The Michael Shermer Show Archives

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss465_Michael_Shermer_2024_09_06.mp3

Download MP3

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss464_Will_Gervais_2024_09_03.mp3

Download MP3

In his new book Disbelief: The Origins of Atheism in a Religious Species, Will Gervais, PhD., a global leader in the psychological study of atheism, shows that the ubiquity of religious belief and the peculiarities of atheism are connected pieces in the puzzle of human nature. Does God exist? This straightforward question has spawned endless debate, ranging from apologists’ supposed proofs of God’s existence to New Atheist manifestos declaring belief in God a harmful delusion.

It’s undeniable that religion is a core tenet of human nature. It is also true that our overwhelmingly religious species is also as atheistic as it’s ever been. Yet, no scientific understanding of religion is complete without accounting for those who actively do not believe. In this refreshing and revelatory book, Gervais argues that religion is not an evolutionary puzzle so much as two evolutionary puzzles that can only be solved together. First is the Puzzle of Faith: the puzzle of how Homo sapiens – and Homo sapiens alone – came to be a religious species. Second is the Puzzle of Atheism: how disbelief in gods can exist within our uniquely religious species. The result is a radically cohesive theory of both faith and atheism, showing how we became a uniquely religious species, and why many are now abandoning their belief.

Through a firsthand account of breakthroughs in the scientific study of atheism, including key findings from cognitive science, cultural evolution, and evolutionary psychology, Disbelief forces a rethinking of the prevailing theories of religion and reminds both believers and atheists of the shared psychologies that set them on their distinct religious trajectories. In casual prose and with compelling examples, Gervais explains how we became religious, why we’re leaving faith behind, and how we can get along with others across the religious divides we’ve culturally evolved.

Will Gervais, PhD, is a cultural evolutionary psychologist and has been a global leader in the scientific study of atheism for over a decade. Dr. Gervais’s research has been featured in media such as The New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Der Speigel, Psychology Today, Vox, and Scientific American. His interdisciplinary work, lying at the intersection of cultural evolution, evolutionary psychology, and cognitive science, has garnered international scientific recognition. He was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science and is the recipient of the Margaret Gorman Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association and the SAGE Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology.

Gervais and Shermer discuss:

What is religion?

Theism, Atheism, Agnosticism, Deism, Pantheism, etc. defined

How many atheists and agnostics and religious skeptics are there really?

Atheism and morality, trust, politics, etc.

Why are atheists so unpopular?

Metaphysical atheism vs. epistemological atheism (or agnosticism)

Popular nonanswers for religion and belief in God(s) (the Puzzle of Faith)

Role(s) of religion in history and society today

Is religion and belief in God(s) adaptive or a byproduct?

What cognitive features of the brain are engaged in faith, religion, & belief in God?

Patternicity, Agenticity, Sensed presence effect, essentialism, dualism, theory of mind, teleology

Big Gods vs. animism, polytheism, supernaturalism

Folk physics (pre-Newtonian) and biology (creationism)

Why some religions are so much more successful than others

Group selection vs. cultural selection

Is religion good for society?

Is religion good for personal health and happiness?

When we colonize Mars will far future humans on other planets believe in God?

Does religion need to be replaced with something?

Enlightenment Humanism, Secular Humanism, and other alternatives.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss463_Ben_Goertzel_2024_09_01.mp3

Download MP3

Dr. Ben Goertzel is a cross-disciplinary scientist, entrepreneur and author. Born in Brazil to American parents, in 2020 after a long stretch living in Hong Kong he relocated his primary base of operations to a rural island near Seattle. He leads the SingularityNET Foundation, the OpenCog Foundation, and the AGI Society which runs the annual Artificial General Intelligence conference.

Dr. Goertzel also chairs the futurist nonprofit Humanity+, serves as Chief Scientist of AI firms Rejuve, Mindplex, Cogito, and Jam Galaxy, all parts of the SingularityNET ecosystem, and serves as keyboardist and vocalist in the Jam Galaxy Band, the first-ever band led by a humanoid robot.

As Chief Scientist of robotics firm Hanson Robotics, he led the software team behind the Sophia robot; as Chief AI Scientist of Awakening Health he leads the team crafting the mind behind Sophia’s little sister Grace.

Dr. Goertzel’s research work encompasses multiple areas, including artificial general intelligence, natural language processing, cognitive science, machine learning, computational finance, bioinformatics, virtual worlds, gaming, parapsychology, theoretical physics and more. He has published 25+ scientific books, ~150 technical papers, and numerous journalistic articles, and given talks at a vast number of events of all sorts around the globe.

Before entering the software industry Dr. Goertzel obtained his PhD in mathematics from Temple University in 1989 and served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. His new book is The Consciousness Explosion: A Mindful Human’s Guide to the Coming Technological and Experiential Singularity.

Shermer and Goertzel discuss:

Natural Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence

General Intelligence (g) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

The alignment problem

Consciousness and sentience

Zombies and the Hard Problem of Consciousness

Data, Sophia, and other robots

Altered States of Intelligence

Mind uploading and the self

How would we know if an AI system was sentient?

Can AI systems be conscious?

Self-driving cars

AI dystopia

AI utopia

AI protopia

UBI

What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?

Can AGI solve political and economic problems?

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss462_Michael_Shermer_2024_08_30.mp3

Download MP3

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. It’s no different when it comes to UFO frenzy. There is a need to separate fact from fiction in UAP claims.

In this episode, Shermer delves into the growing interest in UAPs (formerly UFOs), especially in light of UFOlogist Lue Elizondo’s book Imminent. Elizondo claims the U.S. government has long been aware of extraterrestrial intelligence, backed by reports of unidentified craft surveilling military sites. The episode explores these bold assertions and the tension between believers and skeptics, including scientists like Avi Loeb and institutions like the Department of Defense, which have disputed such claims.

Listeners interested in extraterrestrial intelligence, UFOs, and government secrecy will find this discussion compelling. Shermer reflects on historical UFO figures like Bob Lazar and Travis Walton, questioning their credibility while exploring the widespread belief in imminent “disclosure” of alien contact. Through interviews with experts and analysis of various UAP phenomena, the episode challenges listeners to discern fact from fiction, offering an intriguing examination of what could be humanity’s most profound discovery.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss461_Helen_Pluckrose_2024_08_27.mp3

Download MP3

The stated goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are often reasonable, if not noble—to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment for all. Yet, as more and more people are discovering, DEI as commonly practiced isn’t a natural extension of past civil rights movements or an ethical framework for opposing discrimination on the grounds of race, sex, etc. Rather, it is inextricably connected with an illiberal and authoritarian ideology—Critical Social Justice—that demands adherence to its tenets and punishes any dissent from its dogma.

Even the mildest questions about Critical Social Justice claims—that all white people are racists, that all underrepresented minorities are oppressed, that sex and gender differences have no biological basis, that censorship is a necessary good—are regularly met by DEI trainers and HR officers with pat commands: “Educate yourself,” “Do the work,” “Listen and learn.” At work, raises, promotions, and future employment often depend on our nodding approval of such claims. At school, grades, nominations, and awards are often contingent upon our active agreement with these beliefs. In our daily lives, Critical Social Justice ideology poses a genuine threat not only to our fundamental rights but also to the future of our democratic systems, but if we suggest this, we risk being canceled or shunned by community members. When facing a choice between silent submission and risky if ethical opposition, what is a person to do?

While a growing number of groups concerned about the nature of Critical Social Justice have begun to attack it from the top down through legal, financial, and political means, The Counterweight Handbook takes a decidedly different and novel approach. It works from the bottom up and is written to empower individuals who wish to combat Critical Social Justice in their personal and professional lives. Based on the author’s years of experience studying, exposing, and fighting Critical Social Justice ideology and advising individuals and organizations struggling with it, The Counterweight Handbook is designed to help people address Critical Social Justice problems in the most ethical and effective way possible. It not only offers principled responses to the main claims of Critical Social Justice but also teaches individuals what to do when they are asked to affirm beliefs they do not hold, undergo training in an ideology they cannot support, or submit to antiscientific testing and retraining of their “unconscious” minds. In short, it is for all of us who believe in freedom of speech and conscience, who wish to push back against the hostile work and educational environments Critical Social Justice has created, and who want to stand up for our individual liberties and universal rights.

Helen Pluckrose is a liberal political and cultural writer and was one of the founders of Counterweight. A participant in the Grievance Studies Affair probe that highlighted problems in Critical Social Justice scholarship, she is the coauthor of Cynical Theories and Social (In)justice. She lives in England and can be found on X @HPluckrose

Shermer and Pluckrose discuss:

the problem to be solved?

origin of the problem: post-modernism and Critical Social Justice ideology

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

what it means to “Educate yourself,” “Do the work,” “Listen and learn.”

top-down (Chris Rufo, Ron DeSantis) vs. bottom-up counter measures

gender pronoun declarations

race reckoning

White supremacy accusations and White guilt

antiracism

gender ideology

Blackness

Critical Race Theory (CRT)

decolonize

discourse

dismantle

fragility

intersectionality

normativity

positionality

privilege

problematic

woke.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss460_Joshua_Blu_Buhs_2024_08_25.mp3

Download MP3

Flying saucers. Bigfoot. Frogs raining from the sky. Such phenomena fascinated Charles Fort, the maverick writer who scanned newspapers, journals, and magazines for reports of bizarre occurrences: dogs that talked, vampires, strange visions in the sky, and paranormal activity. His books of anomalies advanced a philosophy that saw science as a small part of a larger system in which truth and falsehood continually transformed into one another. His work found a ragged following of skeptics who questioned not only science but the press, medicine, and politics. Though their worldviews varied, they shared compelling questions about genius, reality, and authority. At the center of this community was adman, writer, and enfant terrible Tiffany Thayer, who founded the Fortean Society and ran it for almost three decades, collecting and reporting on every manner of oddity and conspiracy.

In Think to New Worlds, Joshua Blu Buhs argues that the Fortean effect on modern culture is deeper than you think. Fort’s descendants provided tools to expand the imagination, explore the social order, and demonstrate how power is exercised. Science fiction writers put these ideas to work as they sought to uncover the hidden structures undergirding reality. Avant-garde modernists—including the authors William Gaddis, Henry Miller, and Ezra Pound, as well as Surrealist visual artists—were inspired by Fort’s writing about metaphysical and historical forces. And in the years following World War II, flying saucer enthusiasts convinced of alien life raised questions about who controlled the universe.

Buhs’s meticulous and entertaining book takes a respectful look at a cast of oddballs and eccentrics, plucking them from history’s margins and spotlighting their mark on American modernism. Think to New Worlds is a timely consideration of a group united not only by conspiracies and mistrust of science but by their place in an ever-expanding universe rich with unexplained occurrences and visionary possibilities.

Joshua Blu Buhs is a scholar of the overlap of politics, biology, and ecology in twentieth-century America and has written articles that have appeared in Isis, Environmental History, The World of Genetics, and Journal of the History of Biology. His Ph.D. is in the history of science from Penn State. He is the author of Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend and The Fire Ant Wars: Nature, Science, and Public Policy in Twentieth-Century America, both published by the University of Chicago Press. His new book is Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers.

Shermer and Blu Buhs discuss:

How he got into researching and writing about weird things

The Fire Ant Wars and how Americans thought about nature in the second half of the 20th century (Rachel Carson, E. O. Wilson)

Bigfoot

Charles Fort (1874–1932)

Fortean followers

Tiffany Thayer

Fortean Society

Amazing Stories, Astounding Science Fiction, and other magazines

The Book of the Damned by Charles Fort

Anomalies and anomaly hunting

frogs and fishes falling from the sky, ball lightning, UFOs, cryptids (like Bigfoot), talking dogs and vampires, poltergeist events, spontaneous human combustion, levitation, unexplained disappearances, out-of-place artifacts, and highly unusual coincidences

science fiction

aesthetic modernism

UFOs and UFOlogy

Ancient aliens and von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods

The Day the Earth Stood Still as a Christ allegory

Dianetics, Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard

Graham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods

Skeptics and Humanists

Conspiracies and conspiracy theories

“modernity released the marvelous, expanded the possible ways in which humanity came into the presence of the awesome. The death of God and the rise of science as the preeminent process for creating truth opened new provinces, provided new materials for imagining, inventing, experiencing enchantment.”

Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled “The Hermit Scientist,” about what we would today call pseudoscientists, and in 1952 he expanded it into a book titled In the Name of Science:

“(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. (3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. (4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. (5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.”

“If the present trend continues, we can expect a wide variety of these men, with theories yet unimaginable, to put in their appearance in the years immediately ahead. They will write impressive books, give inspiring lectures, organize exciting cults. They may achieve a following of one—or one million. In any case, it will be well for ourselves and for society if we are on our guard against them.”

Of Fort, Buhs reveals, “His was a radical skepticism that refused to accept anything as absolutely true or absolutely false.”

Buhs: “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world. They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity, undermined the authority of experts and expertise. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.”

A Residue of Anomalies

Review of Think to New Worlds: The Cultural History of Charles Fort and His Followers by Joshua Blu Buhs, University of Chicago Press, pub date June 24, 2024

by Michael Shermer

The “residue problem” in science means that no matter how all-encompassing a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The most famous case in the history of science is that Newton’s gravitational theory could not account for the precession of the planet Mercury’s orbit, subsequently explained by Einstein’s theory of relativity. Many paradigm shifts happen, in fact, when enough anomalies build up to justify a new explanatory model.

Unfortunately, residues of unexplained anomalies open the door to autodidacts to jump in with their alternative theories to mainstream science. The widely-viewed 2023 Netflix series Ancient Apocalypse, for example, follows alternative archaeologist Graham Hancock around the world as he exposes anomalies he asserts are unexplained by science and best accounted for by the lost civilization of Atlantis. Every episode of the popular History Channel series Ancient Aliens features alleged anomalies that scientists purportedly cannot explain without invoking extraterrestrials. And what were those UAP videos screened in the halls of Congress last year but Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena?

This tradition of collecting anomalies and cataloging them into paranormal, supernatural, extraterrestrial, mystical, and magical worlds just beyond the horizons of science can be traced back a century to Charles Fort (1874–1932) and his Fortean followers, which in turn shaped science fiction, avant-garde modernism, Surrealist art, and UFOlogy throughout the 20th century, skillfully recounted in a compelling narrative by cultural historian and author Joshua Blu Buhs, whose previous book, Bigfoot: The Life and Times of a Legend, set the tone for this deeper dive into who and what gave rise to the original New Age.

Fort’s research methodology—more fully developed and proselytized by the writer and adman Tiffany Thayer, who went on to found the Fortean Society—is what today is called “anomaly hunting.” Intrepid would-be researchers rummage through scientific books, journal articles, magazine features, and newspaper stories for anything that doesn’t quite seem to fit with mainstream science. Fort’s original anomaly hunting expeditions netted him a plethora of weird things for which scientists had no explanation: frogs and fishes falling from the sky, ball lightning, UFOs, cryptids (like Bigfoot), talking dogs and vampires, poltergeist events, spontaneous human combustion, levitation, unexplained disappearances, out-of-place artifacts, and highly unusual coincidences.

Fort and his followers—Forteans, as they called themselves—“had their largest effect on the practices of science fiction, aesthetic modernism, and UFOlogy, pursuits seemingly peripheral to the mainstream,” Buhs explains in embedding his subject in time and place, and contrasting the movement he traces with that of the world of early 20th-century science. Buhs’ thesis—well supported and cogently argued—is that the belief in “modernity” as a coldly secular and mechanically scientific worldview devoid of wonder is wrong. On the contrary, “modernity released the marvelous, expanded the possible ways in which humanity came into the presence of the awesome. The death of God and the rise of science as the preeminent process for creating truth opened new provinces, provided new materials for imagining, inventing, experiencing enchantment.” The anomalies compiled by Fort and Forteans served as “inspiration for those who tried to imagine the future,” one that they could create “rather than having it thrust upon the world.”

Not everyone was so influenced by Fort and Foreanism. In 1950, the science writer Martin Gardner published an article in the Antioch Review entitled “The Hermit Scientist,” about what we would today call pseudoscientists, and in 1952 he expanded it into a book titled In the Name of Science with the descriptive subtitle “An entertaining survey of the high priests and cultists of science, past and present” (later republished as Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science and now considered a classic in modern skepticism). Said cultists were none other than Forteans and their ideological offspring, about whom Gardner upbraided as cranks, which he characterized thusly: “(1) He considers himself a genius. (2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads. (3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. (4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. (5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.”

This mid-century encounter established a tension between believers (represented by Fort and Forteans of all stripes) and skeptics (represented by Gardner and others worried not only about Fortean claims but additional paranormal and occult beliefs). “If the present trend continues,” Gardner concluded, “we can expect a wide variety of these men, with theories yet unimaginable, to put in their appearance in the years immediately ahead. They will write impressive books, give inspiring lectures, organize exciting cults. They may achieve a following of one—or one million. In any case, it will be well for ourselves and for society if we are on our guard against them.”

Nevertheless, as Buhs notes, Garnder was a “mysterian”—those who believe there are some mysteries that will never be explained by science, such as consciousness, free will, and God—unwilling to completely dismiss all Fortean claims outright. And this opened the door to a different form of skepticism. Of Fort, Buhs reveals, “His was a radical skepticism that refused to accept anything as absolutely true or absolutely false.”

The problem with such enchanted thinking in which there is no clear boundary between science and pseudoscience, between the natural and the supernatural, between truth and falsehood, is today’s collapse in confidence in our institutions, from science and medicine to politics and the media. “Fort and Forteans played their part in the creation of this world,” Buhs concludes his cultural history. “They eroded the distinctions between truth and falsity, undermined the authority of experts and expertise. They launched a thousand conspiracies into the national consciousness.” Fort’s playful anomaly hunting “had been replaced by Thayer’s acerbic nihilism, which became omnipresent and decoupled from any need to compile evidence or craft arguments.” As a result, a century after Fort’s swerve away from the scientism of the modern world, we have theories that consist of only two words, “Fake News!”, one word, “Rigged!” and even one letter, “Q”.

In the end, science needs outsiders and mavericks who poke and prod and push accepted theories until they either collapse or are reinforced even stronger. But it also needs standards of evidence and norms of objectivity, truth telling, accountability, and professionalism. Unfortunately, outsiders like Forteans and their modern descendants tend to fall far short of these standards and norms.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss459_Michael_Shermer_2024_08_23.mp3

Download MP3

As if 2024 couldn’t get any weirder, tensions in the Middle East have escalated with the United States sending one of our nuclear submarines to the Mediterranean as a deterrent signal to Iran that they better think twice about attacking Israel. That sub, the Ohio-class USS Georgia, carries non-nuclear cruise missiles.

But 14 of our 18 Ohio-class submarines have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles—each sub has in its belly the nuclear equivalent of all the bombs dropped in World War II. Multiply that by 14 and let your imagination be properly staggered.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces have pushed into Russian territory and Putin is outraged at the invasion. How far can Ukraine go before Putin uses his battlefield tactical nukes in response?

In this solo episode, Michael Shermer discusses the threat of nuclear annihilation and explores the evolutionary origins of our moral emotions and logic of deterrence based on game theory.

Focus of the analysis: the need to reduce nuclear stockpiles and shifting the taboo from using to owning nuclear weapons.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss458_Richard_Reeves_2024_08_20.mp3

Download MP3

What’s wrong with boys and men these days?

Boys and men are struggling. Profound economic and social changes of recent decades have many losing ground in the classroom, the workplace, and in the family. While the lives of women have changed, the lives of many men have remained the same or even worsened. Our attitudes, our institutions, and our laws have failed to keep up. Conservative and progressive politicians, mired in their own ideological warfare, fail to provide thoughtful solutions.

The father of three sons, a journalist, and the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, Richard V. Reeves has spent twenty-five years worrying about boys both at home and work. His book, Of Boys and Men, along with his American Institute for Boys and Men, tackles the complex and urgent crisis of boyhood and manhood. Reeves looks at the structural challenges that face boys and men and offers fresh and innovative solutions that turn the page on the corrosive narrative that plagues this issue. Of Boys and Men argues that helping the other half of society does not mean giving up on the ideal of gender equality.

Reeves says that gender equality is not a zero-sum game. We can do more for boys and men without doing less for women and girls. We can be passionate about women’s rights, and compassionate towards the struggles of boys and men. Of course there remain many gender gaps where women and girls remain at a disadvantage, especially in terms of pay, senior positions of leadership, access to venture capital, and so on. But in advanced economies, there are also gender gaps where boys and men have now fallen behind, especially if they are Black or from a lower-income background.

Richard Reeves is the founding president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Before founding AIBM in 2023, Reeves was a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution where he focused on policies related to economic inequality, racial justice, social mobility, and boys and men. Reeves is the author of several books, including Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to do About It and Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That is a Problem, and What to do About It. Inspired by his own experiences as a father and policy expert, Richard founded the American Institute for Boys and Men to bring awareness to the challenges facing boys and men today and to develop evidence-based solutions. In June, philanthropist Melinda French Gates announced she will be donating over $1B over the next two years to support women’s rights, and one of the recipients was the American Institute for Boys and Men founded by Richard Reeves to the tune of $20 million.

Shermer and Reeves discuss:

The gender gap in higher education is wider today than it was in 1972, when Title IX was passed, but the other way round, with men earning only 42 percent of degrees

In the average school district, boys are almost a grade level behind girls in English language arts (there is no gap in Math)

The risk of suicide is four times higher for boys and men than their female peers and has risen by more than a third among younger men since 2010

Male deaths before the age of 65 resulted in over 4 million years of potential life lost in 2022, three times the number for women

Employment rates among Black men are lower than for white men, white women, and Black women

Couples whose first child is a daughter are less likely to have more children than those whose firstborn is a son.

Adoptive parents are willing to pay about $20,000 more for a girl than a boy, according to one U.S. study.

Mothers of sons are often treated as if they have contracted a chronic disease, as Ruth Whippman reports in her book BoyMom. When she told a friend that her third child, conceived through in vitro fertilization, was going to be her third son, the response was: “I could understand it for a girl, but why go through all that just for another boy?”

Progressive left excoriating their “toxic masculinity” and a reactionary right telling them to “man up” and resist the “feminization” of society

Ruth Whippman’s Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture by Niobe Way talks about the “Boy Code.” This code consists in the privileging of certain masculine attributes, including “stoicism, independence, assertiveness, thinking, and crunching numbers,” and the devaluation of “soft” capacities, such as “vulnerability, dependency, sensitivity, feeling, and the analyses of words and language.” She also indicts the Boy Code for a range of other social and economic pathologies. “‘Boy’ culture is rooted in ideologies that intersect with one another,” she writes, “including but not limited to patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, homophobia, and transphobia.” Ms. Way laments the “masculine bias that undergirds neoliberalism” and claims that “because ‘boy’ culture is in bed with capitalism, money is valued over love.”

However:

Income inequality: why do women make .84 cents on the dollar compared to men

Fortune 500 CEOs: only 10.4 percent are women

Congress: 72 percent men, 28 percent women

I thought the future was female?

Education

Work/Labor market

Family

Marriage

Divorce/custody/spousal support/child support

What the political left gets wrong about boys and men

What the political right gets wrong about boys and men

Solutions: Fatherhood as an independent institution.

“In a zero-sum political environment, merely drawing attention to the problems of boys and men can be seen as somehow downplaying the ongoing challenges facing girls and women. This is why Democrats, in particular, are so reluctant to directly address male issues. That is a recipe for bad politics…”

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/sciencesalon/mss457_Elizabeth_Weiss_2024_08_17.mp3

Download MP3

Archaeologist Elizabeth Weiss’s new book, On the Warpath, is an autobiographical account of her storied career on the front lines of the culture war in our colleges and universities. Her opposition to the reburial of Native American skeletal remains, her insistence that indigenous knowledge is not science but myth, and her fight against wokeism and political correctness in academia exposed her to numerous controversies and cancel culture campaigns, and a court case.

A photograph of Weiss with a skull — as natural to anthropologists as a doctor being pictured with a stethoscope — led to her university shutting her out of the collection and changing the locks. This became an international news story, as did the American Anthropological Association canceling one of her presentations because she explained that a skeleton’s sex is binary and not gender fluid.

This hard-hitting and often humorous book tells the story of Dr. Weiss’s fight for science against superstition, and her attempts to promote free speech and academic freedom. It also exposes the current rot in today’s universities, through the lens of her battles against day-to-day absurdities. These include an attempt to bar “menstruating personnel” (formerly known as women) from the curation facility, a campaign to ban research on ancient Carthaginian remains because the individuals concerned never consented to photography, and a plan to declare X-rays sacred, so that they can be repatriated to Native Americans (who may actually be Mexicans), prior to being burned or buried.

Elizabeth Weiss is a controversial and world-renowned anthropology professor, specializing in the analysis of human skeletal remains. For much of her career she was based at San Jose State University, where she curated one of the largest collections of skeletal remains in the US. She is the author of numerous books and articles, and she played an essential role in bringing the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibition “What Does it Mean to be Human?” to the San Francisco Bay Area. She’s been featured in the New York Times, Science and USA Today, and has been interviewed on Fox News and Newsmax. She currently lives in New York City, where she holds a visiting fellowship with Heterodox Academy.

Shermer and Weiss discuss:

How she became interested in archaeology and when her field became politicized

Whatever happened to Kennewick Man, and who was he anyway?

When studying bones, why sex is binary

How wokeness has ruined anthropology and archaeology

The anthropology wars of the 1990s and the archaeology wars of the 2020s

Why science is never complete and so burying fossils after a preliminary scientific analysis is inappropriate

Why the fossil remains of most Native American sites have tenuous or no connection whatsoever to modern tribal peoples living nearby

The peopling of the Americas and what the consensus is on how long ago migrations began

Alternative archaeology and how scientists handle anomalous findings (e.g., 130,000-year old Mammoth fossils in San Diego that suggest they may have been butchered by humans)

Why archaeologists who support cultural relativism and respect for other people’s origin stories do not apply that same attitude toward, say, Christian creationists or Mormon creation stories

How she has been discriminated against as a woman researcher by some Native American groups (and why her otherwise liberal or progressive colleagues don’t defend her here)

Her lawsuit against San Jose State University for defaming her as a “racist” and blocking her from further scientific study of the fossil collection she has curated for 17 years

What’s behind cancel culture and identity politics

The future of archaeology on its present trajectory toward the politicization of science.

If you enjoy the podcast, please show your support by making a $5 or $10 monthly donation.