Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sexuality is, and always has been, a topic that is endlessly fascinating but also contentious. You might think that asexuality would be more straightforward, but you'd be wrong. Asexual people, or "aces," haven't been front and center in the public discussion of gender and sexuality, and as a result there is confusion about such basic issues as what "asexuality" even means. Angela Chen is a science journalist and an ace herself, and she's written a new book about asexuality and how it fits into the wider discussion of sex and gender. Precisely because sexuality is so taken for granted by many people, thinking about asexuality not only helps us understand the issues confronting aces, but the meaning of sexuality more broadly.

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Angela Chen received a B.A. in comparative literature from UC San Diego. She is a contributing editor at Catapult magazine, and her writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Vox Media, The Atlantic, MIT Technology Review, and elsewhere. Her new book is Ace: What Asexuality Reveals about Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex.

• Web site
• Amazon.com author page
• Twitter

You can't always get what you want, as a wise person once said. But we do try, even when someone else wants the same thing. Our lives as people, and the evolution of other animals over time, are shaped by competition for scarce resources of various kinds. Game theory provides a natural framework for understanding strategies and behaviors in these competitive settings, and thus provides a lens with which to analyze evolution and human behavior, up to and including why racial or gender groups are consistently discriminated against in society. Cailin O'Connor is the author or two recent books on these issues: Games in the Philosophy of Biology and The Origins of Unfairness: Social Categories and Cultural Evolution.

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Cailin O'Connor received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of California, Irvine. She is currently Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at UCI. Her works involves questions in the philosophy of biology and behavioral science, game theory, agent-based modeling, social epistemology, decision theory, rational choice, and the spread of misinformation.

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• Google Scholar publications
• PhilPeople Profile
• Talk on how misinformation spreads
• Amazon author page
• Twitter

Not too long ago nobody carried a mobile phone; now almost everybody does. That's the kind of rate of rapid progress we're seeing with our ability to directly edit genomes. With the use of CRISPR-Cas9 and other techniques, gene editing is becoming commonplace. How does that work — and perhaps more importantly, how are we going to put it to use? Fyodor Urnov has worked in this area from its beginning, having coined the term "gene editing." We talk about how this new technology can be used to cure or prevent disease, as well as the pros and cons of designer babies.

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Fyodor Urnov received his Ph.D. in Biology from Brown University. He is currently professor of Genetic, Genomics, and Development in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at UC Berkeley, as well as Director for Technology and Translation at the Innovative Genomics Institute. His research focuses on using CRISPR gene-editing techniques to develop treatments for sickle cell disease, radiation injury, and other conditions, as well as guiding IGI researchers as they bring these therapies from the lab to the clinic.

• Web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Innovative Genomics Institute
• Talk on "The Next Generation of Edited Humans"
• Twitter

Todays episode is sponsored by The Great Courses Plus. Mindscape listeners get a free trial if they sign up at http://thegreatcoursesplus.com/mindscape.

Human civilization is only a few thousand years old (depending on how we count). So if civilization will ultimately last for millions of years, it could be considered surprising that we've found ourselves so early in history. Should we therefore predict that human civilization will probably disappear within a few thousand years? This "Doomsday Argument" shares a family resemblance to ideas used by many professional cosmologists to judge whether a model of the universe is natural or not. Philosopher Nick Bostrom is the world's expert on these kinds of anthropic arguments. We talk through them, leading to the biggest doozy of them all: the idea that our perceived reality might be a computer simulation being run by enormously more powerful beings.

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Nick Bostrom received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the London School of Economics. He also has bachelor's degrees in philosophy, mathematics, logic, and artificial intelligence from the University of Gothenburg, an M.A. in philosophy and physics from the University of Stockholm, and an M.Sc. in computational neuroscience from King's College London. He is currently a Professor of Applied Ethics at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford Future of Humanity Institute, and Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology. He is the author of Anthropic Bias: Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.

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• Oxford web page
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page
• Talk on the Simulation Argument

Physicists have traditionally simplified systems as much as possible, in order to shed light on fundamental properties. But small, simple parts build up into large, complex wholes. Are there new rules and laws of nature that apply specifically to the realm of complexity? This has been a popular question for a few decades now, and we have some answers but not as many as we would like. Neil Johnson is an expert on complex systems generally, and information networks in particular. We discuss how self-organization can arise from individual units following their own agendas, and how we can mathematically characterize such behavior. Then we talk about information networks in the modern world, including how they have been used to spread disinformation and find recruits for radical fringe groups.

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Neil Johnson received his Ph.D. in physics from Harvard University. He is currently professor of physics at George Washington University, where he heads an initiative in Complexity and Data Science. In 1999 he presented the annual Christmas Lectures at the Royal Institution in London. He was the recipient of the Burton Award from the American Physical Society in 2018. Among his books are the textbook Financial Market Complexity and the trade book Simply Complexity.

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• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia
• Amazon author page
• Lecture on Complexity in Human Activity

It's easy to foresee that technological progress will change how we live; it's much harder to anticipate exactly how. Self-driving cars represent an enormous technological challenge, but one that is plausibly on the way to being solved. What will be the unanticipated consequences when autonomous vehicles become commonplace? Jason Torchinsky is a fan of technology, but also a fan of driving, and his recent book Robot, Take the Wheel examines how our relationship with cars is likely to change in the near future.

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Jason Torchinsky is a senior editor at Jalopnik. His writing has also appeared in venues such as Boing Boing, Muck Rack, and Mother Jones. He is a producer and occasional guest star on Jay Leno's Garage, and has been the host of the YouTube series Jason Drives.

• Articles at Jalopnik
• Articles at Muck Rack
• Robot, Take the Wheel: The Road to Autonomous Cars and the Lost Art of Driving
• Twitter

We are living, in case you haven't noticed, in a world full of bullshit. It's hard to say whether the amount is truly increasing, but it seems that everywhere you look someone is trying to convince you of something, regardless of whether that something is actually true. Where is this bullshit coming from, how is it disseminated, and what can we do about it? Carl Bergstrom studies information in the context of biology, which has led him to investigate the flow of information and disinformation in social networks, especially the use of data in misleading ways. In the time of Covid-19 he has become on of the best Twitter feeds for reliable information, and we discuss how the pandemic has been a bounteous new source of bullshit.

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Carl Bergstrom received his Ph.D. in biology from Stanford University. He is currently a professor of biology at the University of Washington. In addition to his work on information and biology, he has worked on scientific practice and communication, proposing the eigenfactor method of ranking scientific journals. His new book (with Jevin West) is Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, which grew out of a course taught at the University of Wisconsin.

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• University of Washington web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Wikipedia
• Twitter
• Amazon author page
• Calling Bullshit website

Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There's much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of moral realism — the view that objective moral truths exist independently of human choices. That's not my own view, but ethics and meta-ethics are areas in which I think it's wise to keep an open mind and listen to smart people who disagree. This conversation offers food for thought for people on either side of this debate.

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Russ Shafer-Landau received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arizona. He is currently Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Among his numerous books are Moral Realism: A Defense and Whatever Happened to Good and Evil? He is the editor of Oxford Studies in Metaethics, and is the founder and organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop.

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• UW-Madison web page
• PhilPeople profile
• Amazon author page
• Talk on Moral Disagreement and Moral Intuitions
• Wikipedia

Someday, most likely, we will encounter life that is not as we know it. We might find it elsewhere in the universe, we might find it right here on Earth, or we might make it ourselves in a lab. Will we know it when we see it? "Life" isn't a simple unified concept, but rather a collection of a number of life-like properties. I talk with astrobiologist Stuart Bartlett, who (in collaboration with Michael Wong) has proposed a new way of thinking about life based on four pillars: dissipation, autocatalysis, homeostasis, and learning. Their framework may or may not become the standard picture, but it provides a useful way of thinking about what we expect life to be.

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Stuart Bartlett received his Ph.D. in complex systems from the University of Southampton. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech, and was formerly a postdoc at the Earth Life Science Institute at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

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• Caltech web page
• Google Scholar publications
• ResearchGate page
• "Defining Lyfe in the Universe: From Three Privileged Functions to Four Pillars," Bartlett and Wong (2020).

We gather empirical evidence about the nature of the world through our senses, and use that evidence to construct an image of the world in our minds. But not all senses are created equal; in practice, we tend to privilege vision, with hearing perhaps a close second. Ann-Sophie Barwich wants to argue that we should take smell more seriously, and that doing so will give us new insights into how the brain works. As a working philosopher and neuroscientist, she shares a wealth of fascinating information about how smell works, how it shapes the way we think, and what it all means for questions of free will and rationality.

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Ann-Sophie Barwich received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences, University of Exeter. She is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and Cognitive Science Program at Indiana University Bloomington. She has previously been a Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience at The Center for Science & Society, Columbia University, and held a Research Fellowship at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Vienna. Her new book is Smellosophy: What the Nose Tells the Mind.

• Web site
• Indiana University web page
• Google Scholar publications
• Blog at Psychology Today
• Talk on the Philosophy and History of Olfaction
• Twitter