The Michael Shermer Show

In a conversation based on the book Threats: Intimidation and its Discontents, Shermer and Barash discuss: 2020 as the most momentous year of the past half century, judging historical figures based on modern morals (e.g., race and slavery), whether humans are naturally gullible or skeptical, the evolutionary logic of deterrence, how animals deal with threats, how humans deal with threats, game theory of deterring threats, nuclear deterrence (Mutual Assured Destruction) as a threat strategy, the motives behind nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. arms race against the U.S.S.R., the arms race within the U.S. between the Army, Navy, and Airforce, close calls with nuclear weapons and why this is not a sustainable strategy, how to deal with threats like Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea, Trump and what he did right with regard to North Korea. David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington. He has written more than 280 peer-reviewed articles and 40 books. Barash has penned op-eds in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Chicago Tribune, as well as numerous pieces in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nautilus, and Skeptic.

Shermer and Prothero discuss: flat earth theories and how we know the earth is round, hollow earth theories and how we know it’s not hollow, the return of Ptolemy and an earth-centered solar system model (and how we know it’s wrong), how science deals with anomalies, fringe claims, and challenges to the orthodoxy, whether humans were in the San Diego area 130,000 years ago, how consensus is achieved in science (and the messy road to get there), from Newton to Einstein and what ultimately determines if a theory is true or not, flood myths and what causes such stories to arise in some cultures but not others, catastrophism vs. uniformitarianism in geology, the age of the earth and how geologists determined it, the myth of Atlantis and what Plato really intended with his account, biblical accounts of the world and how we should read the book as literature, not science, how science won the evolution-creation wars, science denial and how to deal with it, and the real-world consequences of denying science. Dr. Donald R. Prothero has taught geology for over 33 years as Professor of Geology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and currently at Pierce College in Woodland Hills, CA. He earned M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. degrees in geological sciences from Columbia University in 1982. He is currently the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of 33 books and over 250 scientific papers, including five leading geology textbooks and three trade books as well as edited symposium volumes and other technical works. He is on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine, and in the past has served as an associate or technical editor for Geology, Paleobiologyand Journal of Paleontology. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, and the Linnaean Society of London, and has also received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation. In 1991, he received the Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society for the outstanding paleontologist under the age of 40. He has also been featured on several television documentaries, including episodes of Paleoworld (BBC), Prehistoric Monsters Revealed (History Channel), Entelodon and Hyaenodon (National Geographic Channel) and Walking with Prehistoric Beasts (BBC).

In this wide ranging conversation focused on Greg Lukianoff’s co-authored (with Jonathan Haidt) book The Coddling of the American Mind, and his new documentary film Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story, about the free speech champion Ira Glassner, who headed the ACLU for decades, he and Shermer discuss: the state of free speech today, how coddled today’s students are, the data on rates of depression and anxiety in students today, possible causes of the coddling of the American mind: social media, screen time, culture of safetyism, culture of victimhood, helicopter parenting, the decline of unsupervised, child-directed play, cancel culture and its effect on self-censorship and silencing speech, current rates of deplatforming and canceling in academia, the polarization of politics, when self-censorship is healthy, default to truth theory vs. default to skepticism theory, How gullible are we, really? how to combat the negative influencers on social media, a brief history of free speech in the 20th and 21th centuries, why people in power want to silence dissenters (even free speech advocates in power), and the value of viewpoint diversity. Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Lukianoff is a graduate of American University and Stanford Law School. He specializes in free speech and First Amendment issues in higher education. He is the author of Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate and Freedom From Speech. Read about his new film: Mighty Ira: A Civil Liberties Story.

Why are so many humans religious? Why do we daydream, imagine, and hope? Philosophers, theologians, social scientists, and historians have offered explanations for centuries, but their accounts often ignore or even avoid human evolution. Evolutionary scientists answer with proposals for why ritual, religion, and faith make sense as adaptations to past challenges or as by-products of our hyper-complex cognitive capacities. But what if the focus on religion is too narrow? Renowned anthropologist Agustín Fuentes argues that the capacity to be religious is actually a small part of a larger and deeper human capacity to believe. Why believe in religion, economies, love? Fuentes employs evolutionary, neurobiological, and anthropological evidence to argue that belief — the ability to commit passionately and wholeheartedly to an idea — is central to the human way of being in the world. The premise of the book is that believing is our ability to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources, our histories and experiences, and combine them with our imagination. It is the power to think beyond what is here and now in order to see and feel and know something — an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth — that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly and authentically, in that “something” so that it becomes one’s reality. The point is that beliefs and belief systems permeate human neurobiologies, bodies, and ecologies, and structure and shape our daily lives, our societies, and the world around us. We are human, therefore we believe, and this book tells us how we came to be that way. Shermer and Fuentes also discuss: what it means to “believe” something (belief in evolution or the Big Bang is different from belief in progressive taxes or affirmative action), evolution and how beliefs are formed…and why, evolution of awe, wonder, aesthetic sense, beauty, art, music, dance, etc. (adaptation or exaptation/spandrel?), evolution of spirituality, religion, belief in immortality, Were Neanderthals human in the “belief” sense? human niche and the evolution of symbolism/language, evolution of theory of mind, how to infer symbolic meaning from archaeological artifacts, components of belief: augmented cognition and neurobiology, intentionality, imagination, innovation, compassion and intensive reliance on others, meaning-making, dog domestication and human self-domestication, Göbekli Tepe and the underestimation of ancient peoples’ cognitive capacities, the development of property, accumulation of goods, inequality, and social hierarchy, gender role specialization, monogamy and polyamory, gender and sex, and continuum vs. binary thinking, violence and warfare, political and economic systems of belief, and love as belief. Agustín Fuentes is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. He is an active public scientist, a well-known blogger, lecturer, tweeter, and an explorer for National Geographic. Fuentes received the Inaugural Communication & Outreach Award from the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Apollo’s Arrow offers a riveting account of the impact of the coronavirus pandemic as it swept through American society in 2020, and of how the recovery will unfold in the coming years. Drawing on momentous (yet dimly remembered) historical epidemics, contemporary analyses, and cutting-edge research from a range of scientific disciplines, bestselling author, physician, sociologist, and public health expert Nicholas A. Christakis explores what it means to live in a time of plague — an experience that is paradoxically uncommon to the vast majority of humans who are alive, yet deeply fundamental to our species. Featuring new, provocative arguments and vivid examples ranging across medicine, history, sociology, epidemiology, data science, and genetics, Apollo’s Arrow envisions what happens when the great force of a deadly germ meets the enduring reality of our evolved social nature. Shermer and Christakis discuss: the replication crisis in social science and medicine, determining causality in science and medicine, how we know smoking causes cancer and HIV causes AIDS, but vaccines do not cause autism and cell phones do not cause cancer, randomized controlled trials and why they can’t be done to answer many medical questions, natural experiments and the comparative method of testing hypotheses (e.g., comparing different countries differing responses to Covid-19), the hindsight bias and the curse of knowledge in judging responses to pandemics after the fact, looking back to January 2020, what should we have done?, comparing Covid-19 to the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, and other pandemics, bacteria vs. viruses, coronaviruses and their effects, and why viruses are so much harder to treat than bacteria, Bill Gates’ TED talk warning in 2015 and why we didn’t heed it, treatments: hydroxychloroquine, remdesivir, Vitamin D. How civilization will change: medical: coronavirus is here to stay — herd immunity naturally and through vaccines, personal and public health: handshakes, hugs, and other human contact; masks, social distancing, hygiene, long run healthier society (e.g., body temperatures have decreased from 98.6 to 97.9), economics and business, travel, conferences, meetings, marriage, dating, sex, and home life, entertainment, vacations, bars, and restaurants, education and schools, politics and society (and a better understanding of freedom and why it is restricted), from pandemic to endemic. Nicholas A. Christakis is a physician and sociologist who explores the ancient origins and modern implications of human nature. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University, where he is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science, in the Departments of Sociology, Medicine, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Statistics and Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering. He is the Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science, the co-author of Connected, and the author of Blueprint.

Philip Goff, a philosopher at Durham University and author of 'Galileo’s Error,' dives deep into the mysteries of consciousness. He introduces panpsychism, suggesting consciousness is a fundamental aspect of all matter. Goff critiques traditional scientific methods, arguing they fall short in explaining consciousness. The conversation dances through dualism, free will, and the philosophical implications of our understanding of reality, offering fresh perspectives that could shape future explorations in science and morality.

The provocative thesis of Break It Up is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t limited to the South or the 19thcentury. It was there at our founding and has never gone away. Investigative journalist Richard Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region. Each New England town after Plymouth was a secession from another; the 13 colonies viewed their Union as a means to the end of securing independence, not an end in itself; George Washington feared separatism west of the Alleghenies; Aaron Burr schemed to set up a new empire; John Quincy Adams brought a Massachusetts town’s petition for dissolving the United States to the floor of Congress; and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison denounced the Constitution as a pro-slavery pact with the devil. From the “cold civil war” that pits partisans against one another to the modern secession movements in California and Texas, the divisions that threaten to tear America apart today have centuries-old roots in the earliest days of our Republic. Richly researched and persuasively argued, Break It Up will help readers make fresh sense of our fractured age. Shermer and Kreitner discuss: what happens if Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave, the possibility of the secession of California, Oregon and Washington, States rights vs. Federal power in issues like climate change, abortion, health care, etc., how Native American tribes and nations governed themselves and what the colonists learned from them, how the 1st colonial revolution was fought not to create a federation but to destroy one when Boston rebelled against the Crown-backed Dominion of New England, separatists movements throughout our history, Aaron Burr’s attempts to create a new nation he would head, spread of slavery to the west and Jefferson’s fear that it sounded like a “fire bell in the night,” why John Quincy Adams introduced a petition demanding the dissolution of the U.S.: If the day should ever come, (may Heaven avert it,) when the affection of the people of these states shall be alienated from each other; when the fraternal spirit shall give away to cold indifference, or collisions of interest shall fester into hatred, far better will it be for the people of the disunited states, to part in friendship from each other, than to be held together by constraint. how Southern states initially sought to expand the union of slave holding states, not secession, why reconstruction failed, the Civil War of the 1960s, Brexit, Texit, and Calexit, Russia support for American secessionist movements, James Madison’s observation (in Federalist Paper No. 51) about the problem all human groups/tribes/nations must solve: But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. Kreitner’s summation of America’s irrepressible conflict “The ‘irrepressible conflict’ was not just between North and South, freedom and slavery; it reflected something even deeper. The truly ‘irrepressible’ conflict was between union and disunion, whose forces bringing American together and those tearing them apart.” Richard Kreitner is a contributing writer to The Nation. He is the author of Booked: A Traveler’s Guide to Literary Locations Around the World. A graduate of McGill University, he has also written for The New York Times, Slate, Salon, The Baffler, Raritan, The Forward, and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.

The common narrative of Neanderthals is that they were a group of dullard losers whose extinction 40,000 years ago was due to smarter competition and a little of interbreeding with our own forebears. Likening someone to a Neanderthal was and, most likely, still is a top-rate anthropological insult. But, in the past few decades, Neanderthal finds have greatly contradicted our perception of the species. In Kindred, Rebecca Wragg Sykes combs through the avalanche of scientific discoveries of the species and uses her experience at the cutting-edge of Paleolithic research to share our new understanding of Neanderthals, shoving aside cliches of rag-clad brutes in an icy wasteland. She reveals them to be curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. They ranged across vast tracts of tundra and steppe, but also stalked in dappled forests and waded in the Mediterranean Sea. Above all, they were successful survivors for more than 300,000 years, during times of massive climatic upheaval. Shermer and Sykes also discuss: the nature of species and if Neanderthals and Homo sapiens are one or two species, the deep time span of Neanderthals, the wide geography of Neanderthals, how archaeologists work today to discern Neanderthal lives and minds, Neanderthal DNA and what we have learned from it, Neanderthal bodies, Neanderthal brains and minds, Neanderthal tools and what they tell us about their lives, Neanderthal hunting/caloric needs, Neanderthal art, Neanderthal sex and love and social lives, Neanderthal death, burial, afterlife beliefs, and possible religious beliefs, and extinction: what happened to the Neanderthals? Rebecca Wragg Sykes has been fascinated by the vanished worlds of the Pleistocene ice ages since childhood, and followed this interest through a career researching the most enigmatic characters of all, the Neanderthals. After a Ph.D. on the last Neanderthals living in Britain, she worked in France at the world-famous PACEA laboratory, Université de Bordeaux, on topics ranging from Neanderthal landscapes and territories in the Massif Central region of south-east France, to examining how they were the first ancient humans to produce a synthetic material and tools made of multiple parts. Alongside her academic activities, she has also earned a reputation for exceptional public engagement. The public can follow her research through a personal blog and Twitter account, and she frequently writes for the popular media, including the Scientific American and Guardian science blogs. Becky is passionate about sharing the privileged access scientists have to fascinating discoveries about the Neanderthals. She is also co-founder of the influential Trowelblazers project, which highlights women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists through innovative outreach and collaboration.

This classic lecture on skepticism was given by James Randi on March 22, 1992 at the inaugural session of the Distinguished Science Lecture Series hosted by Michael Shermer and presented by The Skeptics Society in California (1992–2015). The transcript for this lecture appeared in Skeptic magazine 1.1 (1992). James Randi presents an amazing first-hand analysis of astonishing claims encountered in his European visit. New-found freedoms stimulate rampant pseudoscientific practices in eastern bloc nations. With wit and wonderfully illustrative examples, Randi teaches us several lessons on the scientific investigation of unusual claims. Famed magician and investigator of paranormal claims, Randi is best selling author of The Faith Healers and Flim Flam! Randi was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Grant for his investigation of faith healers.

The United States today is hopelessly polarized; the political Right and Left have hardened into rigid and deeply antagonistic camps, preventing any sort of progress. Amid the bickering and inertia, the promise of the 1960s—when we came together as a nation to fight for equality and universal justice—remains unfulfilled. As Shelby Steele reveals in Shame, the roots of this impasse can be traced back to that decade of protest, when in the act of uncovering and dismantling our national hypocrisies—racism, sexism, militarism—liberals internalized the idea that there was something inauthentic, if not evil, in the America character. Since then, liberalism has been wholly concerned with redeeming modern America from the sins of the past, and has derived its political legitimacy from the premise of a morally bankrupt America. The result has been a half-century of well-intentioned but ineffective social programs, such as Affirmative Action. Steele reveals that not only have these programs failed, but they have in almost every case actively harmed America’s minorities and poor. Ultimately, Steele argues, post-60s liberalism has utterly failed to achieve its stated aim: true equality. Liberals, intending to atone for our past sins, have ironically perpetuated the exploitation of this country’s least fortunate citizens. Approaching political polarization from a wholly new perspective, Steele offers a rigorous critique of the failures of liberalism and a cogent argument for the relevance and power of conservatism. Shermer and Steele discuss: 30th anniversary of his book The Content of Our Character, and what has changed in race relations in America in those 30 years? Steele’s response to President Johnson’s famous quote: “Freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him; bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” why “The promised land guarantees nothing. It is only an opportunity, not a deliverance.”, literal truths vs. poetic truths and power: “What actually happened was that liberalism turned to poetic truth when America’s past sins were no longer literally true enough to support liberal policies and the liberal claim on power. The poetic truth of black victimization seeks to compensate for America’s moral evolution. It tries to keep alive the justification for liberal power even as that justification has been greatly nullified by America’s moral development.”   political correctness is the enforcement arm of poetic truth, black families & fatherless homes, white guilt, race fatigue, reparations, anti-racism, achievement gap, Princeton racism letter, race and IQ, SAT tests, BLM and the nuclear family, training and sensitivity programs. Shermer and Steele also discuss his new film, produced with his son Eli Steele, titled What Killed Michael Brown? Steele: “We human beings never use race except as a means to power. Race is never an end. It is always a means, and it has no role in human affairs except as a corruption.” “America’s original sin is not slavery. It is simply the use of race as a means to power. Whether for good or ill, race is a corruption. Always. And it always turns one group into the convenience of another group.” “Liberalism’s great sin was to steal responsibility for black problems away from black people, leaving them vulnerable to destructive social forces, such as the drug epidemic of the 70s and 80s. It was the suffering of blacks that justified liberalism’s demand for power, but this only relegates blacks to permanent victimhood and alienates them from the power to uplift themselves.” Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Winner of the Bradley Prize and a National Humanities Medal and the author of the National Book Critics Circle award-winning The Content of Our Character, Steele lives in the Central Coast of California.