The Well

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Ideas that inspire a life well-lived

Do we inhabit a multiverse? Do we have free will? What is love? Is evolution directional?

Life’s biggest questions rarely have simple answers. That is precisely why they continue to occupy the world’s most thoughtful minds. The Well is a place to engage those questions, drawing on insights from science, philosophy, and the humanities.

Created by the John Templeton Foundation in partnership with Big Think, The Well brings together ideas that inspire deeper understanding and a more considered approach to living.

in partnership with

The Templeton Foundation supports interdisciplinary research and catalyzes conversations that inspire awe and wonder.

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AI won’t replace biologists — it’ll just join the staff
Everyone wants to know if AI will replace their job. Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR, has a clear-eyed take from inside the lab.

by Jennifer Doudna

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Everything Articles Videos
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The Well
Psychedelics have brought mysticism into modern medicine. Researchers are listening.
What happens when transcendent experiences collide with a culture that lacks language for understanding them?
Aidan Seale-Feldman, PhD & Lee Helland
John Templeton Foundation
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7mins
The Well
CRISPR’s co-inventor on the importance of responsibility in science
Jennifer Doudna co-invented CRISPR. Now she's the one asking how much power we should be allowed to handle.
Jennifer Doudna
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The Well
What genome editing tech has done for the world, so far
Jennifer Doudna knew CRISPR would be powerful the moment she discovered it. She never expected it would lead to this.
Jennifer Doudna
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The Well
The incentive problem at the heart of modern science
"Publish or perish" has become an academic cliché. But the biggest casualty isn't researchers — it's scientific discovery itself.
David Sloan
John Templeton Foundation
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42mins
The Well
The living world is forcing scientists to rethink purpose
Purpose is not only a question of meaning. For philosopher Alan Love, it is also a question of life, agency, function, and scientific method.
Alan Love
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8mins
The Well
The case for breaking out of your academic box
Science used to be broad because so few people could afford to do it. Now that more people can participate, the structures need to evolve too. Philosopher Alan Love explains.
Alan Love
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11mins
The Well
What living systems teach us about true agency
Our ability to build machine intelligence has outrun our ability to understand it. Professor Alan Love, director of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, thinks biology can help close that gap.
Alan Love
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7mins
The Well
Your life has purpose — just not the kind you think
We’ve been asking whether we have a purpose. Philosopher Alan Love says the better question is: what kind of purpose can we identify, document, and explain?
Alan Love
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10mins
The Well
The universe isn’t random – it’s something stranger
Why does life keep getting more complex? Why doesn't evolution get stuck? Physicist Stephen Wolfram has been working on this for decades. Turns out the answer is more simple (and more strange) than we expected.
Stephen Wolfram
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15mins
The Well
Objective reality only exists because other people do
We experience only one small slice of the ruliad. What’s the ruliad? Stephen Wolfram explains.
Stephen Wolfram
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54mins
The Well
Physics doesn’t explain the universe. Computation does.
What do the laws of physics, biological evolution, and your free will have in common? The same mathematical principle runs through all of them. Stephen Wolfram has spent 40 years finding it.
Stephen Wolfram
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9mins
The Well
The universe can’t be predicted, even if you know all its rules
Most ‘theories of everything’ make the universe feel smaller. Physicist Stephen Wolfram's does the opposite.
Stephen Wolfram
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6mins
The Well
Why personal and collective risk-taking need completely different rules
We often ask what new technology can do. Yale philosopher L.A. Paul asks a deeper question: what does it do to the people who use it?
L.A. Paul
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7mins
The Well
Why life’s biggest choices feel impossible in advance
Transformative experiences don’t just change your perspective or lifestyle, they change the kind of person you are. Yale philosopher L.A. Paul explains.
L.A. Paul
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8mins
The Well
The unsatisfying limits of rational decision-making
L..A. Paul spent her career at Yale studying the decisions that remake you from the inside out — and why rational thinking fails exactly when you need it most.
L.A. Paul
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30mins
The Well
The hidden bias in every life-changing decision you make
You can't explain a third dimension to someone living in a two-dimensional world. According to Yale philosopher L.A. Paul, the same is true of life's biggest decisions — you simply can't know what it's like until you're already there.
L.A. Paul
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11mins
The Well
We’ve been guessing about ancestral history — until now
We used to think human migration was a simple branching tree. Ancient DNA proved it's something far stranger. Harvard Geneticist David Reich explains.
David Reich
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8mins
The Well
How ancient DNA proved human origin theory wrong
Human origins once looked like a simple migration story. According to geneticist David Reich, new evidence keeps turning it into a record of contact, disappearance, and surprise.
David Reich
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8mins
The Well
Ancient DNA just proved that ‘pure genetics’ don’t exist
The oldest bones in Britain share almost no DNA with anyone alive today. Here’s what that tells us about human history, genetics, and ethnic “homelands."
David Reich
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49mins
The Well
Your ancestors aren’t who you think they are
What if one of our oldest ideas about ancestry is simply wrong? Harvard geneticist David Reich argues that ancient DNA has exposed the myth of purity and uncovered a far messier history of who we are and where we came from.
David Reich