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David Lusseau always wanted to be a biologist. “Well, either biologist or clown,” he adds, “but I realized there was not much money in clowning.” When Marie the dolphin entered Lusseau’s life, she sealed the deal for him becoming a biologist. A bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) who swam in the waters near the village of Cerbère on the border between France and Spain in the late 1980s, Marie set seventeen-year-old Lusseau on a path that would one day lead him to study social networks in her species. “When you look in the eyes of a dolphin, you realize there is a lot going on,” Lusseau says, reminiscing on his time with his cetacean friend. “It is something that is very hard to express or grasp or explain in a factual matter, but spending time with [Marie] got me interested in … trying to understand how dolphins work, [in what] I perceived as another intelligent species on the planet.”

As an undergraduate, Lusseau spent time as a research assistant working with a group studying bottlenose dolphins in Florida. When out in the water, he encountered dolphins swimming on their own or in pairs. On occasion he bumped into a trio, but dolphins always seemed to be doing their own thing, just in the company of one or two others. That view of dolphin sociality, or the lack of it, changed dramatically when Lusseau began his PhD research in the late 1990s at the University of Otago in New Zealand. His dissertation focused on conservation biology in bottlenose dolphins in a fjord called Doubtful Sound, but the social behavior of the dolphins there hit him like a ton of bricks. As soon as he got there, he encountered not lone dolphins, duos, or trios, but groups of thirty or more dolphins schooling and moving about in a coordinated manner. These were very different animals from the solo dolphins and very small dolphin groups he had studied in Florida.

Each day Lusseau rose at 4 a.m., grabbed some breakfast, swatted away an endless barrage of midges, and arrived at Doubtful Sound before the sun rose. He’d board a 14-foot boat, locate a group of dolphins, and do focal animal sampling, cycling through dolphins, each recognizable by natural markings on their dorsal fins, often from shark attacks. Doubtful Sound can be stunningly beautiful, but it is at a latitude called the “roaring forties” because of the strong winds from the west and six- to eight-foot waves at times, which make for rough going when watching dolphins from a boat.

As he spent time with the dolphins, Lusseau began thinking about how to understand their complex social dynamics, but he couldn’t quite figure out the best way to proceed. On one of his stints back at the University of Otago, Lusseau recalls reading a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper on social networks written by physicist Mark Newman and others. Soon after that, he emailed Newman, telling him, “I think you are doing really cool stuff and I can understand it, because you write so well. Would you like to have a look at what we’re doing?” Newman was interested. It wasn’t long before he and Lusseau were coauthoring papers on dolphin social networks. But before they penned any coauthored papers, Lusseau published a 2003 paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London that is widely regarded as the first study explicitly on social networks in nonhumans.

Unlike animal social network papers in today’s journals, where readers are acquainted with how networks operate, to put readers in the right frame of mind in 2003, Lusseau opened his Royal Society paper using a strategy that Darwin had employed in On the Origin of Species. The idea was to introduce a phenomenon that readers already knew about (in Darwin’s case artificial selection, as in selection of different breeds of pigeons) and then make the case that what followed (natural selection), though it appeared radical, was really just another variety of what he had just discussed. In Lusseau’s paper, the opening sentences read: “Complex networks that contain many members such as human societies … the World Wide Web (WWW) … or electric power grids … permit all components (or vertices) in the network to be linked by a short chain of intermediate vertices.” And before readers knew it, they were learning about such social networks in dolphins.

Lusseau constructed dolphin networks based on thousands of observations, and one metric he looked at was network diameter, which measures the average shortest path between nodes. To introduce network diameter to readers, Lusseau first discussed psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world” research from the late 1960s. “The global human population seems to have a diameter of six,” wrote Milgram, “meaning that any two humans can be linked using five intermediate acquaintances.” The party version of Milgram’s small world is the parlor game “six degrees of Kevin Bacon.” The rules are simple: players choose a movie actor and then connect that actor to another that they played alongside in a film, repeating the process over and over, trying to link their original actor to movie star Kevin Bacon—who once quipped “he had worked with everybody in Hollywood or someone who’s worked with them”—in no more than six connections. It turns out the dolphin small world in Doubtful Sound is smaller than the human one (including Kevin Bacon’s), both in the size of the network and network diameter, the latter of which is approximately three, meaning any two dolphins in Doubtful Sound can be linked using two intermediate acquaintances.

Lusseau wondered what would happen if the dolphin network was culled by, for example, shark predation. To do this, using the network data he had collected, he built a computer algorithm that simulated predation, reducing the network size 20 percent by randomly removing 20 percent of the dolphins. The small world of the dolphins, it turned out, was unaffected by such a reduction. But if instead of randomly selecting individuals to remove from the network, Lusseau simulated removal of the 20 percent of dolphins who had the greatest number of ties to others, network diameter increased, which had the effect of slowing information transfer within the network.

As he came to know his dolphins better, Lusseau discovered that some individuals in Doubtful Sound give signals that affect group movement associated with finding new resources, including food. Side flopping, in which a dolphin leaps from the water and lands on its side, is seen only in males when they initiate a move to a new location, while upside-downing, in which an individual rolls onto its ventral side and slaps the water to signal an end to a group move, is seen almost exclusively in females. But only a few males do all the side flopping, and only a few females do all the upside-downing. Lusseau wanted to know if a network analysis would shed light on exactly which males and which females. It did. Males initiating and females terminating travel had higher betweenness— they were key hubs in this traveling/foraging network—than their non-signaling counterparts.

In a few populations of bottleneck dolphins on the other side of the planet, in Brazil, signaling and networking is not sometimes about feeding opportunities—they are always about that. And the dolphins have, rather remarkably, added humans to their feeding networks.

For more than three decades, ethologist Paulo Simões-Lopes has been studying dolphin populations in the lagoon systems along the coastline near Laguna, Brazil, about 800 kilometers south of São Paulo. The dolphins in nine populations along that stretch do something that no other dolphins—and almost no other animals, period— do. They not only network with each other, but cooperate with humans to secure more food for both themselves and their primate partner.

Each autumn, a huge mullet migration takes place in southern Brazil. Both the dolphins and the fishermen see the fish as prize prey. Up to fifty fishers, wading waist deep in very cold water, wait for the chance to cast large circular nylon nets called tarrafa over schools of mullet. The problem for the fishers is that the water is murky, and it is next to impossible to see the fish. The problem for the sixty or so dolphins at Laguna is that compared to their other prey, mullet are large and hard to catch. But dolphins aren’t especially troubled by murky water, as they detect mullet using echolocation, a built-in sonar system that would be the envy of most engineers.

Dolphins produce sound waves in their nasal sacs and focus those waves through fatty tissue and fluid in their foreheads. Once the sound waves are shot out into the water, they travel until they bump into an object, at which point they bounce back to the dolphins, who use their lower jaw as a receiver. From the lower jaw, the waves travel to the inner ear and then to the brain. Objects of different sizes and densities reflect back sound waves of different frequencies, and the dolphins use that information to “see” what is in the water around them. When their sonar detects mullet, dolphins signal fishers that the fish are present by curving their backs and then slapping their heads or their tails on the water surface. The fishers then cast their tarrafa and pull in loads of mullet. The confused mullet who escape the tarrafa often swim right into the mouths of waiting dolphins. It’s the perfect win-win situation.

Laguna newspapers from the late 1890s featured articles about this dolphin-human mutualism, and so Simões-Lopes knows that, at the very least, it has been going on for more than 130 years. And though many dolphins don’t signal fishers, every fisher knows which dolphins do. “It is famous [in southern Brazil],” Simões-Lopes says. “I grew up watching those dolphins … I would sit on a rock in the canal and watch for hours. I knew it was unusual … I knew there were dolphins in a big harbor farther south where dolphins and fishermen don’t interact.”

Today Simões-Lopes has a team of ten working with him, but he began on his own in 1988. Soon thereafter, he entered a PhD program and built his dissertation around his research on the dolphin-human foraging mutualism. Each day he brought a folding chair with him and set it up on a rock, watching the dolphins through his binoculars, taking photos—he had compiled a mug book with photos of all the dolphins in the lagoon—and filling notebook after notebook with data on dolphins signaling fishers.

Simões-Lopes began to know the fishers, and they began to know him. He also was starting to get a good feel for which dolphins at Laguna signaled the fishers and which did not. Not surprisingly, the fishers also kept tabs, telling Simões-Lopes about the “good dolphins” (who signaled fishers) and the “bad dolphins” (who did not). The fishers know not only which dolphins signal, but which dolphin will give which signal: “Each dolphin gives the signal in a different way,” one fisher said, “and we need to know [the different signals] in order to catch the fish.” Another fisher was more of a romantic, telling Simões-Lopes and his colleagues, “This is beautiful. It doesn’t happen everywhere.”

The more that Simões-Lopes thought about those “good” dolphins and “bad” dolphins, the more he wanted to understand them better. Years later Mauricio Cantor joined Simões-Lopes’s team; Cantor had worked with Hal Whitehead, a leader in early social network analysis. Simões-Lopes and Cantor decided that a network analysis might help them delve deeper into the between-species cooperation they observed on a daily basis. In 2008, they contacted David Lusseau, who had done the network studies on bottlenose dolphins in New Zealand, and asked if he would be interested in serving as a sort of conceptual consultant specializing in social networks. Lusseau was more than happy to join their team.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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Simões-Lopes and his team assumed dolphins learn how to signal humans from other signalers they associate with, so for their social network analysis, they were especially interested in whether signaling dolphins preferred spending time with other signaling dolphins, both when they were chasing mullet into nets and, just as importantly, when they were not. To test whether there were cliques of signalers and cliques of dolphins who didn’t signal, Simões-Lopes’s team looked at clustering coefficients of sixteen cooperators and nineteen dolphins who did not signal and cooperate with fishers.

What they discovered were three cliques within the larger network of the thirty-five dolphins. Clique 1 had fifteen dolphins: each and every one of them cooperated with the local fishers. Dolphins in this clique associated with one another not just during the autumn mullet fishing season but the rest of the year as well. Clique 2 had a dozen dolphins, none of whom cooperated with fishers, and dolphins in this clique were not as well connected to one another as the individuals were in Clique 1. Clique 3 was made up of eight dolphins: seven never cooperated with fishers, but one—dolphin 20—did. And of all thirty-five dolphins in the network, it was dolphin 20 who spent the most time interacting across cliques, acting as what Simões-Lopes and his colleagues call a “social broker” between the signalers and non-signalers.

This behavior is all wonderfully complex, and we humans—and I don’t just mean the artisanal fishers of Laguna—should be grateful to play a role in understanding it.

Excerpted and adapted by the author from The Well-Connected Animal: Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies by Lee Alan Dugatkin, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2024 by Lee Alan Dugatkin. All rights reserved.

Lee Alan Dugatkin is an evolutionary biologist and a historian of science in the Department of Biology at the University of Louisville. He is the author of sixteen books and more than 200 articles in such journals as Nature, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and The Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Dr. Dugatkin is contributing author to Scientific American, The American Scientist, The New Scientist, and The Washington Post. His latest book is The Well-Connected Animal: Social Networks and the Wondrous Complexity of Animal Societies.

In this solo episode, Michael Shermer discusses the upcoming election, reflecting on the historical context of past elections and the political polarization that has intensified over the years.

The United States as Global Liberal Hegemon: How the U.S. Came to Lead the World examines America’s role as the global liberal hegemon. Using a historical analysis to understand how the United States came to serve as the world leader, Goldberg argues why the role of a liberal hegemon is needed, whether the United States has the ability to fulfill this role, and what the pitfalls and liabilities of continuing in this role are for the nation. He also considers the impact that this role on the global stage has for the country as well as individual citizens of the United States. Goldberg argues that the United States’s geographic location away from strong competitors, it’s role as the dominant economy for much of the 20th century, and its political culture of meritocracy all contributed to the United States taking this role in the 1940s. He also argues that the role of liberal hegemon has shifted to include not only being the international policeperson but also to be the world’s central banker, a role that at this time only the United States can fill.

Edward Goldberg is a leading expert in the area of where global politics and economics intercept. He teaches International Political Economy at the New York University Center for Global Affairs where he is an Adjunct Assistant Professor. He is also a Scholarly Practitioner at the Zicklin Graduate School of Business of Baruch College of the City University of New York where he teaches courses on globalization. With over 30 years of experience in international business and as a former member of President Barack Obama’s election Foreign Policy Network Team, Dr. Goldberg is the author of Why Globalization Works For America: How Nationalist Trade Policies Destroy Countries, and The Joint Ventured Nation: Why America Needs A New Foreign Policy. He is a much-quoted essayist and public speaker on the subjects of Globalization, European-American relations, U.S.-Russian and China relations. He has commented on these issues on PBS, NPR, CBS, Bloomberg, and in The New York Times, The Hill, and the Huffington Post. His new book is The United States as Global Liberal Hegemon: How the U.S. Came to Lead the World.

Shermer and Goldberg discuss:

“In the 1940s, when America anointed itself hegemon, somewhat like in Great Britain in the nineteenth century, American foreign policy was largely, aside from Harry Truman and a few others, dominated by a group of men who generally all went to similar prep schools and graduated from Princeton, Yale, or Harvard. This has changed drastically. If there is one common domestic thread in American post-World War II history, it is how American society and political life has become noticeably more diverse.”

• The 2024 presidential election is the first time Americans are voting on whether the U.S. should remain the so-called “leader of the free world” – or just go it alone as Donald Trump suggests. Even in the late 1930s, the heyday of isolationism, isolationism never appeared on the ballot. In fact in the presidential election of 1940, the Republican candidate Wendel Wilkie was an internationalist.
• What are the benefits to American citizens to continue in this role? What are the costs? And why can’t another nation or some institution play this role?
• Does the U.S. need allies to be successful or are relationships/institutions like NATO “obsolete” as Trump has stated?
• Why does there need to be a global leader or as Secretary of State Blinken said, an organizer? Is there any logic for instance to Donald Trump’s statement that he would “encourage Russia to do whatever the hell they want?”
• As the world faces new globalized communal problems, climate change, pandemics, financial contagion, etc., is the U.S. political culture capable of leading the world against these more abstract threats?
• Secretary of State Blinken’s statement, “Whether we like it or not, the world does not organize itself,” I look at why the United States is the only country capable of organizing the world, of being the liberal hegemon.
• the world’s central banker, the financial fireman of the world, a position at this time only the United States can fulfill.
• why a liberal hegemon is needed. Why can’t the United Nations organize the world or be the cop?
• The United States was the only major nation whose birth was influenced by the philosophical enlightenment movement. Thus, it has a very different view of the role of government. In America, the government was created not to watch over the individual welfare of its citizens but to guarantee their fundamental rights and liberties. That perspective emphasizes the individual over the community. Does America’s political culture, based on an aggrandized view of the eighteenth-century enlightenment theory of individual rights, hinder its ability to lead in the twenty-first century?
• Foreign governments have been trying to influence American foreign policy since the time of George Washington.
• disastrous mistakes like Vietnam and Iraq
• The March of Folly
• are the rewards of hegemony worth the price for the American citizen? $1.120 trillion the United States spent on defense in 2022. This expenditure created approximately 800,000 civilian jobs and 1.3 million active-duty jobs. But could these funds have created larger economic growth if applied to other areas?
• U.S. has defense treaties with 51 countries plus independent security understandings with others.
• Is the Iowa farmer aware that the reason their soybeans can be shipped safely around the world is because of the protection of the United States Navy?
• Roosevelt State of the Union address to Congress January 6, 1941: “No realistic American can expect from a dictator’s peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion-or even good business … Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
• The United States has agreed to treaties obligating it to the defense of 51 countries:
  • 28 countries in NATO, which is essentially a defense umbrella for Canada and most of Europe
  • 18 through the Rio Treaty that applies to most of Central and South America
  • ANZUS Treaty with Australia and New Zealand
  • A bilateral treaty with Japan
  • A bilateral treaty with South Korea
  • A bilateral treaty with the Philippines.
• The theory behind most of these treaties derived from the lessons of World War I and II and especially the isolationist period between those two wars. Essentially, the underlying idea for these agreements is to halt aggression early rather than letting it metastasize and potentially overcome the United States.

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Seven creepy stories from seven listeners, and seven guesses by me.

All across America, a storm is gathering: from book bans in school libraries to anti-trans laws in state legislatures; fire-bombings of abortion clinics and protests against gay rights. The Christian Right, a cunning political force in America for more than half a century, has never been more powerful than it is right now—it propelled Donald Trump to power, and it won’t stop until it’s refashioned America in its own image.

In Wild Faith, critically acclaimed author Talia Lavin goes deep into what motivates the Christian Right, from its segregationist past to a future riddled with apocalyptic ideology. Using primary sources and firsthand accounts, Lavin introduces you to “deliverance ministers” who carry out exorcisms by the hundreds; modern-day, self-proclaimed prophets and apostles; Christian militias, cults, zealots, and showmen; and the people in power who are aiding them to achieve their goals. Along the way, she explores anti-abortion terrorists, the Christian Patriarchy movement, with its desire to place all women under absolute male control; the twisted theology that leads to rampant child abuse; and the ways conspiracy theorists and extremist Christians influence each other to mutual political benefit.

From school boards to the Supreme Court, Christian theocracy is ascendant in America—and only through exploring its motivations and impacts can we understand the crisis we face. In Wild Faith, Lavin fearlessly confronts whether our democracy can survive an organized, fervent theocratic movement, one that seeks to impose its religious beliefs on American citizens.

Talia Lavin is the author of the critically acclaimed book Culture Warlords. She is a journalist who has had bylines in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the New York Times Review of Books, the Washington Post, and more. She writes a newsletter, The Sword and the Sandwich, which is featured in Best American Food and Travel Writing 2024. She is a graduate of Harvard University with a degree in comparative literature, and was a Fulbright scholar who spent a year in Ukraine. Her first book was Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy. Her new book is Wild Faith: How the Christian Right is Taking Over America.

Shermer and Lavin discuss:

• The Satanic Panic and the McMartin preschool case
• The Recovered Memory Movement
• Multiple Personality Disorder
• Demon possession and exorcisms
• Moral panics
• The Evangelical right is working hard to dominate what it refers to as the Seven Mountains of Societal Influence: Arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media, and religion
• How Christian dominance has waxed and waned over the past 50 years
• Opposing abortion by all possible means
• Opposing marriage equality
• Opposing no-fault divorce in favor of hard-to-sever “covenant marriages”
• Opposing out-of-wedlock heterosexual sex
• Christian Zionism: “Christian Zionists have spent more than $65 million in support of ongoing Israeli settlements within the disputed territories of the West Bank,” “Before the Messiah can return, the nation of Israel must be restored; Jerusalem must be a Jewish city; and the Temple, the center of worship and sacrifice in the ancient Jewish world, which was last destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD, must be rebuilt,” writes Lavin. But here’s the rub: For the temple to be rebuilt, the Jewish people have to be “purified with the ashes of a red heifer.” (young, female cow)
• In a poll conducted in 2018 by Christian research organization LifeWay Research, a staggering 80 percent of evangelicals agreed with the statement that the creation of the modern state of Israel was a “fulfillment of Bible prophecy that shows we are getting closer to the return of Jesus Christ.” Some may see this as imminent, others as eventual, though a 2010 Pew poll showed nearly 60 percent of white evangelical Christians in the U.S. expect Jesus Christ to return by 2050.
• Premillenarian dispensationalism, which was developed in the late nineteenth century and holds that the world is divided into eras, or dispensations, which will culminate in Christ’s triumphant return.
• Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth
• Why do Christians want to control female sexuality and reproductive freedom?
• Prostitution and pornography
• Children and families.

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

The great auk (Pinguinus impennis) displayed in the Natural History Museum of Denmark stands erect on its pedestal, its great beak jutting forward, apparently fearless. It is possessed of a certain dignity and grace. It demands my attention. It was probably killed off in Iceland, where I come from, and was one of the last of its kind. For thousands of years, these large, flightless birds swam the extensive waters of the North Atlantic and made their nests on islands and skerries, where each pair laid and incubated a single, uniquely patterned egg per year. According to most accounts, the last of the great auks were slaughtered on Eldey, an island off the southwest coast of Iceland, in June 1844. About eighty taxidermic examples of great auks exist in various museum collections, and most of them came from Eldey.

Alongside the great auk displayed in Copenhagen are four large glass jars. One is labeled: Iceland 1844, . These jars contain the viscera of great auks killed on that famous (or infamous) expedition to Eldey. These are not all the birds’ organs; some are stored in another seven jars elsewhere in the museum, out of the public eye, along with another stuffed great auk. At my request, a museum guide takes me to see this second bird. It is posed somewhat differently than the one on display. Its beak is open, as if ready to address the visitor. Unlike the first bird’s stark black-and-white plumage, this one looks grayish and rather dull. I am told it is a true rarity; it is in winter plumage, while most great auks were captured while breeding, in early summer. Perhaps this second bird was caged alive and slaughtered in winter. Perhaps it was kept as a pet for some months, like the great auk owned by the Danish polymath Ole Worm (1588–1654), one of the leading figures of the Nordic Renaissance. Worm personally owned three great auks, one of which he sometimes walked on a leash, and he made a fine drawing of it before adding it—stuffed—to his Wunderkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, a precursor to the modern museum.

In its imposing old building in Copenhagen, only a fraction of the Danish museum’s “curiosities” are on display. In full, the collection comprises millions of animals from around the globe, and boasts exemplars of several species that have become extinct in recent centuries—such as a well-preserved skull of a dodo (Raphus cucullatus)—as well as fossils of dinosaurs and other organisms from previous eras of the earth’s history. Here, in this old and venerable museum, it is easy to detect the ideas that lay behind the collecting of natural objects for the past three and a half centuries. The need was perceived to educate the populace of various European nations, whose empires extended around the world, about the progression of time and about their place in the expanding universe. Such collections demonstrated the might and extent of each empire, and the value of research: all things can be named, catalogued, and categorized systematically.

Is such an approach still valid in our current era, now termed the Anthropocene, or Human Age? In our time, the “natural” habitat of the planet has been radically refashioned by humans. Vital links between species, developed over eons, have been severed swiftly, fundamentally impoverishing the living world and posing a serious threat of the mass extinction of many species. How, I wonder, can such a process possibly be cataloged or categorized, given the speed of change and the complexities involved— and what would be the point?

The bird species that no longer exist had, and still have, a special attraction. They have much to teach us.

I never saw a great auk growing up in Iceland, a land where they had once been quite common. Neither did the nineteenth-century British naturalists John Wolley and Alfred Newton.

Like their contemporaries, Wolley and Newton busily collected birds’ eggs and specimens, classifying and recording them in the fashion of the Victorian age. When they set off for Iceland in 1858, they hoped to visit Eldey Island and study the rare great auk. They hoped to observe its behavior and habits and, perhaps, bring home an egg, or a skin, or a stuffed bird or two for their own cabinets of curiosities—unaware of the fact that the species had already been hunted to extinction. When they left Victorian England for Iceland, they teased that this was a “genuinely awkward expedition.” And so it proved to be, in many ways. They never made it to Eldey. Like me, they never saw a great auk on Iceland, not even a stuffed one.

Prior to the killing of the last great auks, extinction was either seen as an impossibility or trivialized as a “natural” thing. The great taxonomist Carl von Linné, or Linnaeus (1707–78), imagined that a living species could never disappear; for evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin (1809–82), species would naturally come and go in the long history of life. The great auk brought home the fact that a species could perish quite quickly and, moreover, not naturally, but primarily as a result of human activities. No other extinction had been documented as carefully.

During their historic expedition to Iceland in 1858, Wolley and Newton collected impressions of great auk hunting, through substantial interviews with the men who took part in the latest hunts and the women who skinned and mounted the birds, along with their prices and sales on foreign markets to collectors of “curiosities.” These impressions were preserved in the set of five handwritten notebooks Wolley titled the Gare-Fowl Books. Now archived in Cambridge University Library in England, their hundreds of pages are written in several languages (English, Icelandic, Danish, and German). As an anthropologist and an Icelander, once I had seen the Gare-Fowl Books, there was no turning back: I had to dive into the text and visit zoological museums and archives. For me, the great auk opened an intellectual window into ideas of extinction and their relevance to the current mass disappearance of species.

Many sightings of great auks were reported after 1844 on North Atlantic skerries in Iceland (1846, 1870), Greenland (1859 or 1867), Newfoundland (1852, 1853), and northern Norway (1848). Some of the reports were certainly apocryphal: people had mistaken another species for a great auk, or had seen what they wanted to see. Others were deemed credible and were probably true: evidence of a few dispersed pairs of birds continuing to breed on islands or skerries for a few years. Such tales were often unjustly dismissed, and unnecessarily strict standards of proof and corroboration were applied. The consensus among scholars today seems to be that the last living great auk was seen off Newfoundland in 1852.

Once it seemed clear that the last great auks were dead, museums and collectors around the world scrambled to acquire skins, eggs, and bones of the extinct bird. The Victorian obsession with collecting was past its peak, but anything relating to the great auk remained a prize. There are some eighty stuffed great auks in collections around the world, and an unknown number of preserved skins and viscera. Only about twenty-four complete skeletons exist, while thousands of loose bones (some with knife marks) are kept in museum collections. The skeletons do not have the visual appeal of the stuffed birds, mounted to look so lifelike in their full plumage. However, the bones—what Wolley and Newton termed “relics”—tell a long and complex story of their own. And there are about seventy-five great auk eggs believed to be extant today, the vast majority being documented and numbered.

Now and then over the years, various species have been said to reappear suddenly, after having been thought long exterminated. Several birds have been confirmed to be such so-called “Lazarus species,” including the Bermuda petrel (Pterodroma cahow), which scared Spanish explorers away with their eerie calls. Considered extinct for three centuries, it was rediscovered on one of the Bermuda Islands in 1951. Also, the flightless takahē (Porphyrio hochstetter) of New Zealand, which was claimed extinct late in the nineteenth century, reappeared in 1948. In recent years, with intensive searching, social media, and growing awareness of the threat of mass extinction, such reports have escalated. However, the possibility of any surviving great auk “Lazarus” can be ruled out.

Charles Darwin made the point that species swept away by history would not return. They were gone for good. In On the Origin of Species, he wrote: “We can clearly understand why a species when once lost should never reappear, even if the very same conditions of life, organic and inorganic, should recur.” This has long seemed blindingly obvious. No doubt many people have wondered why Darwin saw reason to state it at all. Yet his words were perhaps necessary at the time. The meaning of extinction had not yet been fixed, and Darwin may well have felt it was time to dispel the fantasy regarding the resurrection of species.

Alfred Newton, on the contrary, entertained the idea that extinction processes could be reversed. And in our own time, discussions of the renaissance, even resurrection, of species is taken for granted—as if Bible stories and the natural sciences had coalesced into one, after centuries of enmity and conflict. Will we live to see the resurrection of Pinguinus impennis? Might genetics and cloning do the trick?

In the spring of 2015, a group of like-minded individuals met at the International Centre for Life in Newcastle, England, to discuss the possible reanimation of the great auk. The meeting was attended by more than twenty people, including scientists and others interested in bird conservation. They addressed the principal stages of “de-extinction,” from the sequencing of the full genome of the extinct animal to the successful releasing of a proxy animal population into the wild. They were interested in resurrecting the great auk quite literally, to see it thrive once more, in zoos or even on the skerries and islands of the North Atlantic.

Thomas Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who has sequenced the great auk genome was one of the scientists who attended. The de-extinction of a species, however, has proved to be a more complicated issue than was originally anticipated—both technically and ethically. Gilbert pointed out that a re-created species can never be exactly like the original, and that the question must be asked: What counts as “near enough”—ninety-five percent, ninety, …? If the element that is lacking, though it may only account for a few percent of the genome, turns out to be crucial, and makes it harder for a re-created species to survive or to reproduce, nothing will have been gained. A re-created great auk that could not swim, for instance, would not be “near enough.” Likewise, a great auk capable of flight might be “way too much.” For most people, whatever the species concept to which they subscribe—and there remains a thriving philosophical debate on that subject—a flying bird would hardly qualify for legitimate member of the great auk species.

Yet a substitute bird that could swim would be welcomed by many, as it might fill in the large gap left by the great auk’s extinction. A substitute species might contribute to the rewilding of the oceans, a task that has barely begun; indeed “the underwater realm has been trailing behind its terrestrial counterparts.” Interestingly, this idea echoes Philip Henry Gosse’s historic aquaria project, reversing the arrows, from land to sea, and operating on a much larger scale. The grand aquarium of the planet’s oceans, including the recently discovered seabirds’ hotspot in the middle of the North Atlantic, or so the idea goes, could be repopulated by relatively large charismatic animals, territorially raised and later released into the oceans, where they would be managed and monitored by human divers. Gosse would be amused.

The expense of such de-extinction is high, however, and it is hard to decide which species should have priority: the mammoth? the dodo? the great auk? or perhaps one of the numerous species of tiny snails that rarely generate human concern? It’s tempting, and productive, to focus on tall birds and charismatic megafauna, but invertebrates such as snails and insects, which make up most of the animal kingdom (perhaps 99 percent), deserve attention too. In the Anthropocene, this age of mass human-caused extinctions, the selection of species is clearly an urgent, but difficult, concern. The re-creation of the great auk assuredly has symbolic significance, not least in light of the attention the species has garnered from both scholars and the public since its demise. The excessive price nowadays of great auk remains is significant too.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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In January 2023, a great auk egg sold for $125,000 at Sotheby’s. But bringing the bird back to life is a gigantic challenge, if not an impossible one. Perhaps the funds that would be spent on the de-extinction of the great auk might be better spent elsewhere. Nor should we overlook the Law of Intended Actions, Unintended Consequences.

• • • • • •

Now that I know the great auk’s long history, I feel as if the stuffed birds in the Copenhagen museum were once my neighbors or acquaintances. As a scientist, I know that their viscera are stored in alcohol to preserve them and to enable people to study them. Still I wonder if the organs are in a constant state of inebriation from the alcohol, existing beyond the bounds of real time, in a sort of euphoric oblivion? Generations of visitors, of all ages and many nationalities, have passed by these jars of preserved bird parts over the past century and a half. What observations did they take home?

The hearts stored in one jar are no longer beating, but no doubt many visitors on my side of the glass have wondered, as I do, how they would have pulsed when the bird’s blood was still flowing—and whether they could be resuscitated, by electric shock or genetic reconstruction. The eyes of the last male great auk are kept in another jar. I see them staring, gazing into both the past and into my own eyes.

This essay was excerpted and adapted by the author from The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction. Copyright © 2024 by Gísli Pálsson. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.

Gísli Pálsson is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of Iceland. He previously held positions in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, the Centre for Biomedicine & Society at King’s College, London, and at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science at the University of Miami. His books include The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, Down to Earth, and The Man Who Stole Himself.

Big Tech is driving us, our kids, and society mad. In the nick of time, Restoring Our Sanity Online presents the bold, revolutionary framework for an epic reboot. What would social media look like if it nourished our critical thinking, mental health, privacy, civil discourse, and democracy? Is that even possible?

Restoring Our Sanity Online is the entertaining, informative, and frequently jaw-dropping social reset by Mark Weinstein, contemporary tech leader, privacy expert, and one of the visionary inventors of social networking.

This book is for all of us. Casual and heavy users of social media, parents, teachers, students, techies, entrepreneurs, investors, and elected officials. Restoring Our Sanity Online is the catapult to an exciting, enriching, and authentic future. Readers will embark on a captivating journey leading to an inspiring and actionable reinvention.

Restoring Our Sanity Online includes thought-provoking insights including:

• Empowering You―Social Media User, Content Creator
• In The Crosshairs: Privacy And Anonymity
• Saving Our Kids From The Abyss
• Surprise! Social Media Can Be Good For Your Mental Health
• Is AI The High-Tech Tattletale In Your Social Experience?
• Lifting the Veil On Bots and Trolls
• Facts, Opinions, Lies―Who Decides?
• Web3 Is Here―What The Heck Is It?

Mark Weinstein is a world-renowned tech entrepreneur, privacy expert, and one of the visionary inventors of social networking, including SuperFamily and SuperFriends, two of the earliest social networks. In 2016 he founded MeWe, the Facebook alternative with the industry’s first Privacy Bill of Rights. MeWe’s membership grew to nearly 20 million users worldwide, whose advisory board includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web; Steve “Woz” Wozniak, co-founder of Apple; Sherry Turkle, MIT academic and tech ethics leader; and Raj Sisodia, co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism movement. Mark is frequently interviewed and published in major media including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fox, CNN, BBC, PBS, Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, The Hill, and many more worldwide. He covers topics including social media, privacy, AI, free speech, antitrust, and protecting kids online. A leading privacy advocate, Mark’s landmark 2020 TED Talk, “The Rise of Surveillance Capitalism,” exposed the many infractions and manipulations by Big Tech, and called for a privacy revolution. Mark has also been listed as one of the “Top 8 Minds in Online Privacy” and named “Privacy by Design Ambassador” by the Canadian government. His new book is Restoring Our Sanity Online: A Revolutionary Social Framework.

Shermer and Weinstein discuss:

• Amid growing concerns over targeting, bullying, hate, boosted misinformation, bots and trolls, AI, privacy violations, and democracy disruption, can we really “restore our sanity online?”
• As an early inventor of social networking, have you been shocked by the direction social media has taken since launching SuperFamily and SuperFriends in 1998?
• How do we combat the mental health crisis associated with social media, particularly among teens?
• How can parents take charge of the runaway train which is their kids on social media?
• You’ve said the Surgeon General’s recommendation of putting warning labels on social media won’t be effective at protecting kids. What will?
• Your book has a chapter that says social media can be good for our mental health … You must be kidding!
• As Meta, X, Snap, and other Big Tech increasingly utilize AI, how will AI impact the future of social media?
• How will AI chatbots and “AI Friends” affect our personal relationships?
• Web3 promises to fix the problems with social media—privacy, data ownership, elimination of targeting, etc. What should people know about Web3? Is that too good to be true?
• How do you envision the future of privacy and anonymity on social media?
• How do we defeat bots and trolls? Are they going to destroy democracy?
• While conducting research for the book, how did you discover the shared patterns between Big Agriculture, Big Energy, and Big Tech?
• What lessons can be gleaned from Big Ag and Big Energy that we can apply to Big Tech?
• The book’s subtitle is “A Revolutionary Social Framework” and in chapter seven you introduce “Restoration Networks.” What’s so revolutionary about these?
• Why should social platforms create a more equitable creator economy?
• How can the tenets of Conscious Capitalism, often associated with retail companies like Patagonia, be applied to social networks?
• Can social media really function successfully without Surveillance Capitalism?

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

A thoroughly discredited idea, that the Mesoamerican Olmec people were Black Africans, continues to gain traction.

Neal Stephenson is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the novels Termination Shock, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, Seveneves, Reamde, Anathem, The System of the World, The Confusion, Quicksilver, Cryptonomicon, The Diamond Age, Snow Crash, and Zodiac, and the groundbreaking nonfiction work In the Beginning … Was the Command Line. He is also the coauthor, with Nicole Galland, of The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. His works of speculative fiction have been variously categorized as science fiction, historical fiction, maximalism, cyberpunk, and post-cyberpunk. In his fiction, he explores fields such as mathematics, cryptography, philosophy, currency, and the history of science. Born in Fort Meade, Maryland (home of the NSA and the National Cryptologic Museum), Stephenson comes from a family comprising engineers and hard scientists he dubs “propeller heads.” He holds a degree in geography and physics from Boston University, where he spent a great deal of time on the university mainframe. He lives in Seattle, Washington. As The Atlantic has recently observed, “Perhaps no writer has been more clairvoyant about our current technological age than Neal Stephenson. His novels coined the term metaverse, laid the conceptual groundwork for cryptocurrency, and imagined a geoengineered planet. And nearly three decades before the release of ChatGPT, he presaged the current AI revolution.” His new novel is Polostan, the first installment in his Bomb Light cycle.

Shermer and Stephenson discuss:

• How to write professionally
• How to write science fiction and fantasy
• How lives turn out: genes, environment and luck
• How so much of history is contingent
• No Hitler, No Atomic Bomb
• How the bomb was developed and why
• The ethics of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• The Hobbesian Trap, Security Dilemma, and the Other Guy Problem and the bomb
• Mutual Assured Destruction and why it has worked (so far)
• Cryptocurrency
• AI, ChatGPT, and the Singularity
• Mind uploading
• Human evolution and the far future of humanity
• What type of political and economic systems will we have on Mars?
• Charles Sanders Peirce and the philosophy of Fallibilism
• Platonic realism.

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

A review of Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright (2023) and Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge, From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester (2023)

Can the history of how humans organize knowledge help us understand 21st century information overload? Two readable new books help us address these questions with interdisciplinary narratives: Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic by Simon Winchester, and Informatica: Mastering Information Through the Ages by Alex Wright.

To varying degrees and slightly different ways, both books review the history of information technologies as a helpful tool. Both cover the familiar chronology from the clay tablets and papyrus scrolls of ancient times, monks in the Middle Ages copying texts in their scriptoria, the 15th and 19th century technologies that made books cheaper and more common, the development of reference books, and the mid-20th century innovations leading to modern computers and World Wide Web. Both books are also stimulatingly interdisciplinary, discussing many more historical topics than I’ve mentioned above, but also grounded in science and technology. After these similarities, the books diverge.

Cuneiform tablet
Mesopotamia, circa 31 CE

Although Knowing What We Know is rich in history, it is not chronological. It instead progresses from the learning of information (education) to the storing of knowledge (museums, libraries, and encyclopedias), and then to the dissemination of knowledge, concluding in thoughtful discussion of the implication of new technologies, such as the AI-based Large Language Models (LLMs). These topics are corralled by Winchester’s background in journalism, and the grounding of each topic in precise examples.

On education, for example, Winchester contrasts three striking 21st century cases. He vividly recalls the woman he interviewed who started a school in a poverty-stricken village in India. Those students’ joyous thirst for knowledge is contrasted against the high-tension stakes in China, where a single exam taken in students’ teenage years determines their job opportunities for the rest of their lives. Winchester’s third example of education is the most striking—that of an illiterate island group whose oral storytelling tradition saved them, alone, from a tsunami.

Winchester progresses to knowledge summarized in encyclopedias, recalling his own love of them in his youth and summarizes the rise and cessation of the leading print encyclopedia of the 19th and 20th century, Encyclopedia Britannica. How can complex issues about the leading online encyclopedia Wikipedia, with its vast size and reliability, be better illustrated than by Winchester’s own experience late in his research seeing there that a pioneer of internet technology was listed as having died, the correction of which Winchester learned the next morning on social media?

And so it goes: Winchester focuses on a few extraordinary cases to illustrate each of his points. For the preservation of knowledge in museums, it is the remarkable story of the saving of museum treasures in China during political turmoil, and how the Chinese government has viewed this precious collection. Similarly, the rise of mass media is illustrated by the BBC because, Winchester notes, its style was influential in the development of radio news around the world. This flows naturally to the following chapter’s discussion of propaganda, focusing on the chilling example of the Nazis. His penultimate chapter is about polymaths and, finally, wisdom, focusing less on religion than on whether it was wise to drop the atomic bombs in 1945. The book concludes with the implications of ChatGPT and other new technology for our brains.

Winchester has a remarkable ability to turn what could be a dry recitation of facts into a series of compelling stories, with numbered subsections in each chapter. The one time I felt that he could have used a copy editor was during his overly long digression on Krakatoa, the subject of one of his previous books, though he did make even this topic surprisingly relevant. In his hands, such meandering is usually done masterfully.

Like a well-structured novel, all that came before leads Winchester to his conclusion. His fear is that technology, as currently progressing, can hurt our ability to think for ourselves. Characteristically, he illustrates this with a specific example: the complex skill set he stumbled through when his small boat needed to navigate toward land rather than be lost in the ocean in the days prior to GPS. Can people even read maps anymore? In one of the book’s few missed opportunities, he does not draw an extended parallel to the people who (accurately) decried in Gutenberg’s era that if books were mass produced, people’s ability to remember vast amounts of knowledge would decline, which it did (the skill of modern mnemonists, such as the late Harry Lorrayne, notwithstanding).

If Winchester’s book is grounded in concise case studies, Wright’s contributions in Informatica are science and the history of structured systems for organizing knowledge. These merge when Wright discusses the biological classification scheme developed primarily by Carl Linnaeus, including an amusing anecdote involving Thomas Jefferson mailing the decaying body of a moose to acclaimed scientific theorist Comte de Buffon. Although science is mentioned several times in Winchester’s Knowing, Alex Wright’s Informatica opens with it, following the late biologist E.O. Wilson in speculating about the biological role of epigenetics in human knowledge transmission. Wright compares “networks and hierarchies” in the natural and the human worlds. He sees parallels between creations by groups that are unlikely to have communicated, such as the similarity between the plant taxonomies created by Western scholars and those formed through oral tradition in other societies.

Using more traditional evidence, Wright explicitly links the Linnaean classification scheme to the development of librarians’ attempts to organize books, culminating in the Dewey Decimal System at the turn of the 20th century. He appropriately refers to this 19th century arc as “the industrial library,” the creation of more elaborate organizational schemes being demanded by vastly increased numbers of published books, which was in turn allowed by new technology.

Successive chapters discuss early to mid-20th century utopian information sharing projects using then-existing technology, including index cards and telegraphy, or the briefly famous Mundaneum (an institution that aimed to gather together all the world’s knowledge and classify it according to a system called the Universal Decimal Classification). In Informatica, Wright’s discussion of these utopian schemes does not flow as well as it could, the reader being left to make the connections.

Worse, Wright’s extended history of the developments leading to the modern internet is shoehorned into a subsection of the revised “Web That Wasn’t” chapter as “The Web That Was.” This combination of topics in the same chapter was tenable in Glut, but in Informatica the subsection discusses so many people and inventions, all of whose work made the World Wide Web possible, that it should have been a new chapter. Finally, Wright recycled some of his earlier writing and did not update it, such as referring to CD-Roms and America Online (AOL) as leading technologies. This could have been fixed easily.

That said, the narrative in Informatica is more clearly chronological than in Knowing What We Know, but Simon Winchester is so skilled a writer that his book is generally a smoother narrative despite being more episodic. Except in the book’s outline: I was halfway through the book before realizing that its main chapters had a logically progressive sequence to them, from data acquisition to information display to the uses of knowledge and finally to wisdom. Winchester could have made this clearer earlier in the book with just a few words.

One side topic bears noting: Winchester said in at least two media interviews that his discussion of the racism found in a leading mid-century encyclopedia was edited out of the published version of Knowing What We Know, on the grounds that it would be too controversial or offend too many of his readers. Perhaps it would have, but its inclusion would have been valuable, partly for highlighting the important point that even the most well-respected reference materials can be wrong. While it can be argued that this is excusable because Knowing is not written by an academic scholar, a similar edit was also made in a book by Yale historian Beverly Gage, G-Man, (which I reviewed in an earlier issue of Skeptic), with pages 62–63 twice leading the reader to guess, but never know for sure, which apparently offensive word is represented. The criticism that only elite scholars know about the history of racism will become a self-fulfilling prophecy if that history is not included in popular books.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.3
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On the other hand, Informatica and Knowing What We Know both have problems with the wording of their titles, and with such vast topics, it would be easy to quibble with decisions on which topics to focus. I wonder if Informatica’s new title could make readers think they are getting a wholly different book, rather than an update of Glut (originally published in 2007), with uneven revisions and only a chapter’s worth of new material? In Knowing What We Know, it’s the last third of the subtitle (“From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic”) that could mislead: in other cases, the phrase “Ancient Wisdom” has sometimes referred to religious traditions, but here seems to refer more to any ancient writing, and the book’s late discussion of wisdom is not primarily about religion.

The important point shared by Knowing What We Know and Informatica is that greater access to information also presents challenges. Informatica is more theoretical and historical, Knowing being more a historically informed snapshot of our present. Both are stimulating and both are informative.

Michelle Ainsworth holds an MA in History and she is currently researching the cultural history of stage magic in the United States. She is a humanist and lives in New York City.

In ChatGPT and the Future of AI, the sequel to The Deep Learning Revolution, Terrence Sejnowski offers a nuanced exploration of large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and what their future holds. How should we go about understanding LLMs? Do these language models truly understand what they are saying? Or is it possible that what appears to be intelligence in LLMs may be a mirror that merely reflects the intelligence of the interviewer? In this book, Sejnowski, a pioneer in computational approaches to understanding brain function, answers all our urgent questions about this astonishing new technology.

Sejnowski begins by describing the debates surrounding LLMs’ comprehension of language and exploring the notions of “thinking” and “intelligence.” He then takes a deep dive into the historical evolution of language models, focusing on the role of transformers, the correlation between computing power and model size, and the intricate mathematics shaping LLMs. Sejnowski also provides insight into the historical roots of LLMs and discusses the potential future of AI, focusing on next-generation LLMs inspired by nature and the importance of developing energy-efficient technologies.

Grounded in Sejnowski’s dual expertise in AI and neuroscience, ChatGPT and the Future of AI is the definitive guide to understanding the intersection of AI and human intelligence.

Terrence J. Sejnowski is Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and Distinguished Professor at the University of California at San Diego. He has published over 500 scientific papers and 12 books, including The Computational Brain with Patricia Churchland. He was instrumental in shaping the BRAIN Initiative that was announced by the White House in 2013, and he received the prestigious Gruber Prize in Neuroscience in 2022.

Sejnowski and Shermer discuss:

• Large Language Models
• ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-5 and beyond
• What is AI and AGI?
• The alignment problem
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it have?
• What is thinking?
• How brains evolved
• Reverse engineering brains
• How language evolved
• Artificial intelligence and natural intelligence
• Emotions, mind, and sentience
• What is “mind”, “thinking”, and “consciousness”, and how do molecules and matter give rise to such nonmaterial processes?
• The hard problem of consciousness
• The self and other minds
• How would we know if an AI system was sentient?
• Can AI systems be conscious?
• Does Watson know that it beat the great Ken Jennings in Jeopardy!?
• Self-driving cars
• What set of values should AI be aligned with, and what legal and ethical status should it
• AI as an existential threat
• Why there is no such thing as “the” singularity. There are lots of them and we’ve already experienced them and will continue to do so.

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

This buried rock wall found throughout Rockwall County has people wondering about its origin.

Situating her analyses within the broader intellectual landscape, First Amendment scholar and philosopher Tara Smith takes up the views of such historical figures as John Locke, Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill, while also addressing contemporary clashes over issues ranging from speech on social media, “cancel culture,” and the implications of “religious exemptions” to the crucial difference between speech and action and the very vocabulary in which we discuss these issues, dissecting the exact meanings of “censorship” and “freedom.”

Tara Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where she has taught since 1989. A specialist in moral, legal, and political philosophy, she is author of the books Judicial Review in an Objective Legal System (Cambridge University Press, 2015), Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist (Cambridge, 2006), Viable Values: A Study of Life as the Root and Reward of Morality (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), and Moral Rights and Political Freedom (Rowman and Littlefield 1995). Smith’s scholarly articles span such subjects as rights conflicts, the morality of money, everyday justice, forgiveness, friendship, pride, moral perfection, and the value of spectator sports.

Shermer and Smith discuss:

• What is freedom?
• What are rights?
• How are rights and freedoms won or lost?
• Private vs. government restrictions on speech
• Social media, tech companies, and censorship
• speech and expression
• Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission
• Speech – Action distinction and where the lines between speech and conduct are blurry
• Hate speech = violence?
• Is Twitter a platform or a publisher?
• Is Facebook an information service or a telecommunications company?
• Incitement to violence and the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection
• Libel and slander
• Self-censorship
• Free expression as speech (flag burning, Madonna’s videos, etc.)
• Corporate controls on speech
• Compelled speech
• How Oliver Wendell Holmes introduced the clear and present danger test, which would become an important test under First Amendment law over the coming decades.

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

The 2008 documentary film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed was released to widespread media coverage and hype. Starring Ben Stein—a conservative commentator, actor, and former speechwriter for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—the film argued there was a conspiracy within academia to censor Intelligent Design (ID) and to cover up evidence that belief in evolutionary theory led to everything from atheism to the Nazi Holocaust. Expelled opened in over 1,300 theaters and earned nearly $8 million. In addition to ID theorists, the film included interviews with noted proponents of evolutionary theory such as Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Shermer.

As the film’s co-writer, I was part of the crew that came to the Skeptic magazine office to interview Michael Shermer. Here is how he described his experience with us:

Ben Stein came to my office to interview me about what I was told was a film about “the intersection of science and religion” called Crossroads (yet another deception). I knew something was afoot when his first question to me was on whether or not I think someone should be fired for expressing dissenting views. I pressed Stein for specifics: Who is being fired for what, when, and where? In my experience, people are usually fired for reasons having to do with budgetary constraints, incompetence, or not fulfilling the terms of a contract. Stein finally asked my opinion on people being fired for endorsing Intelligent Design. I replied that I know of no instance where such a firing has happened.

This seemingly innocent observation was turned into a filmic confession of ignorance when my on-camera interview abruptly ends there, because when I saw Expelled at a preview screening at the National Religious Broadcasters’ convention (tellingly, the film is being targeted primarily to religious and conservative groups), I discovered that the central thesis of the film is a conspiracy theory about the systematic attempt to keep Intelligent Design creationism out of American classrooms and culture.

Although I was in agreement with the film’s agenda at the beginning, throughout the long production process, my feelings about the project and the ID movement underwent a significant shift. But I stayed on board in the hope of providing a counterbalance to the producers’ desire to create what amounted to a piece of pro-ID propaganda. I eventually realized, however, that whoever controls the money controls the point of view, so there was only so much that I could do as a fledgling screenwriter.

In the years since Expelled came out, the transformation of my views has continued apace, so I wrote to Shermer to apologize for the damage the film did and the duplicitous circumstances under which some of our interviews were obtained. In response, he invited me to write an article describing my experience on Expelled as well as my subsequent reflections on the ID movement and the larger issue of the relation between science and religion.

• • • • • •

During the two and a half years I spent working on Expelled, one of the key dynamics I observed was how bitterly divided people were over the notion of ID as a concept, and even more so as a movement. After reading countless books and articles on the subject and participating in interviews with people on all sides, I realized that no matter which way one approached the topic of Darwinian evolution versus intelligent design—and by extension, science and religion—the individuals on the frontlines were virtually all highly intelligent people of goodwill. Unfortunately, some of the leading voices were also exceedingly argumentative by nature. Thus, rather than engage in dialogue that sought to establish common ground and then work together to build bridges toward truth, interactions between the ID movement and its critics often amounted to one side lobbing a verbal grenade at the other and then hunkering down in the trenches as it exploded, all the while chuckling about how foolish the folks on the other side were. Rather than emulate that spirit, I decided I would try to engage my critics in constructive conversation. I wanted to see if it was possible to cross no man’s land and find some sort of common bond with the “enemy.”

Over the several weeks leading up to the film’s release, I did exactly that, spending hours each day engaged with people on my personal blog and other online forums. Despite my legitimate desire to conduct a meaningful dialogue with my opponents, my efforts were often met with an unrelenting wall of bitterness and sarcasm. Perhaps not surprisingly (considering the relentless barrage of abuse) and despite my good intentions, I occasionally succumbed to a similar rhetorical approach, adding a heavy dose of sarcasm to my own barbed responses. Even so, I was truly seeking to abide by motivational speaker Steven Covey’s “highly effective” habit number five: seek first to understand, then to be understood.

I hoped the film could do away with the need to “win” the debate over ID. One way or the other and instead unite these contending minds around their mutual desire to move science forward.

Over time, I recognized a pattern across the various responses that I received, one that matched a famous quote by Richard Dawkins: “It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” On the surface, this sounds like an incredibly arrogant thing to say, relegating one’s opponents to varying levels of intellectual inferiority, insanity, or iniquity. But as I thought about it, I realized that’s how many of us treat those who don’t share our beliefs. When we encounter someone who disagrees with us, at first we assume they simply don’t know what we know, so we attempt to educate them. If that fails, we may briefly entertain the idea that the person is incapable of understanding what we recognize as truth. But if they display a reasonable level of intelligence, we seem to be left with only two options: either they know what we know to be true, and they’re purposely suppressing or obscuring that information (which puts them in the wicked category), or they’re so out of touch with reality that they’re a lost cause.

This was exactly the continuum I found myself traveling along with my neo-Darwinian debating partners. While, in their minds, I made a brief stop at “ignorant,” once I demonstrated that I was reasonably well informed on the relevant issues, they quickly shuffled me into the “wicked” category, with brief stopovers at “stupid” and “insane.” Their favorite name for me was “liar,” which I found frustrating because, despite how one might interpret the rhetorical position of Expelled, a film in which I had authorial influence but no editorial control, I wasn’t trying to be deceptive at all. I was sincerely seeking the truth, not claiming to have it.

In retrospect, though, I empathize with my opponents’ frustration. My stubborn refusal to concede my views probably led them to believe their efforts to correct my faulty thinking were in vain. As it turned out, it was the opposite. Even though I was championing a documentary that many regarded as contrary to science and truth in general, cracks had begun to form in my own beliefs about the ID movement and the branch of evangelical Christianity to which I had converted as a child.

The process began about six years before I signed on to Expelled when I took a class on Science and Christianity at Regent College (a seminary in Vancouver, BC) co-led by historians Mark Noll and David N. Livingstone, author of Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders. That class served as a rebuttal to the commonly held belief that evolution and Christianity must be inherently at odds. As Livingstone outlines in his book, the initial Christian response to Darwin’s theory was characterized by accommodation rather than confrontation. Rather than refute Darwin’s theory, many theologians focused on harmonizing evolution with the notion of divine design instead. It wasn’t until the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the early 20th century—which lumped evolutionary theory together with higher criticism and other attacks on a literal approach to the Bible—that a split between evolutionary science and some branches of Christianity developed.

Noll and Livingstone’s class triggered a desire to go deeper into the subject, leading me to focus on epistemology in general and the philosophy of science in particular. I was fascinated by the concept of warranted belief and the reliability of belief-producing processes. Are humans capable of discerning truth? If so, how? Does objective truth even exist? If so, is it possible to know it?

While my belief in God was still relatively intact at that point, by the time we started development on Expelled in late 2005, the epistemological ground beneath me had shifted. I don’t recall when it was exactly, but sometime over the next six months, I was in a coffee shop doing research for the film when I ran into my pastor and confessed that I no longer believed in Satan, angels, or demons. I can still clearly recall the look of deep disappointment on his face.

My confession was as much a revelation to me as it was to him. I can’t point to any one thing that led to that conclusion, but by then I had steeped myself in the writings of those at the forefront of the fight against ID, including Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Michael Shermer, Kenneth Miller, Michael Ruse, Eugenie Scott, and Sam Harris. I had also read and interacted with several leading proponents of the ID movement, including Stephen Meyer, David Berlinski, William Dembski, Philip E. Johnson, and Michael Behe. Altogether, the more my understanding of the relevant science grew, the less work there seemed to be required of God to create the universe. No matter to which gap in our knowledge one could point, claiming God’s handiwork could always be found there, even if the history of science appeared to be one long, inexorable march toward shining a light into those very gaps, revealing not God but the same natural processes that we observe today, removing the need to resort to any sort of divine intervention as a cause.

To my way of thinking, that didn’t necessarily negate the concept of God or some sort of guiding intelligence in the universe. However, even if such a being existed, it seemed the most one could say was that “life, the universe, and everything” were the product of secondary rather than primary causes. God may have created the scale by which all things are measured, but apart from a few moments where a nudge in the right direction was required, his finger was never on it.

This put me in an ideal frame of mind to accept the primary claims of the ID movement. Many proponents of ID accept most aspects of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, agreeing that the majority of what we observe in the universe is the product of secondary causes. However, while ID proponents agree that natural selection can account for relatively minor changes within species, they argue that it is wholly inadequate when it comes to explaining the origin of new species or of life itself, not to mention the origin of the universe. Not only do ID proponents believe life is too complex to be attributed to “blind” natural causes, they also argue that it is “irreducibly complex,” as Michael Behe puts it, wherein “a single system which is composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning” could not possibly be the product of a gradual process because the system’s function couldn’t be produced by selection until all the pieces were in place.

Furthermore, ID proponents such as William Dembski and Stephen Meyer argue for something called “specified complexity,” whereby if something exhibits both complexity and specificity (i.e., information), one must infer that it is the product of intelligence, given that intelligence is the only source of information in the universe of which we are aware. Hence, even if blind, natural processes could account for how that information is edited (something else that ID proponents dispute), such causes could not explain how that information arose in the first place, much less how the universe in which that information is processed came into being.

Richard Dawkins being interviewed by Ben Stein for Expelled, at the Natural History Museum in London

Of course, opponents of ID have rebuttals to each of these arguments. Primarily, as Richard Dawkins argued in The God Delusion, rather than end the argument regarding origins, proposing an intelligent designer to account for irreducible or specified complexity merely punts the ball down the field because such a designer would have to be the product of the same processes as the phenomenon the designer is invoked to explain. So, as Shermer articulates in Why Darwin Matters, if complexity necessitates an intelligent designer, then there must be a super-intelligent designer, which itself necessitates a super-duper- intelligent designer, and so on in an infinite regress.

Despite such objections to ID, I realized both sides of the debate faced the same sort of infinite regression when it came to explaining origins. Just as positing a designer merely postpones the problem, so does a purely materialistic point of view, with natural selection seemingly incapable of providing an account for how it came to be without invoking itself. The same goes for the seemingly immutable laws of nature within which natural selection operates. We have all sorts of theories for how these forces might have come into being and what holds them constant, but as for an ultimate explanation for the origin of the laws of nature, no one knows for sure. Accordingly, it appeared to me that on a philosophical level at least, ID’s proponents and its materialist critics were on equal footing. Each side was proceeding from a set of philosophical presuppositions about how the world came into being that cannot be proven, and each was at the same time equally certain that the other side’s philosophical presuppositions were wrong.

To add another level of similarity, many individuals on each side claimed that their presuppositions were a scientific inference rather than a philosophical preference. That is, they insisted their axiomatic beliefs were a product of their scientific observations rather than something they brought to the table with them beforehand, only to have those beliefs consciously or affect their scientific observations. Those observations were then predisposed to conform to what they already believed.

If we continue to expel, cancel, and block each other over our differences of opinion rather than dialogue and partner together to share our unique perspectives, there really is no hope for science, freedom, or truth.

When it came to Expelled, it was this interplay between philosophical presuppositions and the day-to-day practice of science that interested me most. After all, any honest observer has to admit that philosophical presuppositions affect how we approach science, for example by determining what is and is not accepted as evidence. At the same time, a truly scientific person must always be willing to revise their presuppositions in light of new evidence and/or arguments. My highest hope for the film was that it could explore this reciprocal relationship between science and philosophy, leading to the very common ground that I had sought to establish with my online debating partners. Perhaps operating from a place of naïve optimism, I hoped the film could do away with the need to “win” the debate over ID one way or the other and instead unite these contending minds around their mutual desire to move science forward.

Alas, that was not to be. For one thing, early in the process of making Expelled, I realized that the film’s producers weren’t interested in open-minded inquiry. They had an axe to grind against what they saw as an oppressive scientific establishment that was unwilling to “allow one divine foot in the door” (as geneticist Richard Lewontin put it), and they were determined to change that. Initially, I bought into this agenda as well, feeling like we were on the right side of history because we were fighting for free and open inquiry, not just on behalf of ID, but also on behalf of science itself. Why shouldn’t scientists be able to follow the evidence wherever it leads? And why shouldn’t intelligence be considered as a potential explanation for particular phenomena until proven otherwise? Hadn’t a presumption of theism, or at least deism, guided most of the early scientists, leading to all sorts of fruitful inquiry? If so, why couldn’t that continue?

My interactions with some of the leading lights of ID also had a chilling effect on my belief that we were on the right side of the debate. For example, when Ben Stein asked Michael Behe how biology would be different if it had ID theory as its foundation, Behe was left groping for an answer. Then when Stein was interviewing David Berlinski outside the Berlin Wall, trying to coax him into saying that an unnecessary ideological wall had been erected to keep any notion of God out of science—just as the Berlin Wall had been erected to keep “dangerous” ideas out of the Soviet bloc—Berlinski refused to acquiesce. Instead, he insisted that we need boundaries in science to help define the field. For example, we don’t accept astrology as part of science, nor should we. Walls aren’t bad in and of themselves, Berlinski argued; it’s more a matter of where we build them and why.

Of course, how we make such a determination is a product of our philosophical presuppositions, which are becoming increasingly impossible to agree on as we all break away from traditional meta-narratives and drift off into our own private definitions of reality. But even if we don’t agree with some or all of a field’s presuppositions, if we presume competence and goodwill amongst scientists, it’s only logical to assume that these boundaries exist not to limit the production of good science but to facilitate it. Otherwise, we find ourselves in the absurd position of arguing that scientists are working against their own self-interest.

Michael Shermer with the film’s press kit

I realize that a presumption of competence and goodwill is increasingly difficult to maintain these days as our confidence in the integrity of various institutions wanes. The problem is, considering the increasing complexity of the modern world, we are facing what energy theorist Vaclav Smil describes as a growing “comprehension deficit,” which makes our need to rely on experts greater than ever. This being the case, how can we determine when a dissident group, such as the ID movement, which is challenging the majority opinion in a field, is correct or whether they are a destructive force that really should be “expelled” out into the cold?

I continue to believe that a presumption of competence and goodwill amongst experts is the most fruitful and cognitively healthy way to proceed. I’m willing to go with the majority view in any given field until given good reason to think otherwise. But I have to admit I’m far more skeptical than I used to be. And who doesn’t love the idea of a plucky group of rebels who risk everything to stand up to oppressive, corrupt authorities, and by opposing them restore freedom, truth, and justice? Everyone from political leaders such as Lenin and Hitler, to storytellers like George Lucas, have exploited this universal narrative, which is becoming increasingly attractive as we all sense a growing lack of control over our circumstances due to the increasing pace and complexity of change, technological and otherwise.

This was exactly the narrative that we sought to tap into when making Expelled, knowing it would resonate with viewers on an emotional level. The question is, were we right when it came to the ID movement? Were they really courageous dissidents standing up against the evil Darwinian empire? I certainly believed it at the time, but I no longer think so now.

Despite the radical change in my views, fifteen years after Expelled I can’t say I regret being involved with the film. It provided me with a blank check to indulge my passion for research, to travel the world, to meet some of the brightest minds in science, to work with people who eventually became some of my closest friends, and to establish myself in the film industry. More importantly, over the long term, it completely transformed my view of life and culture, bringing me much closer to those whom I used to regard as standing on the opposite side of the aisle. But I do have significant regrets about how the film itself turned out, the distrust it sowed amongst viewers regarding the scientific establishment, and the deceptive practices we engaged in to make the film happen.

One example of those deceptive practices was hiring hundreds of extras to serve as Ben Stein’s “audience” during the speech he gives that bookends the film, making it seem as if he’s leading a groundswell of young people who are looking to overthrow the tyrannical Darwinian academy. This was filmed at Pepperdine University, Shermer’s alma mater, so he wrote them to ask how this happened:

The biology professors at Pepperdine assure me that their mostly Christian students fully accept the theory of evolution. So who were these people embracing Stein’s screed against science? Extras. According to Lee Kats, Associate Provost for Research and Chair of Natural Science at Pepperdine, “the production company paid for the use of the facility just as all other companies do that film on our campus” but that “the company was nervous that they would not have enough people in the audience so they brought in extras. Members of the audience had to sign in and the staff member reports that no more than two to three Pepperdine students were in attendance. Mr. Stein’s lecture on that topic was not an event sponsored by the university.” And this is one of the least dishonest parts of the film.

Kevin Miller holding our Big Foot fake-tracks shoe for cryptozoology tomfoolery at the former Skeptic Magazine headquarters in Altadena, CA, where segments of Expelled were filmed

Another was creating a fake production company, complete with a website listing several dummy film projects. We used this website to mislead potential interviewees into believing we were taking an objective approach to the subject matter, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. I’ve been involved in several controversial documentaries since Expelled, and landing interviews with potentially hostile subjects is always a challenge. In such circumstances, I admit to being less than forthcoming about my point of view at times because I’d rather get a “clean read” than a confrontational exchange, a relaxed conversation where the subject expresses their views similar to how they might talk to a friend, but not since Expelled have I taken things to such an extreme.

Like anyone who believes they have the truth (or possibly even God) on their side, while making Expelled we felt the ends justified the means. As history shows time and time again, though, just when we think we’re most virtuous, we’re also at our most dangerous. When facing off against what we regard as a great evil, belief in our own righteousness can blind us to the very evils we ourselves are committing in response.

If Expelled had been made today, it probably would have been called Canceled or Blocked instead because too often when we encounter ideas that offend our philosophical presuppositions, our emotional sensibilities, or our fragile sense of identity, that’s exactly what we do. And unlike the way the scientific establishment is portrayed in Expelled, it’s not just those in authority who do this. More often than not, mobs of regular people are leading the charge. Driven by a sense of self-righteousness and/or a weaponized form of compassion, they summarily destroy people’s lives, due process be damned.

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Lack of common ground, a shared version of reality in which to engage, remains a problem. And with traditional means (such as religion) of establishing this common ground rapidly fading away, it seems like an impossible goal to achieve. If we continue to expel, cancel, and block each other over our differences of opinion rather than dialogue and partner together to share our unique perspectives, there really is no hope for science, freedom, or truth.

We may never be able to achieve unanimity of belief, but if we can at least aspire toward unity of purpose and intent, agreeing to operate from a position of goodwill, charity, and curiosity rather than selfish gain or the need to bolster our identity by scapegoating others, maybe we can find a way to work together despite our differences.

Despite this discouraging state of affairs, I still believe in the power of conversation and debate as perhaps the only way forward. It worked to change my mind (eventually), so why couldn’t it work for others?

Kevin Miller is an award-winning author and filmmaker. He has written, directed, and produced several documentary films, including Hellbound? and J.E.S.U.S.A. He is also the author of the best-selling Milligan Creek Series for middle-grade readers as well as numerous other books for children and adults, both fiction and non-fiction.

It's Skeptoid's 18th birthday! Won't you help us celebrate by giving us a little birthday present?

Can beliefs make you sick? Consider “The June Bug” incident from a U.S. textile factory in the early 1960s. Many employees began to feel dizzy, had an upset stomach, and vomited. Some were even hospitalized. The illness was attributed to a mysterious bug biting workers. However, when the CDC investigated this outbreak, no bugs or any other cause of the illnesses could be identified. Instead, it appears to be an illness caused by the mind — that is, sickness due to expectation.

The June Bug story is one of many striking examples of the nocebo effect, a phenomenon best summarized as the occurrence of a harmful event that stems from expecting it. The nocebo effect plays a role in side effects for some of the most commonly prescribed medications. It provides a lens for understanding how sensationalized media reports that sound alarm about public health might even become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It might even explain the mysterious symptoms associated with Havana Syndrome, during which dozens of US government employees fell ill after reportedly being exposed to an unidentified sound wave in Cuba.

We are just discovering the power behind this effect and how it can be ethically mitigated. Enlightening and startling, The Nocebo Effect is the first book dedicated to investigating this fascinating phenomenon by the foremost experts in the field.

Michael Bernstein, Ph.D., is an experimental psychologist and an Assistant Professor in The Department of Diagnostic Imaging at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. His work is focused on harnessing the placebo effect to reduce opioid use among pain patients. He is Director of the Medical Expectations Lab at Brown. He is the co-author of the new book The Nocebo Effect: When Words Make You Sick, with Charlotte Blease, Cosima Locher, and Walter Brown. https://MichaelHBernstein.com/ Twitter/X: @mh_bernstein

Shermer and Bernstein discuss:

• Placebo
• Nocebo
• Nocebo and brain imaging
• Voodoo deaths and hexes
• The psychology of placebo and nocebo effects
• The biology of placebo and nocebo effects
• The ethics of placebo and nocebo effects
• Nocebo and Covid-19
• Alternative and Complementary Medicine
• Pain, anxiety, depression and other subjective effects
• Anticipatory nausea and learning
• Risk assessment: expected dread associated + how much is known about the risk
• When Psychotherapy harms
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Side effects
• Patient-clinician interactions
• Mesmerism and Benjamin Franklin’s test
• Psychogenic illness
• Havana Syndrome.

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

Can dogs be taught to speak intelligently using floor buttons that represent words?

Religion in the twenty-first century is alive and well across the world, despite its apparent decline in North America and parts of Europe. Vigorous competition between and within religious movements has led to their accumulating great power and wealth. Religions in many traditions have honed their competitive strategies over thousands of years. Today, they are big business; like businesses, they must recruit, raise funds, disburse budgets, manage facilities, organize transportation, motivate employees, and get their message out. In The Divine Economy, economist Paul Seabright argues that religious movements are a special kind of business: they are platforms, bringing together communities of members who seek many different things from one another—spiritual fulfilment, friendship and marriage networks, even business opportunities. Their function as platforms, he contends, is what has allowed religions to consolidate and wield power.

This power can be used for good, especially when religious movements provide their members with insurance against the shocks of modern life, and a sense of worth in their communities. It can also be used for harm: political leaders often instrumentalize religious movements for authoritarian ends, and religious leaders can exploit the trust of members to inflict sexual, emotional, financial or physical abuse, or to provoke violence against outsiders. Writing in a nonpartisan spirit, Seabright uses insights from economics to show how religion and secular society can work together in a world where some people feel no need for religion, but many continue to respond with enthusiasm to its call.

Paul Seabright is a Professor of Economics in the Industrial Economics Institute and Toulouse School of Economics and the University of Toulouse, France. He earned his graduate degrees in economics from the University of Oxford. He was Assistant Director of Research and a Reader in Economics at the University of Cambridge until 2001. He has also been a consultant to private sector firms, governments and international organizations including the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the World Bank, the European Commission and the United Nations. He is the author of The War of the Sexes: How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life, and his new book The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.

Shermer and Seabright discuss:

• What is religion?
• The landscape of religious numbers: going up or down, when and where?
• Why Americans are so much more religious than Europeans
• What motivates people to be religious despite (or perhaps because of) its costs?
• Religion provides people with meaning, purpose and community, which secularism alone often fails to deliver
• Religions as platforms, “organisations that facilitate relationships that could not [otherwise] form”
• Other “platforms” in history (markets, marriage broking, international trade)
• Popular explanations for religion pp. 180–181.
• Role(s) of religion in history and society today
• Enlightenment Humanism, Secular Humanism, and other alternatives
• Is religion and belief in God(s) adaptive or a byproduct?
• Big Gods vs. animism, polytheism, supernaturalism
• Why some religions are so much more successful than others
• Rituals
• Social Gospel vs. Prosperity Gospel
• Taxes vs. Tithing
• Group selection vs. cultural selection
• Cults and New Religious Movements
• Why most religions fail but why some succeed
• Christianity and violence
• Islam and violence
• When we colonize Mars will far future humans on other planets be religious?

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

The 2024 Presidential Election Survey is a representative (by age, race, sex and educational attainment) sample of 3,023 Americans, collected between September 5, 2024, to September 29, 2024. Substantively, the survey covers timely and controversial topics including: voting intentions and perceptions of election legitimacy, willingness to sever relationships because of political disagreement/support for violence if one’s preferred party loses the election, attitudes towards free speech, mental health, trust in journalism and other U.S. institutions, as well as various questions assessing peoples’ attitudes towards (and understanding of) abortion, immigration, crime, race, climate change, economic, gun control and war-related issues.

For additional information, please feel free to contact the Skeptic Research Center by email: research@skeptic.com.

1. Methodological Details—2024 Presidential Election Study

CHRISTOPHER RUFO is a writer, filmmaker, and activist. He has directed four documentaries for PBS, including America Lost, which tells the story of three forgotten American cities. He is a senior fellow of the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of the public policy magazine City Journal. His reporting and activism have inspired a presidential order, a national grassroots movement, and legislation in 22 states. Rufo holds a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a Master’s of Liberal Arts from Harvard University.

Skeptic: You are a controversial figure for your work in the area of Critical Race Theory (CRT). What led you to this subject?

Rufo: My professional background is in documentary filmmaking. The book writing process was totally different. I hope what I was able to do with the book is bring my narrative training to telling stories that engage people and move them at an emotional level.

Skeptic: Well, you did that. It’s a highly readable book in which you present a history of ideas. One of the difficulties is drawing causal connections between thinkers across generations. How do you address that problem?

Rufo: There was a lot of looking for explicit connections. For example, I profile Angela Davis, who I think is really kind of the godmother of CRT. She tied the original critical theory from the early part of the 20th century to American race politics in a deliberate way. Her thesis advisor was the critical theorist Herbert Marcuse, who is also profiled in the book. Then I connect Davis to the modern Black Lives Matter movement; she is the personal mentor to a number of BLM leaders. I tried not to make any specious connections, and I wanted to be charitable to my subjects, to see the world first through their eyes and treat them fairly. Only then did I layer on my criticism or my critique.

Skeptic: On that political front, how do you distinguish between old-school liberals, such as Steven Pinker, and the more radical progressive thinkers of today?

Rufo: The critical theorists I profile in my book are explicitly anti-liberal, such as Angela Davis, Paulo Freire, and Derek Bell, the father of CRT. Their whole movement is explicitly and deeply anti-liberal. It’s against the concept of individual rights, private property, and Enlightenment values. So, I hope that I can also speak to some of those estranged liberals and explain how the movement that has really taken over the institutional left in the United States has deviated from that small ‘l’ liberal tradition and really originates from something much more radical, revolutionary, and Marxist in nature.

Skeptic: Walk us through these influences, starting with Marx.

Rufo: Over the course of the 20th century, there was a deviation from orthodox Marxism as people became more infatuated with the new left, the more activist 1960s youth movement, and racial unrest. Angela Davis was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, and she ran for vice president of the United States on the Communist Party ticket. She was deeply influenced by Marx (although she had written her graduate thesis on Kant) and was also well-versed in the Western philosophical tradition. Paulo Freire—the same. He was working with Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries in the Third World, and his idea of critical consciousness originates in Marxist concepts that he had learned when he was a student in Brazil.

However, the most interesting case is Derek Bell, who was a Harvard Law professor, and in many ways the founding figure of CRT. His students at Harvard Law and other elite law schools around the country, inspired by Bell, established the discipline of critical race theory in the late 1980s. Bell grew up in the Pittsburgh area, served in the U.S. Air Force, went to law school, and was a very successful—even brilliant—student. Then he became a lawyer for the NAACP, handling cases in the Deep South desegregating schools in places such as Mississippi. I think he oversaw something like 300 school desegregation cases. He was a civil rights advocate and activist, a small ‘l’ liberal at the time.

However, Bell became disillusioned with the Civil Rights Movement and utterly disillusioned with Martin Luther King-style civil rights activism that turned to the Constitution, focusing especially on the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. He thought these were all illusions in that they provided the appearance of freedom but were actually used to reinforce secretly and covertly the structures of racial domination. It is this aspect of Bell’s work that survives and is really the foundation of what we now see as critical race theory.

Skeptic: There’s this push to find deep root causes of specific events among politicians. Is this a useful approach?

Rufo: It’s amazing because it’s totally backwards. Politicians say, “Well, no, we’re not going to do the thing that actually could have a significant and immediate impact, and instead we’re going to implement the 1619 Project and focus on the first arrival of African slaves in North America.” That certainly is something of historical importance and scholarly relevance, and should even be part of the public debate, but what do you do with that? Short of having a time travel machine, you can’t change the past 400 years of history. Nor can you show any real relevance to today beyond a very broad and metaphorical interpretation of current events.

When you go back and look at the civil rights movement, against which Derrick Bell rebelled later in his life, you had, for the most part, people who wanted to cash in the promissory note of the Declaration of Independence. They wanted to conform to not only the system of individual rights in the United States as a form of law, but also conform to middle class or bourgeois values as a matter of culture. Look at these great civil rights marches in the 1960s. Men were dressed in suits and ties and the women in dresses. And these weren’t necessarily wealthy people. They were mostly working-class African Americans. However, the image that they wanted to convey was one of dignity, self-respect, and an immense hope for equal participation in American society. I’m still really moved and struck by some of those images.

Compare those images to the kind you see of Antifa or BLM activists in 2020. You have deranged-looking mugshots of people. You have people that visually look quite disordered, committing sprees of violence. And in the name of what? It was never quite clear what they wanted beyond defunding the police or just having a justification for violence. Those two images, if you look at them side by side, reveal the kind of fundamental change in the modern left.

Skeptic: What do you think is the right approach to social change?

Rufo: When you ask people in surveys, “Do you support affirmative action? Do you support race-conscious college admissions? Do you support mandatory diversity, equity, and inclusion training?” They overwhelmingly say “No.” This is true for people of all political affiliations and all racial backgrounds. And yet, all of those things are now required in nearly all of our major institutions. So, you have this mismatch problem where public sentiment is against something, but all of our institutions and even our public policies are for it. Why is that? If we live in a democracy, shouldn’t majority sentiment eventually translate into public policy?

The answer is that, in my view, there are concentric rings of influence on these issues. You have the tightest ring, which consists of the fanatics, the people who are deeply committed to it. They work in it. These are the DEI administrators. These are the critical race theorists. These are the BLM activists. Then you have another concentric ring of people that say, “Well, you know, I more or less buy into the premise of this. I want more diversity.” That’s roughly 30 percent of the public, maybe a little bit more depending on the issue. Then you have an even larger concentric ring of people who are neutral, slightly opposed, or even quite opposed to it, but they don’t speak out because they fear the consequences. This creates an opinion environment in which those very committed activists can really run up the score and impose their point of view as the de facto policy.

That’s the environment we live in. The people who care most about it have figured out where the levers of power are. They’ve gone, in most cases, around the democratic process to impose their will. And they essentially say—as we’ve seen recently with Harvard and the University of North Carolina [the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions processes violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment]—“We know what we’re doing is unpopular. We know what we’re doing is likely illegal and unconstitutional. But we’re going to do it anyway.”

Skeptic: Erika Chenoweth and Maria Steffen’s research on political violence demonstrates that since 1900, nonviolent campaigns worldwide were twice as likely to succeed outright as violent insurgencies. This trend has been increasing over time. In the last 50 years, civil resistance has become increasingly frequent and effective, whereas violent insurgencies have become increasingly rare and unsuccessful. No campaigns failed once they achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5 percent of the population, and lots of them succeeded with far less than that.

Rufo: That’s right. I think academic critique is still valuable. However, what we really need is political opposition because this issue has moved from the realm of academia to the realm of politics. So, it also has to be fought politically. That’s what I’ve done, and I’ve gotten an unbelievable amount of criticism for this approach.

I’ve taken the battle out of the realm of academic discourse and into the realm of practical politics. I’ve been very explicit about that. I said I want to change public perception; I want to turn critical race theory into a brand, and I want to destroy it not just in the realm of public opinion, but also in the realm of public policy.

If it’s in the K–12 school curriculum, it’s a policy question. If it’s in a public university DEI bureaucracy, it’s a policy question. If it’s in our criminal justice system, it’s a policy question. These are political questions, and those who think that we can resolve them through discourse are really doing a disservice. They’re not grappling with the actual difficult nature of statesmanship and political activism that’s required.

If we want to have a society that says, “No, we’re not going to engage in racial scapegoating. We’re not going to judge individuals based on a racial category. We’re not going to imbibe in notions of hereditary blood guilt,” the only way, I think, is through political pressure, by changing the laws by which our institutions are governed.

Skeptic: What are your thoughts on systemic racism? What is your explanation for racial group differences in income, wealth, home ownership, representation in Congress and the corporate C-suite?

Rufo: What is the standard by which we measure systemic racism? How do we define systemic racism? There’s an interesting bait and switch here, because they say, “Well, all of this is systemic racism, from chattel slavery to the fact that a Lakeisha Smith is less likely to get called back than a Lisa Smith.” [“Call back” studies submit the same resumés to businesses and compare the response to identifiably Black versus White names]. You have this transition in the mid-20th century from explicit, formal, and legal racist policies to what amounts to implicit racist policies. Well, what do they mean by that?

They mean that when you measure things statistically, that there is a disparate impact on outcomes. Lisa versus Lakeisha Smith is just one such example. You can say that there are no outright racist policies in policing or housing or geographical distribution, but there are still disparate outcomes. Is it because people are secretly and subconsciously racist? That’s the unconscious bias theory, which has been debunked. [It has been demonstrated that The Implicit Association Test, often cited as confirming evidence, does not measure racial bias but rather reaction time to familiar versus unfamiliar terms.] Are police more likely to shoot a Black suspect than a White suspect? Roland Fryer at Harvard showed that this is not the case. [Although he did find that White police rough up Black people they pull over more than White people.]

Then you have to ask some uncomfortable questions. If, for example, there are more African American men in jail than Asian American men, is it because our society is systemically racist against African American men and systemically giving privileges to Asian American men?

You could make that argument, but I think that on the face of it most people realize that it’s not true. Then you ask about the rate of criminality—do African American males on average commit more crimes than Asian American males? You might find that it’s not racism that is operative. It’s another set of background variables. Robert Rector published some papers on this subject 20 years ago that are still foundational to my thinking. He showed that if you control for those background variables, you find that the argument for active systemic racism vanishes across a whole range of things, not just Lakeisha versus Lisa Smith, but for things that are especially meaningful. For example, if you control for the mother’s academic achievement, the mother’s participation in state welfare programs, and household family structure, the gap between White and Black childhood poverty disappears. It’s zero.

If we aim our public policy towards fixing those variables, we’d be much better served and we’d be much more likely to reduce overall inequalities.

Skeptic: Those causal variables are largely left out of the conversation. Maybe it’s taboo to talk about them right now?

Rufo: I think it is, because it’s a very inconvenient disrupting narrative when you have minority groups that are enormously successful in the United States. The most successful ethnic groups in the United States today are majority non-White ethnic groups, including some Black ethnic groups, particularly Nigerian Americans. Part of that may be due to a selection process—immigrants from Nigeria are disproportionately better educated, have more resources, etc. So, it’s not quite a one-to-one measurement.

Nonetheless, there’s a huge range in success among ethnic groups in the United States. The ones that have stable family structure, commitment to education, a strong work ethic, mutual support within a community, etc., are very successful. Those ethnic groups that do not have those attributes do very poorly on many measures, including income. Appalachian Whites do very poorly while Nigerian Americans or other recent immigrants are doing extraordinarily well.

Skeptic: Are you optimistic we can achieve a colorblind society?

Rufo: There are reasons for optimism and for pessimism. The reason for optimism is that the American people really despise the DEI affirmative action principles of governance. Even in California and Washington state, where I live, voters have rejected affirmative action policies when they’ve been put to a ballot initiative. And the majority of racial groups also oppose these kinds of policies. Despite all of the media dominance, academic dominance, and bureaucratic dominance of the DEI movement—the American people want equal treatment for each individual, regardless of group category. They want colorblind equality, not racial favoritism and enforced equity.

The case for pessimism is that it’s going to be difficult. The problem of racial equality is a thorny one. It is one that has vexed the United States for its whole history and is, frankly, likely to continue. As long as there is visible inequality—statistically measurable inequality—the narrative of critical race theory will have a base of support. It will have the political, emotional, and intellectual grounds that can feed that narrative. This puts us in a bit of a conundrum because paradoxically, the remedies of critical race theory are actually likely to make inequality worse. And for the people who are running a critical race theory style regime, inequality justifies their claims to power. So, they have no incentive to make things better in the real world. If we go in that direction, we face a very long, very brutal, and very disillusioning politics in our future.

Skeptic: Do you see any role for any kind of reparations for formerly oppressed peoples or even currently oppressed people?

Rufo: I have certainly opposed any kind of race-based reparations payments. I think it’s absolutely the wrong direction to go for a host of reasons. Historically, if you look at Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society anti-poverty programs, these were to a large extent a kind of race-based reparations policy that was—they thought—backed up by the latest discoveries in social science, deployed at federal mass scale. These programs now are spending about a trillion dollars a year, disproportionately to African Americans, especially descendants of slaves.

These are policies that sound great, and that’s why they’re often passed in legislation. But we have to be sober and level-headed in analyzing whether they actually work. Do they help us achieve the stated intentions? The evidence that it has helped in any way is lacking. In fact, the most persuasive evidence, in my view, shows that it has had negative, though unintended, consequences. In my reading of it, both statistically and as someone who spent three years researching and documenting public housing projects in Memphis, Tennessee, and getting a first-hand look at their impact, I just don’t think that reparations would work.

This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.

YASCHA MOUNK is a writer and academic known for his work on the rise of populism and the crisis of liberal democracy. Born in Germany to Polish parents, Mounk received his BA in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, and his PhD in government from Harvard University. He is a professor of the practice of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the author of The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (featured on former President Barack Obama’s summer reading list) and The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time.

Skeptic: Let’s talk about identity politics. Is it really the identity or is it the politics?

Mounk: The great civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, a gay Black political activist—though I’m not sure that he would want to list the adjectives in that order—said that the idea of a homogeneous Black community is the invention of White elites, as well as of certain Black people who want to lead it. I think this describes the situation very well. And this is important because it speaks to our model for political solidarity.

Let’s examine the popular ban on “cultural appropriation.” When I was growing up in Europe, the people who worried about cultural purity and the influence that other groups might have on your culture were on the right. Today, some of these concerns persist on the right, but a lot of them have moved to the left. It’s gotten to the point of absurdity, like left-leaning actors who apologize for voicing or acting in roles that don’t match their identity.

The core example is that of White musicians in the 1950s and 1960s “stealing” the music of Black musicians or being inspired by them, and going on to have big careers while Black musicians didn’t. The injustice in the 1950s and 1960s was not that there was some White jazz saxophonist inspired by Black musicians. The injustice was that Black musicians could not travel freely across America because of racism—they could not stay at some of the hotels in which they performed, they were banned from many concert venues, they wouldn’t be played on many radio stations, and they couldn’t be signed by many record labels. That’s what was unjust about it, not something called “cultural appropriation.” If you get that wrong, you also get wrong how you solve it. The way to solve that injustice is not to make sure that White musicians don’t play jazz music or rock ‘n roll. It’s to make sure that Black musicians and African Americans more broadly overcome the deep discrimination that they faced.

All culture is appropriation. Every element of our cuisine, the way we write, and the technology we use today is an accrual of past cultural appropriation. If we put those forms of mutual cultural influence under general suspicion, not only will we forego amazing cultural and technological innovations in the coming decades and centuries, but we’ll also fundamentally fail to celebrate positive aspects of our societies.

Skeptic: How do you respond to people such as Noam Chomsky, who argues that critiques of identity politics such as your own are exaggerations, that things such as critical race theory are just legal or academic ideas that are not filtering down to grammar schools or up to corporations, and that what you are saying is part of a vast right-wing moral panic?

Mounk: I think that’s a mistake. There are people on the right who brand anything they don’t like critical race theory or claim that teaching kids about slavery is critical race theory. That’s absurd. Of course we should teach American children about the terrible history of racial injustice and slavery in this country. However, as a result, a lot of people on the mainstream left, including smart people like Chomsky, end up saying, “Isn’t critical race theory just speaking critically about race in society?” Or they say it’s an academic theory and first graders aren’t reading the academic articles published by Derek Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw.

What I worry about is teachers walking into classrooms in the third, second, and first grade and saying, “If you’re Black, go to that classroom; If you’re Asian American, go to that classroom; If you’re Latino, you go to that classroom; and if you’re White, you go to that classroom over there.” I think it’s fine for kids to be uncomfortable at times, because everything we know from social psychology is that how we define ourselves is malleable. However, when they’re told, “This is your in-group and that over there is your out-group,” that can lead to having endless empathy for the “my group” and terrifying disregard for the suffering of the other group.

So, while the aim may be to create White anti-racists, I think it’s much more likely to create White separatists or White supremacists. The other thing I would say is that these ideas not only now inform the norms and the practices of a great many institutions in the United States—important institutions such as schools—they also inform public policy in really worrying ways.

A shocking example of this was when I sat in on a meeting of the ACIP—the key advisory group advising the Centers for Disease Control—on how to roll out vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now we know that by far the best predictor of how seriously sick you will get from COVID is your age. Therefore, nearly every country in the world prioritized the elderly in their distribution. You might also prioritize hospital workers, because in the middle of a pandemic you don’t want the doctors to be sick. But after that, nearly every country started with the over 85s, and then the over 80s, and then the over 75s. And that also made it easier to communicate this to the public.

Well, ACIP said no. We have to care about racial equity. Older Americans are disproportionately White, and therefore it would be unjust to give a vaccine to them first, even though the CDC’s own model shows that deviating from prioritizing the elderly would raise the death toll by between 0.5 to 6.5 percent—in other words, by thousands of human lives. This had disastrous consequences, literally thousands of additional deaths because of identity politics.

Skeptic: You mentioned “identity politics.” How should we think about this term?

Mounk: The way I think about politics, there are two sets of distinctions: between liberal and authoritarian, and between the left and the right. I am a center-left liberal. I joined the German Social Democratic Party at the age of 13. I had to lie about my age to join it because by law you’re only allowed to join when you’re 14. So, I can claim as long an allegiance to the left as anybody my age. In the distinction between liberal and authoritarian, there are those who want to impose their views by force, have no tolerance for people who disagree with them, and see the world as split into the good and the evil. I want a society in which individuals have free speech and the right of free assembly, and the right of free worship. So even if I win a majority, I’m not going to impose my substantive moral views on you. And I recognize that just because you take what I consider the wrong position on some political issue, that doesn’t make you an evil person. That is what defines me as a true “liberal.” I think the liberal versus authoritarian distinction is more important than the left v. right one.

Skeptic: So there’s left-wing authoritarianism, just as there’s right-wing authoritarianism?

Mounk: How can anyone look at the history of the 20th century without recognizing that? Left-wing authoritarianism, which you may have more sympathy for, should also scare you. It’s much easier for people who think they’re doing good in the world to follow into believing that such forms of authoritarianism are for the good of all humanity, and so we are creating paradise on Earth, not just for one group, but for everybody. That can be very appealing. My grandparents, whom I loved and who were deeply decent human beings, were attracted to such ideas for understandable reasons. They grew up in shtetls, living in poverty and being discriminated against. They thought that we should fight for the rights of proletarians. So I have empathy for people who are tempted by that set of ideas, but I’m also aware of how easily they can seduce you in ways that eventually make you complicit in genuine evil.

Skeptic: You often discuss corporations adopting identity politics. Do they really believe this, or do they not want to be bogged down in lawsuits? What is your sense about that?

Mounk: I would say that there’s a real split. There are certainly true believers in Human Resources departments, and some true believers make a good living as diversity consultants. However, there are also some true believers in the elite class, some among CEOs, and so on. At the same time, there are a lot of people who have an incentive to shut up and stay quiet. People who are not that politically motivated just ask themselves, “Is it really worth my while to push back against this? You know, I’m going to be branded as a troublemaker and perhaps somebody will accuse me of being a racist or a bigot. I better just keep my mouth shut.” And there’s an interesting legal incentive for CEOs to go along with some of this, which is that if your company is sued for racial discrimination or sexual harassment, whether you have engaged in industry standard practices to avert those forms of bias constitutes a key defense. So once your competitors offer a deeply divisive diversity training, you have a legal incentive to do that too. If you don’t, a plaintiff might argue that you clearly didn’t care about discrimination.

So, I think that there is an incentive from social sanction—that speaking up against these ideas is perilous, and there is also an incentive from the actual legal system in the United States in terms of how you can defend yourself against lawsuits, no matter how frivolous.

Skeptic: Given how deep this trend is in education, are you worried about the next generation?

This article appeared in Skeptic magazine 29.2
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Mounk: Yes. My students are deeply and fundamentally shaped by these ideas. Especially if they went to private schools, or schools in good school districts and affluent liberal-leaning parts of the country, these ideas have been drummed into them from day one. It’s the water that they swim in, and they take much of it for granted.

Skeptic: What can we do about it?

Mounk: Well, the first step is to argue back against these ideas from the moral high ground. And part of that is to argue on the basis of principles that you deeply believe in and that might make the world a better place. Now, there’s a broad range of principles that are compatible with liberalism that you can embrace. Perhaps you have a religious motivation, perhaps you’re a socialist, or perhaps you’re a conservative, all of that is fine. My own conviction is that of a philosophical liberal, as well as someone in the American context that has great admiration for certain movements.

Consider Frederick Douglass. When he was invited to hold a speech commemorating the Fourth of July, he called out his compatriots on the hypocrisy of talking about all men being created equal. He asked, “How can you celebrate that value and pat yourselves on the back when Black people around the country are enslaved right this moment?” However, he didn’t say to rip it all up. And while he recognized that newspapers and magazines said terrible things about Black people at the time, he didn’t reject free speech. He called free speech the dread of tyrants, because he realized that it was what allowed genuine political minorities, people who were very unpopular in their time, to fight for their rights.

This interview was edited from a longer conversation that took place on The Michael Shermer Show, which you can watch online.