The Purpose Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Purpose Podcast

Siddhant Pusdekar

Science

Society & Culture

Frequency: 1 episode/181d. Total Eps: 7

Through the purpose podcast we will meet people involved in the Biological Purpose Project. They include experimentalists, theoreticians, and philosophers working on a range of problems from curing cancer to the conservation of the biosphere. In each episode, we delve into the unexpected ways in which they're blending philosophy and science.

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Data updated on 09/10/2026

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https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/
4 shares
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/reader/10.1098/rstb.2024.0087
2 shares
https://www.davidsoderberg.co.uk/
2 shares

https://freemusicarchive.org/music/geb/
2 shares

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Score global : 47%

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No way back - When evolution makes irreversible changes

Season 2 · Episode 2

Thursday, October 8, 2026 • Duration 54:31

We live in a social world as full of cooperation as it is of competition. How should ecologists and evolutionary biologists tell them apart?

Podcast production was supported in part by the Consortium for Advancing a Science of Purpose (#63716; John Templeton Foundation). The opinions expressed are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.

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How the earth shapes life and natural selection with Richard Boyle

Season 2 · Episode 1

Thursday, August 20, 2026 • Duration 42:27

In the 1960s the search for alien life inspires the chemist James Lovelock to imagine that life, if it occurred anywhere in the universe would be accompanied by an atmosphere that was in constant flux. He called this the Gaia hypothesis. Since then the idea has been subject to constant misinterpretation. In this episode, Siddhant talks to Richard Boyle about what the Gaia hypothesis is, what it isn't how planetary scale dynamics interact with life and natural selection.

This episode assumes some knowledge of earth systems and evolution.

Richard's paper describing an attempt to Darwinize Gaia

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/reader/10.1098/rstb.2024.0087

Does Earth’s habitability for life exist due to or in spite of Darwinian evolution by natural selection? (#63450; John Templeton Foundation)

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Thinking the Unthinkable with the Mebêngôkre (ft Charbel El-Hani)

Season 1 · Episode 5

Wednesday, June 19, 2024 • Duration 39:24

https://youtu.be/Bs4ne_PBylY?feature=shared

David Oderberg & The Philosophy of Making Mistakes

Season 1 · Episode 4

Monday, April 22, 2024 • Duration 33:23

David Oderberg is a professor of philosophy at the University of Reading. In this episode he talks about why he got into philosophy, why philosophy is important for the study of living things and the theory of mistakes he's developing along with the rest of the Mistakes in Living Systems team.

Find out more about his work - https://www.davidsoderberg.co.uk/

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Further And Further And Further Back In Time

Season 1 · Episode 3

Friday, February 16, 2024 • Duration 18:49

Host Siddhant Pusdkekar speaks to Joanna Masel about how she stumbled upon a 4 billion year old trend and a problem that evolution has been trying to solve since the beginning of life

Papers referenced in this episode

Genes from Junk DNA

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01925-6.pdf

Papers on directionality in evolution by Joanna Masel

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7153934/

https://elifesciences.org/articles/57347

https://academic.oup.com/genetics/article/211/4/1345/5931507

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Evolution x Design - Butterfly Wing Wallpaper

Season 1 · Episode 2

Saturday, December 9, 2023 • Duration 10:13

Emilie Snell-Rood convinces people that studying weird animals can be useful for designing things. Jessica Rossi-Mastracci is looking forward to playing with bioinspired designs, one of which may or may not be a butterfly wing wallpaper

In this episode of The Purpose Podcast we meet a designer and an evolutionary biologist who are working together to bring light into a dark corner of the University of Minnesota

Artwork by Bernie Cook, who is open to requests (nardcook13@gmail.com)

The Purpose podcast is hosted and produced by Siddhant Pusdekar (pusde001@umn.edu) and is brought to you by the Biological Purpose Project (https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/) funded by The John Templeton Foundation

Music (In order of appearance)

Aimless Walk by Silicon Transmitter

Emotions Are Alright With Me by Geb

Sourced from the Free Music Archive

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Finding Order in Malady

Season 1 · Episode 1

Wednesday, October 18, 2023 • Duration 13:24

Ramray Bhat is an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science in Banagalore, India. He studies how collectives of cancer cells migrate and metastasize to new organs within the human body.

To learn more about the Biological Purpose Project visit - https://www.biologicalpurpose.org/

Podcast produced by Siddhant Pusdekar

Episode cover art by Bernie Cook

Music (In order of appearance)

Aimless Walk by Silicon Transmitter

Where everything begins by drób

Emotions Are Alright With Me by Geb

Sourced from the Free Music Archive

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The Purpose Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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The Purpose Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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