New Books in Science

Science often draws a picture of the world as a giant machine, a meaningless mechanical clock ticking and tocking forever. But religion and poetry offer a different view, one that is teeming with life and overflowing with spirit.Guest: Michael Ruse is a British-born Canadian philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion.Making Meaning is a limited series from Ministry of Ideas that explores how life can be lived more meaningfully. Featuring meditations by some of the world’s most sensitive and insightful thinkers, Making Meaning will give you fresh perspective and encouragement to live with greater intention and fullness. Making Meaning is produced by Jack Pombriant and Zachary Davis. Artwork by Dan Pecci. Learn more at ministryofideas.org and find us on Twitter @ministryofideas. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

What’s actually going on in a cell–or on the spiky outside of an invading virus? Gael McGill, Director of Molecular Visualization at the Center for Molecular and Cellular Dynamics at Harvard Medical School is founder and CEO of Digizyme and has spent his career exploring and developing different modes for visualizing evidence.For this scientific conversation taped back in 2021, Recall this Book host John is joined once again by Brandeis neuroscientist Gina Turrigiano (think ep 4 Madeline Miller; think ep 2 Addiction!).You may want to check out Digizyme‘s images of the spike protein attaching the SARS-CoV2 virus to a hapless cell and fusing their membranes. Or click through to watch a gorgeous video Gael and his team have created.Mentioned in the Episode: Gael praised Galileo’s revolutionary images (drawings? diagrams?) of Jupiter’s moons: Leonardo’s stunning anatomical drawings: The DNA Double-Helix: We all knew that Watson and Crick‘s revelation came with this model: But it’s easy to forget this indispensable antecedent: the enigmatic yet foundational x-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin: “All models are wrong; some are useful.”smiley statistician George Box “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 115 And what sort of deceptive picture did Wittgenstein have in mind? well, how about the 1904 “Plum-pudding model” of what the atom might look like? Wrong, and productive of all sorts of mistaken hypotheses. Gina credited the beautiful drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal with inspiring and illuminating generations of neuroscientists. John credits Science in the Marketplace, an edited collection reminding us that even in crowded lecture-halls, to display science may also mean doing science….. Gael ended his historical tour by praising David Goodsell, cell-painter extraordinaire: John also raved (as he is wont to do) about cave paintings as the first animation in the world (e.g. these horses from Peche-Merle). Listen and Read Here:47 Glimpsing COVID: Gael McGill on Data Visualization Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Joel Sweimler, Exhibition Specialist at the American Museum of Natural History, talks about his career at the museum, working on Seeing Truth, and what his favorite object in the collection happen to be this week.Learn more about the Seeing Truth exhibition at our website.Follow us on Twitter @WhyArguePod and on Instagram @WhyWeArguePodAlexis L. Boylan is the director of academic affairs of the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) and an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Art and Art History Department and the Africana Studies Institute Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

How useful will nuclear fusion be? In a major breakthrough last year at the National Ignition Facility in California, 192 lasers achieved fusion – and created energy - for the first time. It was clearly an important moment. But might the development of fusion technology come too late? Owen Bennett Jones speaks with Sharon Ann Holgate, author of Nuclear Fusion: The Race to Build a Mini Sun on Earth (Icon Books, 2022).Owen Bennett-Jones is a freelance journalist and writer. A former BBC correspondent and presenter he has been a resident foreign correspondent in Bucharest, Geneva, Islamabad, Hanoi and Beirut. He is recently wrote a history of the Bhutto dynasty which was published by Yale University Press. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world.Guests: Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston and research associate at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Ben Allen, associate professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College. Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard University and bestselling author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Linking morality and science can conjure up disturbing histories around social Darwinism, eugenics, and genetically engineered humans. But scientists today are making discoveries that moral agents shouldn’t ignore: how to overcome aggression and tribalism, and how to sustain cooperation in a modern pluralist world.Guests: Diane Paul, professor emerita of the University of Massachusetts, Boston and research associate at the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology. Ben Allen, associate professor of mathematics at Emmanuel College. Steven Pinker, professor of cognitive psychology at Harvard University and bestselling author of The Better Angels of Our Nature, The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate, and many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

What if human intelligence is actually more of a liability than a gift? After all, the animal kingdom, in all its diversity, gets by just fine without it. At first glance, human history is full of remarkable feats of intelligence, yet human exceptionalism can be a double-edged sword. With our unique cognitive prowess comes severe consequences, including existential angst, violence, discrimination, and the creation of a world teetering towards climate catastrophe. What if human exceptionalism is more of a curse than a blessing?As Dr. Justin Gregg puts it in his book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal: What Animal Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity (Little, Brown (US), 2022, Hodder (UK), 2023), there’s an evolutionary reason why human intelligence isn’t more prevalent in the animal kingdom. Simply put, non-human animals don’t need it to be successful. And, miraculously, their success arrives without the added baggage of destroying themselves and the planet in the process.In seven mind-bending and hilarious chapters, Dr. Gregg highlights features seemingly unique to humans – our use of language, our rationality, our moral systems, our so-called sophisticated consciousness – and compares them to our animal brethren. What emerges is both demystifying and remarkable, and will change how you look at animals, humans, and the meaning of life itself.This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Andrew Jewett is the author of Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (2020) and Science, Democracy, and the American University: From the Civil War to the Cold War (2012). He has taught at Harvard, Yale, NYU, Vanderbilt, and Boston College and held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the Cornell Society for the Humanities, the National Academy of Education, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

What is the difference between global warming and climate change? This episode explores: What led Dr. Wu into STEM, and to the study of climate change. Why the term global warming is misleading, and potentially confusing. Why weather around the world is getting more extreme. What she foresees for the future, and what we can do to change that. Why human choices matter on much a larger scale than most people realize. A discussion of the article “Looking Back on America’s Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal”. Today’s article is: Looking Back on America's Summer of Heat, Floods, and Climate Change: Welcome to the New Abnormal by Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu, which provides an overview of the record-breaking heat and historic floods of 2022. Dr. Wu discusses how the new abnormal is increasingly seen as the new weather pattern, why it’s dangerous to normalize this, and what we can do change it. “Welcome to the New Abnormal” was published in The Conversation on September 21, 2022.Our guest is: Dr. Shuang-Yu Wu, who is a climate scientist. Dr. Wu uses climate models to project future climate change and its potential impacts on the hydrological cycle, including precipitation, extreme storms and flood risks. She also collaborates with researchers in ice core science and stable isotope geochemistry investigate climate and environmental change in the past ten thousand years. Dr. Wu received her Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in 2000 where she studied environmental geography. She joined the University of Dayton department of Geology and Environmental Geosciences in 2004 after completing three-year post-doctoral research at Pennsylvania State University. She has published over 50 peer-reviewed articles in high-impact scientific journals, and received close to two million dollars in external funding for her research. Dr. Wu teaches a variety courses mainly in the field of climate change, environmental geosciences, and Geographical Information Systems.Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, a historian of women and gender.Listeners to this episode may also be interested in: The Conversation article: 2022's US Climate Disasters: A tale of too much rain and too little The Conversation article: For a Flooded Midwest Climate Forecasts Offer Little Comfort Bedaso, Z., & Wu, S. Y. (2020). Daily precipitation isotope variation in Midwestern United States: Implication for hydroclimate and moisture source. Science of The Total Environment, 713, 136631. Yuan, W., Wu, S. Y., Hou, S., Xu, Z., & Lu, H. (2019). Normalized Difference Vegetation Index‐based assessment of climate change impact on vegetation growth in the humid‐arid transition zone in northern China during 1982–2013. International Journal of Climatology, 39(15), 5583-5598. Wu, Y., Ji, H., Wen, J., Wu, S.-Y., Xu, M., Tagle, F., Duan, W., Li, J. (2018). The characteristics of regional persistent heavy precipitation events over eastern monsoon China during 1960-2013. Global and Planetary Change, 172, pp.414-427. Welcome to The Academic Life! Join us here each week, where we go inside the academy to learn directly from experts. We embrace a broad definition of what it means to lead an academic life, and are inspired by today’s knowledge-producers working inside and outside the academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science

Listen to this interview of Gang Wang, Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We talk about using the writing to research better.Gang Wang : "I personally view writing as a very useful process to polish my own thinking. For example, when my group are on a project, until we actually put things in writing, we won't find little flaws in the design, or jumped steps in the argumentation, or missing experiments in the study. But when we put things in writing, this shows us very quickly what we've left out." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science