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, established, like the OU, in 1969. He died in July 2025 at the age of 87.
As a young researcher applying for a US visa to go to a conference in the mid-1960s, I presented myself at the fortress-like embassy in Grosvenor Square and ticked the boxes affirming that I was not nor ever had been a member of the Communist Party and did not intend to attempt to overthrow the US government by force. But then I was summoned backstage into a private office, where I faced a...
The issue of evolutionary inevitability was brought sharply into focus by the late Stephen Jay Gould in his book Wonderful Life (1989). Gould discussed the bizarre fossils uncovered by the Cambridge palaeontologist Simon Conway Morris in an outcrop of rock in the Canadian Rockies, known as the Burgess Shale. The shale was formed 511 million years ago, in the period when animal life was...
Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate this, C.H. Waddington imagined what he called an ‘epigenetic landscape’ of rolling hills and valleys. Place a ball at the top of the hill and give it a little push. Which valley it rolls down depends on chance fluctuations; some valleys may converge on the same endpoint, others on different ones.
Steven Rose is a well-known public scientist who has dedicated his career to the study of brains. He has lived through the early days of the technical revolution that has involved increasingly...
Astronomers have penetrated billions of light-years into space, explained the changing states of stars from their birth to their death, postulated the existence of black holes in which matter...
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