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Thu December 20, 2012 at 5:12 AM
Host: Chris Mooney
It's rare that I can say about a guest that, I read his books when I was a kid.
But David Brin is just such a guest. He's the celebrated science fiction author of the Uplift novels, The Postman, and many other books—most recently, Existence. I read the Uplift books when I was tearing through sci-fi as a teenager.
But on top of that, Brin is also a trained scientist and public policy commentator. And in his commentary, as in his novels, he's concerned with the same themes...
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Thu December 13, 2012 at 3:20 PM
Host: Chris Mooney
When we last had Bill McKibben on this show in 2010, I was mainly treating him as another bestselling science author—one who happens to focus on climate change.
Well.
Something kinda big happened in the intervening years, and McKibben has become, simply put, the country's leading environmental spokesman and advocate through his organization 350.org.
From protests against the Keystone XL pipeline to, most recently, his "Do the Math" tour, rallying of college...
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Tue December 4, 2012 at 9:42 AM
Host: Indre Viskontas
Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when facts, those bits of information that we believed captured some fundamental truth about our world, are shown to be no longer true? With the exponential rise in our knowledge about our universe comes a tsunami of data overturning what we once thought...
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Tue October 23, 2012 at 3:25 AM
Host: Indre Viskontas
The month of October is associated with falling leaves, autumn winds and hallowe'en. But for sports fans in the US, it also signals a high point in America's national pastime: baseball's postseason. After a long run of 162 games, the last weeks of October are ripe with matchups in which legends are made and broken. Any skeptic worth his or her salt, however, can't help but marvel at the diversity and frequency of ritualistic behaviors on display amongst these world class athletes...
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Mon October 8, 2012 at 10:47 PM
Host: Chris Mooney
Our guest this week is Lisa Randall, the Harvard theoretical physicist and one of the most heavily cited and influential researchers in her field. She's a member of a number of distinguished scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences—but she's also a very popular science author, behind the bestselling Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and more recently Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate...
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Tue October 2, 2012 at 2:56 AM
Host: Chris Mooney
Our guest this week is a return guest of the show, Massimo Pigliucci.
We last heard about his book Nonsense on Stilts, which was about how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. But his newest effort is in some ways even more ambitious.
It's called Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life. And in it, Pigliucci lays out an approach that he calls "sci-phi." It involves assessing the science of an issue—like,...
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Tue September 18, 2012 at 6:03 AM
Host: Chris Mooney
How many atheists are there in the world? Where do they live? What kind of people are they, and how do they get that way?
Are they happy? Are they prosperous? Do they drag their societies down into a cesspool of immortality—as is often alleged—or, is it precisely the opposite?
All of these questions are amenable to scientific study. With, like, data. It's just that people didn't much bother—until now.
One pioneer in the sociological study of atheists is Phil Zuckerman,...
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Mon September 10, 2012 at 10:26 PM
Host: Chris Mooney
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to make American politics just a little more rational, just a little more evidence based?
Wouldn't it be even nicer if there was a website, or an app, that helped that process along?
Maybe, just maybe, a promising innovation called TruthMarket can help with the problem. It's a site where people who care about the truth crowd-fund campaigns dedicated to either proving the veracity of true claims, or the falsity of wrong ones... where,...
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Tue September 4, 2012 at 11:37 PM
Host: Chris Mooney
Several times on this show, we've discussed the topic of ideological asymmetry. In other words, are people of all political persuasions equally biased, equally prone to reasoning based on their emotions to support prior commitments?
A new scientific paper (PDF) has recently come out that reopens this question, so naturally, we had to invite on one of its authors. His name is Peter Ditto, and he's a social psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who has been...
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Tue August 21, 2012 at 9:07 PM
Host: Chris Mooney
Our guest this week is Arie Kruglanski. He's a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland College Park, and has been a pioneer in the study of closed-mindedness-or, the "need for closure"—including how it drives fundamentalist belief systems and violent extremism.
Dr. Kruglanski has served on National Academy of Sciences panels related to counterterrorism, and is a founding co-principal investigator at the National Center for the Study...
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