The behavioural scientist engagingly lays out the reasons why our every action is predetermined – and why we shouldn’t despair about it

The philosophical debate on free will has a way of blowing people’s minds when they first encounter it. And fair enough: thinkers who deny the existence of free will insist that nobody ever meaningfully chooses what they do. Earlier this week, for example, walking past a cafe, I stopped to buy a coffee, and certainly it felt as if I could have chosen otherwise. Nobody forced me inside at gunpoint, and I’m not enslaved to an overpowering caffeine addiction. I just wanted coffee. But hold on: that desire, and the bodily movements involved in the purchase, were caused by events in my brain. And what caused them? Prior brain events, interacting with my environment. My brain itself, for that matter, is only the way it is because of my genes and upbringing, both of which resulted from the chance meeting of my parents – and so on, in an unbroken chain of causes, back to the big bang.

If our actions are “determined” in this way, the moral implications are dizzying. It becomes hard to see how to blame a Harold Shipman or Charles Manson – or a Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump – for anything they do. If I’d been born with Shipman’s exact genes, and experienced his precise upbringing, I’d simply have been him; there’s no secret corner of my psyche where a ghostly “free will” lurks, capable of making better decisions. (I’m ignoring randomness in quantum physics here, in the interests of my sanity; you’ll have to take my word for it that few free-will theorists think it makes much difference.)

Amy-Jane Beer’s The Flow is one of three prize winners, with Guy Shrubsole’s conservation study The Lost Rainforests of Britain and Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston’s children’s book Leila and the Blue Fox

Adventuring in the wild and protecting rare habitats are the major themes of the winning titles for the 10th Wainwright prize.

The £10,000 prize, started in 2013 to celebrate books that best inspire readers to explore and nurture respect for the outdoors, will be split between the winners of three categories.

The co-founder of DeepMind issues a terrifying warning about AI and synthetic biology – but how seriously should we take it?

On 22 February1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat stationed in Moscow, dictated a 5,000-word cable to Washington. In this famous telegram, Kennan warned that the Soviet Union’s commitment to communism meant that it was inherently expansionist, and urged the US government to resist any attempts by the Soviets to increase their influence. This strategy quickly became known as “containment” – and defined American foreign policy for the next 40 years.

The Coming Wave is Suleyman’s book-length warning about technological expansionism: in close to 300 pages, he sets out to persuade readers that artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology (SB) threaten our very existence and we only have a narrow window within which to contain them before it’s too late. Unlike communism during the cold war, however, AI and SB are not being forced on us. We willingly adopt them because they not only promise unprecedented wealth, but solutions to our most intractable problems – climate change, cancer, possibly even mortality. Suleyman sees the appeal, of course, claiming that these technologies will “usher in a new dawn for humanity”.

Forget ‘great men’ – infection and disease are the really important forces in the development of humankind, believes public health specialist Jonathan Kennedy

Barts pathology museum is usually open to the public only by special appointment. But today, I’m in luck. I find myself with an unexpected open sesame in the form of Dr Jonathan Kennedy, the director of the MSc and iBSc global public health programmes at Barts and the London Medical School, and while he has his photograph taken up on one of its mezzanine floors, I’m free to wander around alone. (At least, I think I’m alone; the museum is nothing if not ghostly.)

On the same site as the hospital in the City of London, this purpose-built, glass-roofed Victorian building is home to about 4,000 medical specimens, the majority of them displayed on open shelves. Every part of the body is represented and every kind of illness and injury – though tracking down a particular condition can be tricky for the non-medical. When I finally find the gnarled, yellow spine of a patient who suffered from tuberculosis – I was after something that speaks to Kennedy’s new book, which is about infectious disease and its effect on human civilisation – it’s largely down to luck. The vertebrae in question just happen to be next to the museum’s most famous exhibit: the skull of John Bellingham, who assassinated the British prime minister, Spencer Perceval , in 1812.