The Origins Project:
what it studied, and what it sold

What the programme set out to do, in its own words. A university-wide initiative addressing “deep and foundational questions ranging across the entire spectrum of scholarship.”

Four themes, which structured everything it did:

• The origin of the universe and the laws of nature
• The origin of life
• The origin of humans
• The origin of consciousness and culture

The founding questions Krauss set out in Scientific American: How did the universe begin? Is our universe unique? How did the laws of physics arise? How did life arise? What are the dynamical processes that govern evolution? What is the origin of modern humans?

This is serious, legitimate, frontier science. It is also — and this is the finding — the single most socially attractive science programme it is possible to design.

Why that matters. Nobody buys proximity to a materials-science lab. The Origins Project convened Nobel laureates, bestselling authors and television scientists, in public, on subjects everyone finds interesting, several times a year, with a fundraising dinner attached.

Epstein’s money did not need to influence the research. The programme’s ordinary operation was already the product.

Founded in 2008 and launched in April 2009, under Krauss as founding director — a Foundation Professor in physics and in ASU’s School of Earth and Space Exploration.

The launch set the pattern. The three-day Origins Symposium drew 80 scientists, many of them Nobel laureates, and consisted of private scientific seminars alongside public sessions.

Sky & Telescope described the atmosphere as a “Woodstock of Science.” Krauss’s own framing: he wanted to begin “with a bang… a symposium that would be heard around the world.”

What it was not. Not a laboratory, not a degree programme, and not primarily a grant-making body. It produced events, not experiments.

What that means for the funding question. When money enters a lab it buys equipment, postdocs and bench time, and leaves an audit trail in outputs. When money enters a convening programme, it buys the convening — travel, venues, honoraria, dinners.

A donor to a research lab funds discovery. A donor to a convening programme funds the room.

And ASU’s own description of the intent was to bridge the gap between the greatest scientific minds in the world and the general public — which is a genuinely worthwhile aim, and also a description of a machine for producing public proximity to famous scientists.

This roster is the programme’s real achievement and, simultaneously, the thing that made it worth funding for the wrong reasons.

Nobel laureates and senior physicists. Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Frank Wilczek, David Gross, Brian Schmidt, Freeman Dyson, Nima Arkani-Hamed, Wendy Freedman, Maria Spiropulu.

Public-facing scientists and authors. Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Brian Greene, Paul Davies, Craig Venter, Frans de Waal, Jeffrey Sachs.

The human-behaviour panel. Steven Pinker, Richard Wrangham, Adrian Raine, Erica Chenoweth, John Mueller, Sarah Mathew.

Every one of these people is a working scholar who appeared at a public university event. Nothing about that association implies knowledge of anything.

But note the overlap with the wider network. Steven Pinker and Frank Wilczek both appear elsewhere in this archive — Pinker as a client of John Brockman, whose salon Epstein was substantially funding; Wilczek as a scientist listed as a beneficiary on Epstein’s foundation website who says he never received any money.

Richard Dawkins appears in the 2002 photograph of Brockman clients travelling to TED.

The same forty or so people recur across Edge dinners, Origins debates and Epstein’s correspondence — not because they were collaborating with him, but because one small population was being convened repeatedly, by overlapping conveners, with his money somewhere in the room.

The honest answer is that it is very hard to say — and that difficulty is itself the finding.

What is documented. $2.25 million across nine donations, December 2010 to April 2017. Roughly $250,000 from Epstein’s Enhanced Education foundation; $2 million from Leon and Debra Black.

What ASU has never published. An itemised account of what any of it funded. No breakdown by event, workshop, salary, travel or venue has been released.

What the structure tells us anyway. A convening programme spends money on convening. The plausible destinations are speaker travel and honoraria, venue hire at Gammage, symposium logistics, staff time, and the fundraising dinners themselves.

Which produces an uncomfortable inference. If Epstein-linked money paid for the events, then it partly paid for the room in which he was photographed with Krauss and Pinker at the 2014 gala — the same year the Blacks’ $2 million began arriving.

The returned funds. After the programme was shuttered, ASU returned $25,000 to Enhanced Education and about $460,000 to the Blacks, at the donors’ request.

That means roughly $1.75 million had already been spent — and no public record says on what.

What was not bought. No evidence indicates Epstein shaped a research question, selected a speaker, or influenced a finding. This report does not suggest otherwise.

Two of the four Origins themes concern the biological origins of human beings and human behaviour.

The recurring debate subjects across 2014–2015 were:

• The Origins of Violence — whether human violence is rooted in biology
• Xenophobia: Why Do We Fear Others? — the evolutionary roots of in-group preference
• War and Peace in the World of Ants — social organisation and conflict
• Extinctions — species-level risk and survival
• Transcending our Origins: Violence, Humanity and the Future

What Epstein is documented as personally interested in. Reporting establishes he told associates he wanted to seed the human race with his own DNA, and that he discussed eugenics with scientific friends until shortly before his death. He is reported to have wanted his brain frozen for revival.

The overlap, stated precisely. Evolutionary accounts of human behaviour are legitimate science. They are also the nearest respectable neighbour to the ideas Epstein actually held.

The same pattern appears at Harvard, where his largest gift created a Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and where The Nation argued his funding supported a current of thought emphasising heredity in determining human behaviour.

What this does not establish. That any scholar shared his views, that the panels reached conclusions he wanted, or that the subject choices were his. The Origins themes were set at launch in 2009, before his first donation in December 2010.

What it does establish. That the field selection across three institutions was consistent, and was never random.