We Go Way Back, an exhibition exploring how ancient DNA is revealing new insights into human evolution, migration, culture and disease, will open at the Francis Crick Institute on 16 July 2026.
Ancient DNA is the genetic material from our ancestors long gone. These fragments of DNA are extracted from bones and teeth, before being processed in an ultra-clean laboratory and sequenced to reveal the underlying genetic code.
Sabahat Fida’s work sits at the crossroads of science, religion, and metaphysics, often integrating theology with reflections from nature. This article explores justice as a divine and ontological principle—rooted in Shia theology, classical philosophy, and natural analogies—culminating in the lived example of Imam Ali (ʿa).
AI uses expansive memory to make accurate predictions of the next word in a series of words. Memory and talking are fundamental to being human, and we fear that AI will replace them. But because memory and talking have built-in limits, human life extends beyond them to a part of ourselves that AI cannot replace. We have called this our “higher” or “true” self, but it is simply the part of ourselves outside of memory. AI challenges us to fully embrace this part of ourselves, since we’re in the process of turning over our talking- and memory-selves to the machines.
The modern human is a cordless Theseus. We are neither male nor female, and we are within the labyrinth, armed not with weapons or determination, but with cell phones…………We are all within the labyrinth, which is now a crowded place full of humans taking selfies.
Florian Coulmas is Professor of Japanese Society and Sociolinguistics at the IN-EAST Institute of East Asian Studies at Duisburg-Essen University. He has published numerous books, including ‘An Introduction to Multilingualism’ (OUP, 2017) and ‘Writing and Society: A Introduction’ (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In 2016, he was awarded the Meyer-Struckmann-Prize for Research in Arts and Social Sciences. For the past three decades he has served as Associate Editor of the ‘International Journal of the Sociology of Languages’, during which time he has observed the steadily increasing use of the concept of identity in both general and scholarly publications. His book, ‘Identity: A Very Short Introduction’, was published in February 2019.
Matej Peljhan is a clinical psychologist by profession and works as a psychotherapist. He holds the title ‘Master of Photography’, which is the highest title you can obtain in Slovene photography. He has presented his work at 20 independent exhibitions in Slovenia and abroad, and has received over a hundred prizes.
In his photographic series, COVID-19: THINKING WITH ART, he closely monitored the changes and consequences that occur in the mental and social life of people during a pandemic.
Anil Seth is Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, where he is also Co-Director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. He is also Co-Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) Program on Brain, Mind, and Consciousness, and of the Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme: From Sensation and Perception to Awareness. Editor-in-Chief of Neuroscience of Consciousness (Oxford University Press) and a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher (2019, 2020, 2021), which recognizes the top 1% of researchers by field with sustained impact over a period of a decade.
His new book ‘Being You: A New Science of Consciousness’ is a Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller, a New Statesman Book of the Year, a Guardian Book of the Week and a Guardian and Financial Times Science Book of the Year. His 2017 main-stage TED talk has more than 12 million views and is one of TED’s most popular science talks.
Alexa Wright is London-based artist working across a range of media including photography, video, interactive installation and book works. She has worked at the intersection of art and medical science since the late-1990s and often works with people with mental and physical differences to make works that address questions of human identity and otherness through qualities like vulnerability and empathy. She has been involved in several long term inter-disciplinary collaborations, for example with Alf Linney, Professor of Medical Physics and computer scientists at UCL (1999-2010) and Hybrid Bodies, a unique international, interdisciplinary project based in Toronto, Canada that brought together medics, visual artists, a philosopher and social scientists to explore the emotional and psychological effects of heart transplantation (2007-19).
Nicholas R. Longrich is a Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath.
“I’m interested in how the world came to be and why it’s the way it is, and not some other way. I study dinosaurs, among other things – pterosaurs, fossil birds, lizards and snakes. I’m especially interested in understanding macroevolution- large-scale evolutionary patterns and processes. The evolution of organisms and ecosystems over millions and billions of years, the evolution of complex adaptations like bird flight, the snake body plan, and the human mind.
I’m particularly interested in the idea that macroevolution is more than just lots of microevolution- that over long periods of time, at large scales, and in the evolution of complex structures, different dynamics come into play; that over time, the processes of evolution itself have evolved. Recently, I’ve become interested in the human species.”
“Can we imagine a kind of art made, first, for the viewer, for a shift in her consciousness, but then in addition, a kind intended specifically to turn her in the direction of otherness – to draw her out beyond her ego-self and toward the immensity of not-me? In what way might this be achieved?”
Taney Roniger is a visual artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Since the late 90s she has been exploring the relationship between art, science, and the spirituality of immanence in both her work as an artist and in numerous essays and symposia.