…

First, I find it inter­est­ing that the guy is not actu­al­ly an athe­ist, although I can under­stand why they chose the title. Sec­ond, I found this bit at the end very insight­ful:
“Q: Can’t you do a project of this scope at a top uni­ver­si­ty like Cal­tech?

Koch: No. Uni­ver­si­ties are great at pro­duc­ing indi­vid­ual sci­en­tists who are bril­liant at push­ing new ideas, but the entire sci­en­tif­ic endeav­or is con­struct­ed on the notion of being hyper-com­pet­i­tive and as dif­fer­ent as pos­si­ble from oth­er peo­ple. Oth­er­wise, you don’t get a Ph.D. You don’t get tenure. You don’t get grants. You don’t get papers in high pro­file jour­nals. So it’s very dif­fi­cult to focus an enor­mous amount of research in a dis­ci­plined way.”

On Rec­on­cil­ing Athe­ism and Mean­ing in the Uni­verse

“Roman­tic reduc­tion­ist” neu­ro­sci­en­tist Christof Koch dis­cuss­es the search for mean­ing in the world of sci­ence, and the philo­soph­i­cal influ­ence of work­ing with Fran­cis Crick.