Point of Inquiry

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Maria Konnikova, who is the author of a simply fascinating new book about training your mind so you're as sharp as the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. It's entitled Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. In addition to her new book, Konnikova writes the "Literally Psyched" column for Scientific American, and is a doctoral candidate in psychology at Columbia University. She's also written for The Atlantic, Slate, The New York Times, and other publications. Mastermind is her first book.

Host: Chris Mooney This is our first show of 2013, and notably, we're still here. A lot of people actually thought the world was going to end at the end of last year, which, presumably, means that now it's rejoicing time. And also reflection time. Time for reflection on all the things that people are capable of believing, as well as the things that might really lead to global catastrophe someday. To help us in that process, we've invited back our expert on all things related to the world ending and not ending: Phil Plait. He needs no introduction, except to say that he's the Bad Astronomer. He's the Bad Astronomer at Slate, on Twitter, and on every other platform you can imagine. Phil Plait is an astronomer, lecturer, and author. After ten years working on Hubble Space Telescope data and six more working on astronomy education, he struck out on his own as a writer. His two books are Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing "Hoax" and Death from the Skies! These Are the Ways the Universe Will End.

Host: Indre Viskontas It's become almost a truism that in their spare time, skeptics tend to gravitate towards TV shows, novels and games that portray the very monsters, myths and conspiracies that they work so hard to debunk. A great story is just as entertaining to the most hardened skeptics as it is to the rest of the population. And because they are often more knowledgeable about the history of a particular monster or myth, skeptics might even enjoy fictional depictions of pet topics more than the uninitiated general public. A case in point is author and podcaster Scott Sigler, whose fascination with monsters led him not only to read and watch stories about monsters, but even to invest all of his creative energy and talent into writing horrifying and thrilling science fiction novels. But is there a risk of propagating myths through storytelling? Does science fiction help or hurt critical thinking? To get some insights into these questions, we talked to Scott about his writing process, his characters and what truths we can learn about ourselves through fiction. New York Times best-selling novelist Scott Sigler is the author of Nocturnal, Ancestor, Infected, and Contagious, hardcover thrillers from Crown Publishing, and the co-founder of Dark Øverlord Media, which publishes his Galactic Football League series. Before he was published, Scott built a large online following by giving away his self-recorded audiobooks as free, serialized podcasts. His loyal fans, who call themselves "Junkies," have downloaded over fifteen million individual episodes of his stories and interact daily with Scott and each other in the social media space. Scott reinvented book publishing when he released Earthcore as the world's first "podcast-only" novel, harkening back to the days of serialized radio fiction. He's been covered in Time magazine, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, and The Huffington Post, among others. He still records his own audiobooks and gives away every story-for free-to his Junkies at ScottSigler.com.

Host: Chris Mooney We usually record Point of Inquiry at a distance. Over the phone. Skyping. But for this show, I packed up my gear and hailed a cab—to the Center for Inquiry's brand new Office of Public Policy in downtown, Washington, D.C. The Center for Inquiry is here to literally make this country listen to reason... and science. It's a sensibility that is simply in far too short of a supply in this town. So I sat down with Ronald A. Lindsay, CFI's president, and Michael De Dora, head of the Office of Public Policy, to talk about their plans to make our legislators and leaders just a little more rational and science based. Ronald A. Lindsay is president and CEO of the Center for Inquiry and its affiliates, the Council for Secular Humanism and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. He has led the organization since 2008. Michael De Dora is director of the Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy and its representative to the United Nations.

Host: Chris Mooney It's rare that I can say about a guest that, I read his books when I was a kid. But David Brin is just such a guest. He's the celebrated science fiction author of the Uplift novels, The Postman, and many other books—most recently, Existence. I read the Uplift books when I was tearing through sci-fi as a teenager. But on top of that, Brin is also a trained scientist and public policy commentator. And in his commentary, as in his novels, he's concerned with the same themes that motivate this show: How can we protect science from the forces that want to do it in? And, can people really be rational? So, we're excited to have him on the show.

Host: Chris Mooney When we last had Bill McKibben on this show in 2010, I was mainly treating him as another bestselling science author—one who happens to focus on climate change. Well. Something kinda big happened in the intervening years, and McKibben has become, simply put, the country's leading environmental spokesman and advocate through his organization 350.org. From protests against the Keystone XL pipeline to, most recently, his "Do the Math" tour, rallying of college students to call for their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies... McKibben now speaks for a stunning mass movement of concerned people. Many of them are young. And many of them are terrified at what is happening to the planet that, in his last book, McKibben renamed "Eaarth," because, he said, the old name just didn't really capture it any longer. So, we are simply thrilled to welcome him back on the show.

Host: Indre Viskontas Because we live in an uncertain world, we arm ourselves with facts to gain a sense of control and therefore some modicum of comfort. We know that the sun will rise tomorrow even though it disappears tonight. But what happens when facts, those bits of information that we believed captured some fundamental truth about our world, are shown to be no longer true? With the exponential rise in our knowledge about our universe comes a tsunami of data overturning what we once thought we knew with complete certainty. Are there patterns that emerge from this wasteland of myths that once were accepted facts. One tried and true solution is to apply math to the problem, and network scientist and author Samuel Arbesman has done just that in his recently published book on the Half-life of Facts. Samuel Arbesman is an applied mathematician and network scientist. He is a Senior Scholar at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a fellow at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. In addition, he blogs at Wired.com, and his essays about math and science have appeared in such places as the New York Times, The Atlantic, and the Ideas section of the Boston Globe. Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Arbesman was a research fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School, where he used network science and applied mathematics to study innovation, scientific discovery, and prosocial behavior. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University in 2008, and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University in 2004. He has also coined a new word, named an asteroid, and created an eponymous constant and the Milky Way Transit Authority subway map.

Host: Chris Mooney One of the first people I ever got to know in skepticism was Steven Novella. He was a professor at Yale, just starting out as an organized skeptic—I was a student, just getting fired up about the same stuff. Since then, Steve has become hugely successful as a skeptic leader and as a communicator of skeptical ideas, particularly when it comes to his area of specialty, alternative medicine. And one thing I've always noticed about him over the years is his unending capacity to consider what really works to promote skepticism and critical thinking, and what doesn't—and to adjust accordingly. So I asked Steve on the show to discuss this process, and to talk about grappling with one of the toughest issues in skepticism and the issue that is his personal specialty—dealing with false claims about medical cures, or what is sometimes called complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Steven Novella is a neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine. He's also the host of the podcast Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, and the president and co-founder of the New England Skeptics' Society. He writes the blog Neurologica, and contributes to a number of other blogs including Science-Based Medicine.

Host: Chris Mooney Before the "complementary and alternative medicine" fad, and before UFO craze, lived a man whom you might call the first modern pseudoscientist. His name was Immanuel Velikovsky. He had a strange theory about a comet—that turned out to be Venus—shaping the course of human history. He tangled with Carl Sagan about it—and with the scientific community about it. And then, he was mostly forgotten. But no longer, because Princeton historian of science Michael Gordin has tracked down Velikovsky's personal papers. In his book The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, Gordin uses Velikovsky's example to show how he laid the groundwork for other pseudosciences-it's kind of like they followed in his footsteps. Michael Gordin is professor of history at Princeton University and director of the program in Russian and Eurasian Studies. He has written widely in the history of science with a focus on the Soviet Union and the early nuclear age. The Pseudoscience Wars is his fourth book.

Host: Chris Mooney On this show, we often debate the state of American secularism—covering topics like the rise of the so-called "nones," or the unending battle to rescue the country from the pernicious influence of Christian right. Our guest this week, Jacques Berlinerblau, has a provocative thesis about all this. He says that American secularism has clearly and distinctly lost major ground. And to recover from that loss, well... he's got some suggestions that might not go down well—but it's important to hear them. Even if, you know, you're not quite ready for a political allegiance with religious moderates. Jacques Berlinerblau is author of the new book How to be Secular: A Call to Arms for Religious Freedom. He's an associate professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown, where he directs the Program for Jewish Civilization.

Host: Indre Viskotnas Despite our individual differences, highlighted especially during an election, much of what we see, hear, smell or feel is shareable: that is, when standing in front of an object, we can more or less agree that it has a particular color, shape, texture, size and so on. But what if I tell you that I see an object clearly which you do not? Or hear a voice that doesn't have a physical source? Now we enter the world of hallucinations. Hallucinations, or perceptions of objects without an external reality, are not confined to the minds of people with schizophrenia or those who take hallucinogenic drugs. In many cultures, visions are considered a privileged state of consciousness; the trait of a special person chosen by some supernatural force to pass along an important message. But in our western worldview, hallucinations are often associated with a malfunctioning brain. What causes the startling, unbidden perception of something that seems very real, but has no material existence outside of our own minds? With reference to his own mind-altering experiences, the 'poet-laureate of medicine', Dr. Oliver Sacks, takes us through the looking glass and into the fascinating world of hallucinations. Oliver Sacks, M.D. is a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. He is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985), Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007) and The Mind's Eye (2010). Awakenings (1973), his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Dr. Sacks is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His new book, Hallucinations (2012), has just been released.

Hosts: Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney At the 2012 CSICON conference in Nashville, Tennessee, your Point of Inquiry hosts Indre Viskontas and Chris Mooney finally actually found themselves in the same place. The result was a show that features both of them covering current events—the 2012 election, the passing of CFI founder Paul Kurtz—and each also conducting an interview! Our guests: Jon Ronson (interviewed by Chris Mooney) is a journalist, filmmaker, radio personality and humorist-author of books you have heard of like The Men Who Stare at Goats and The Psychopath Test. You may have heard him on This American Life, or read him in the Guardian—or, if you are a very strange and odd person, or maybe a psychopath, you may have been interviewed by him! Because that would put you right in his wheelhouse, as he explains in this interview. Richard Wiseman (interviewed by Indre Viskontas) holds Britain's only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. His research on an eclectic range of topics including luck, self-help, illusion and persuasion has been published in some of the world's leading academic journals and cited in over 20 introductory textbooks. He has also written several best-selling books that have been translated into over 30 languages, including The Luck Factor, Quirkology, and 59 Seconds. His psychology-based YouTube videos have received over 45 million views and he has given keynote addresses to organisations across the world, including The Royal Society, The Swiss Economic Forum, and Google. Richard is the most followed British psychologist on Twitter and was recently listed in the Independent On Sunday's top 100 people who make Britain a better place to live. Over 2 million people have taken part in his mass participation experiments and he has acted as a creative consultant to Derren Brown, The MythBusters, CBS's The Mentalist, Heston Blumenthal, Nick Cave and Jeremy Deller. He began his working life as a professional magician and is a member of The Inner Magic Circle.

Host: Indre Viskontas The month of October is associated with falling leaves, autumn winds and hallowe'en. But for sports fans in the US, it also signals a high point in America's national pastime: baseball's postseason. After a long run of 162 games, the last weeks of October are ripe with matchups in which legends are made and broken. Any skeptic worth his or her salt, however, can't help but marvel at the diversity and frequency of ritualistic behaviors on display amongst these world class athletes. What is it about baseball that cause intelligent, highly-motivated, elite athletes to refrain from washing their underwear, to eat fried chicken or crunchy taco supremes, to put pennies in their supporters after every win, or chew the same piece of gum night after night, saving it under a baseball cap? The repertoire of routines that batters engage in while stepping into the box is often as choreographed as a ballet: with commentators going so far as calling Mike Hargrove the human rain delay because of his extended dance. To navigate this swamp of superstition, we talked to Bruce Hood, a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, whose popular book SuperSense: Why We Believe in the Unbelievable, has shed light on our tendency towards irrational behaviors. Professor Hood is the director of the Bristol Cognitive Development Centre at the University of Bristol, where he studies the origins of supernatural beliefs, intuitive theory formation, inhibitory control and general cognitive development. He has been awarded a Sloan Fellowship among other honors, and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Science society. In 2011, he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas lectures broadcast by the BBC to over 4 million viewers. His most recent book is the Self Illusion, which calls into question our view of ourselves as coherent, integrated individuals.

Host: Chris Mooney In this show, we talk to two founders of ScienceDebate, a nonprofit organization that in the last two election cycles has pushed to get the presidential candidates to talk about and debate science policy. So far, there has been no actual presidential science debate. But this year, ScienceDebate got Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to answer 14 top science policy questions, leading to some revealing results. And with the election less than a month away—an election whose winner will guide science policy at a time when international research competitiveness, climate change, and other science based issues demand attention... it's hard to think of many things more important for voters to pay attention to. The media feel otherwise, unfortunately. The first presidential debate and the vice-presidential debate have ignored science almost entirely. But that's precisely why we're here, and why ScienceDebate is here—to try to shine some light on the issues that matter critically, but aren't getting their due. Matthew Chapman is a screenwriter, author, and great-great grandson of Charles Darwin. When not working on ScienceDebate, he recently wrote and directed The Ledge, a thriller whose central character is an atheist. Shawn Otto is also a screenwriter and author, most recently of the book Fool me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America. Among other accolades, he also wrote and co-produced the Oscar nominated film A House of Sand and Fog.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Lisa Randall, the Harvard theoretical physicist and one of the most heavily cited and influential researchers in her field. She's a member of a number of distinguished scientific societies, including the National Academy of Sciences—but she's also a very popular science author, behind the bestselling Warped Passages: Unraveling the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and more recently Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World, which is just out in paperback. Between the hardback and paperback release of Knocking on Heaven's Door, a subject much discussed in the book—the quest for the discovery of the Higgs boson—was actually completed. Or at least, scientists at the Large Hadron Collider found a particle that sure looks like the Higgs. Randall has a new e-book about this entitled Higgs Discovery: The Power of Empty Space. So we were thrilled to speak with her about the Higgs, and what the discovery means about the ability of physics to continually peel back new layers of the universe.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is a return guest of the show, Massimo Pigliucci. We last heard about his book Nonsense on Stilts, which was about how to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. But his newest effort is in some ways even more ambitious. It's called Answers for Aristotle: How Science and Philosophy Can Lead Us to a More Meaningful Life. And in it, Pigliucci lays out an approach that he calls "sci-phi." It involves assessing the science of an issue—like, say, the biology of romance—and then also weighing an array of philosophical considerations, before figuring out how to negotiate this life domain. It's quite the heady undertaking—but, well, that never stopped us here before.... Massimo Pigliucci is a professor in the Philosophy Program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and was formerly a biology professor at Stony Brook University. He is the author or editor of eight previous books, most recently Nonsense on Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk. He lives in New York City.

Host: Indre Viskontas There is no doubt that our world is populated with cheats and liars. Most of us, slaves to the availability heuristic, think of major cheaters like Bernie Madoff, Tiger Woods, and Barry Bonds as inflicting the most damage onto society. But just how honest are we, with others and with ourselves? The surprising finding from several studies conducted by Dan Ariely and his collaborators is that we all cheat. What's worse, the consequences of these little everyday deceptions can sometimes far outweigh the ill effects of even the biggest lies. Following up on his previous books demonstrating our irrationality, this week on Point of Inquiry Dan walks us through his account of the irrational forces that determine whether or not we behave ethically. Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, with appointments at the Fuqua School of Business, the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, the Department of Economics, and the School of Medicine. Dan earned one PhD in cognitive psychology and another PhD in business administration. He is the founder and director of the Center for Advanced Hindsight. His work has been featured in many outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and others. His two previous New York Times best-selling books are Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality.

Host: Chris Mooney How many atheists are there in the world? Where do they live? What kind of people are they, and how do they get that way? Are they happy? Are they prosperous? Do they drag their societies down into a cesspool of immortality—as is often alleged—or, is it precisely the opposite? All of these questions are amenable to scientific study. With, like, data. It's just that people didn't much bother—until now. One pioneer in the sociological study of atheists is Phil Zuckerman, professor of sociology at Pitzer College. He's the author of Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, and Faith No More: Why People Reject Religion. And we're excited to have him on this week to reveal what we actually know about secularity—on a global scale.

Host: Chris Mooney Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to make American politics just a little more rational, just a little more evidence based? Wouldn't it be even nicer if there was a website, or an app, that helped that process along? Maybe, just maybe, a promising innovation called TruthMarket can help with the problem. It's a site where people who care about the truth crowd-fund campaigns dedicated to either proving the veracity of true claims, or the falsity of wrong ones... where, in essence, you make money by showing definitively that you're right. The goal, of course, is to use market forces to vanquish truthiness... and, well, here's hoping that it works. To talk about this new site, we've invited on its founder, Rick Hayes-Roth. Rick Hayes-Roth is the chairman and CEO of Truth Seal Corporation, and a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. In the past he has served as Chief Technology Officer for Software at Hewlett Packard, and program director for research in information processing at the Rand Corporation. He is currently the founder and chief executive of TruthMarket.

Host: Chris Mooney Several times on this show, we've discussed the topic of ideological asymmetry. In other words, are people of all political persuasions equally biased, equally prone to reasoning based on their emotions to support prior commitments? A new scientific paper (PDF) has recently come out that reopens this question, so naturally, we had to invite on one of its authors. His name is Peter Ditto, and he's a social psychologist at the University of California-Irvine who has been a leader in the study of emotional, or motivated, reasoning. At the same time, Ditto also studies the psychological foundations of political ideology more broadly. And in another recent paper, he and colleagues including Jonathan Haidt, provide a wealth of data on the personalities and motivations of people who choose to be libertarian. So we wanted to talk about that as well. Peter Ditto is department chair and professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California-Irvine. His research focuses on motivated reasoning and how our differing moral emotions tend to impel it—and how it is involved in partisan political biases. The scientific papers discussed in this episode are the following: Liu, B., & Ditto, P. H. (in press). "What dilemma? Moral evaluation shapes factual belief." Social Psychological and Personality Science. Iyer, R., Koleva, S., Graham, J., Ditto, P. H., & Haidt, J. (in press). "Understanding libertarian morality: The psychological dispositions of self-identified libertarians." PLoS ONE.

Host: Indre Viskontas According to the USDA, Americans produce and consume more beef, veal, and chicken than any other nation in the world. As a result, the status of animal welfare in the meat production industry should be of some concern to all Americans, regardless of dietary habits. One of the world's leading experts in livestock handling practices is Dr. Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University. In addition to gaining international recognition for her research on animal behavior and designs of feed yards and slaughterhouses, Dr. Grandin is also arguably the most famous high-functioning autistic adult. Her story has inspired countless individuals and families who have been touched by autism spectrum disorders, as well as other conditions that cause sensory hypersensitivity. In 2010, Clare Danes won both Emmy and Golden Globe awards for her portrayal of Temple in the critically-acclaimed HBO biopic Temple Grandin. This week on Point of Inquiry, we talk to Grandin about science, animal behavior, autism, ethics, and much more. Temple Grandin teaches courses on livestock behavior and facility design at Colorado State University and consults with the livestock industry on facility design, livestock handling, and animal welfare. She has appeared on television shows such as 20/20, 48 Hours, CNN Larry King Live, PrimeTime Live, the Today Show, and many shows in other countries. She has been featured in People Magazine, the New York Times, Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, Time Magazine, the New York Times book review, and Discover magazine. In 2010, Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people. She has also authored over 400 articles in both scientific journals and livestock periodicals on animal handling, welfare, and facility design. She is the author of Thinking in Pictures, Livestock Handling and Transport, Genetics and the Behavior of Domestic Animals, and Humane Livestock Handling. Her books Animals in Translation and Animals Make Us Human were both on the New York Times best seller list.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Arie Kruglanski. He's a Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland College Park, and has been a pioneer in the study of closed-mindedness-or, the "need for closure"—including how it drives fundamentalist belief systems and violent extremism. Dr. Kruglanski has served on National Academy of Sciences panels related to counterterrorism, and is a founding co-principal investigator at the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland. In addition, Kruglanski is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and has edited a variety of prominent journals, including the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Donald Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology. For more about his research, you can visit his website.

Host: Chris Mooney This week's guest is Joe Romm. You may know him as a top blogger on global warming and energy—but that's not why we're having him on. In an impressive show of versatility, Romm the scientist has written a book about how to persuade people. It's entitled Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga. In essence, it's a treatise on the neglected art of rhetoric, the technique mastered by Shakespeare and the writers of the King James Bible. In it, Romm delves deeply into figures of speech, and how they make orators persuasive by allowing them to activate people's emotions. Indeed, as Romm writes, modern neuroscience now confirms what the poets always knew about getting to people's heads through their hearts (that's a metaphor, by the way—one of the chief techniques that Romm discusses). If you ever want to understand why scientists—and people devoted to reason and critical thinking—fare so poorly getting their message across, you are going to want to listen to this show. Joe Romm is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, and oversees the blog ClimateProgress.org, which was named one of Time Magazine's Fifteen Favorite Websites for the Environment in 2007. He is also the author of several books, including Hell and High Water: Global Warming—The Solution and The Politics. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT, and served as acting assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy during 1997 and principal deputy assistant secretary from 1995 through 1998.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Peter Montgomery, senior fellow with People for the American Way and author of a new report entitled Twelve Rules for Mixing Religion and Politics, released last week with a new introduction by Bill Moyers. Point of Inquiry invited Montgomery on the show to discuss these very useful rules of the road, but also to ask a key question: Will the religious right ever consent to follow them? Peter Montgomery oversees the People For the American Way Foundation's research and writing on the Religious Right. Before joining the group in 1994, he was associate director of grassroots lobbying for Common Cause, and also wrote and edited for Common Cause Magazine, an award-winning journal featuring investigative reporting about the federal government.

Host: Indre Viskontas In an election year, it is especially important that our critical thinking skills be sharply honed. We have to sift through facts, fiction, and hyperbole in order to decide who it is that should lead us for the next four years. To remind us what the right questions to ask are and how to ask them, we invited on the show Dr. Christopher diCarlo, noted philosopher of science and ethics, whose research focuses on how and why humans reason, think, and act the way they do. diCarlo is a Philosopher of Science and Ethics whose interests in cognitive evolution have taken him into the natural and social sciences. He is interested in how and why the human brain has evolved to its current state and what cross-cultural and cross-species behavior can provide insight into universally common modes of reasoning. He is also interested in the application of neuroscience (specifically fMRI work), in an effort to better understand psychoneuroendocrine feedback looping in problem solving. His most recent book is How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Asking the Right Questions. In 2008, he was honored with the Canadian Humanist of the Year Award from the Humanist Association of Canada.

Kerry Emanuel is a leading atmospheric scientist and a self-described conservative. As a result, lately he's been at the forefront of trying to convince his ideological brethren that the science behind global warming is real. We invited Emanuel on to talk about whether global warming is indeed influencing the extreme weather that is afflicting the United States—and also for the unique vantage point that he brings to environmental and energy issues. Kerry Emanuel is professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is an expert on global warming and on tropical cyclones—aka, hurricanes. In addition to his large volume of scientific papers, he is also author of two popular books: Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, and What We Know About Climate Change.

Host: Chris Mooney Can people who care about secularism take America back from the religious right? Of all the questions that concern us on this show, this is perhaps the most important, the most central, of all. And David Niose has an answer to it. Simply put, he thinks we can. In his new book, Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans, Niose outlines the damage the religious right has done, and how the growing forces of secularity stand poised to finally effectively counter them. Central to the strategy? Embracing the atheist, or at any rate, the secular identity, and wearing it proudly on one's sleeve. David Niose is an attorney and president of the Washington-based American Humanist Association. He has appeared widely in national and international media advocating for secularism and humanism, and serves as vice president of the Secular Coalition for America.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest is Tina Dupuy—the reporter, comedian, skeptic, and editor-in-chief of the startup publication SoapBlox. Dupuy appears frequently on MSNBC, Current TV, RT and the BBC and on numerous radio shows. She has written for Mother Jones, the Atlantic, Skeptic, and many other publications. Her weekly oped is syndicated nationally by Cagle Cartoons.

Host: Chris Mooney For this episode of Point of Inquiry, we tried something a little different. At Center for Inquiry headquarters in Amherst, NY, we filmed a special hour long program with multiple in-studio guests, including the famed atheist comedian Jamie Kilstein. As usual, the program is also available as an audio-only podcast. In either format, here's what it contains: When Doubt is a Crime: Michael De Dora, director of the Center for Inquiry Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C., discusses the disturbing case of an Indonesian man who was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison, just for questioning whether God exists. Fox News Bashing, Redux: Chris Mooney responds to recent listener comments, some of them complimentary, some... not so much. From the Culture Wars to... Chuck Norris: We talk with Ed Brayton, the blogger behind Dispatches from the Culture Wars and owner of the FreethoughtBlogs network, about recent church state issues—and his steady monitoring of everyone's favorite right wing karate menace. Gotta Keep ‘em Separated: We interview Jessica Ahlquist, the high school freethought activist who was recently victorious in her Rhode Island church-state lawsuit over a prayer banner displayed in her high school auditorium. Jamie Kilstein: The hilarious atheist comedian and host of Citizen Radio discusses how he became an atheist, the future of the 99 percent, mixed martial arts, and his fighting challenge to conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg.

Host: Indre Viskontas The idea that science moves forward by carefully peeling back layers of the onion of truth, one by one, in a deliberate fashion, is so prevalent that it borders on cliche. But the truth is that running scientific experiments often feels more akin to dipping a cup into a bottomless well of information: each new study simply raises more questions than it answers. Although scientific knowledge is vast, ignorance, or what's left to learn, dwarfs what we think we know. Exploring this boundless frontier, neurobiologist Stuart Firestein explains how ignorance, rather than facts, drives science. Stuart Firestein is the Chair of Columbia University's Department of Biological Sciences where he studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience Firestein serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program for the Public Understanding of Science. His popular course at Columbia University served as the basis of his new book Ignorance: How it Drives Science published by Oxford University Press.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Chris Hayes, host of MSNBC's Up With Chris Hayes and editor at large of The Nation. Hayes has come out with a much anticipated new book that makes a surprising argument. It's called Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy, and in it, he attributes the stunning loss of trust in American institutions to, well, the system by which we chose who runs them. That system is a meritocracy—and it's supposed to be a fair one in which people get ahead or fall behind based on their own inherent abilities. But in reality, Hayes says, inequality in, inequality out. It's an intriguing and unexpected thesis, and after reading it, we wanted to ask Hayes about what this means for science in particular—which is, after all, a meritocracy. We also wanted to ask Hayes why people at the top of the totem pole—supposedly so smart, supposedly so well-trained and cultured—are in fact so poor at reasoning about those below them.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Cara Santa Maria, the senior science correspondent for the Huffington Post and the personage behind its "Talk Nerdy to Me" video series. Recent topics range from cannibalism, to the non-power of positive thinking, to the strange sex lives of animals, to the, well, bizarreness of creationism. Cara has appeared previously on shows ranging from Larry King Live to Geraldo at Large, and has co-hosted an episode of Star Talk Radio with Neil DeGrasse Tyson. She was also recently seen hosting several episodes of The Young Turks' popular web spinoff series The Point. She tweets at @CaraSantaMaria, and you can find her videos at the Huffington Post's Talk Nerdy To Me.

Host: Chris Mooney In late April, a study came out in Science that really got the secular blogosphere hopping. It was a paper showing that something we've long suspected may be true—less critical thinking is associated with more religiosity. In fact, having a cognitive style where you're less analytic, and more intuitive, promotes faith. And vice versa. It turns out this paper is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we're learning about the religious mind. So to get deeper into the topic, we invited on Will Gervais, lead author of the current paper and of much other work besides. Will Gervais is a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Next year he will be an associate professor in psychology at the University of Kentucky. His research studies the cognitive, evolutionary, and cultural reasons why people entertain in supernatural beliefs—or, why they don't, which is perhaps equally interesting.

Host: Indre Viskontas Recently, there has been a flurry of neuroscientists declaring that free will is an illusion in the popular press. But before we can assess the extent to which we are zombies, we need to first tackle the question of what, exactly, is consciousness. To get up to speed on the state of the art, we talked to Christof Koch, a colorful pioneer in the application of scientific tools to delineate the neural correlates of consciousness, whose famous 18-year collaboration with Francis Crick helped legitimize the field. Koch has never shied away from controversy, commenting on sentience in machines and dogs without skipping a beat. Christof Koch is Professor of Biology and of Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and Chief Scientific Office of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. He is the author of Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist and The Quest for Consciousness, among other books.

Host: Chris Mooney Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to attend the 2012 World Skeptics Conference in Berlin. It's important to keep tabs on our skeptical and freethinking colleagues around the world, and the challenges they're facing. And in this case, perhaps the most disturbing story out of the conference involved the spread of a new form of creationism—namely, Islamic creationism—in Europe. It's a topic I've wanted to explore on the show for some time. So in Berlin, I stopped to speak with Johan Braeckman, who has been tracking the subject closely. Johan Braeckman is a professor of philosophy of science at Ghent University in Belgium, and his research focuses on philosophical issues in the life sciences, particularly evolution and neuroscience. He's the author of a number of books and papers, including, most recently, Doubting Thomas Has a Point: A Guide to Critical Thinking, coauthored with Maarten Boudry.

Our guest this week is Greta Christina, a leading atheist blogger, speaker, and commentator, and a regular contributor to AlterNet.org. Christina is author of the new ebook Why Are You Atheists So Angry?: 99 Things that Piss Off the Godless, which grows out of a 2007 blog post on the same topic. The book will also be out in print in June. Greta Christina blogs at FreeThoughtBlogs.com, and her writing has appeared, among other places, in Ms., Penthouse, Chicago Sun-Times, On Our Backs, and Skeptical Inquirer. She is editor of the "Best Erotic Comics" anthology series, and of "Paying For It: A Guide by Sex Workers for Their Clients."

Host: Indre Viskontas In developed countries at least, the status of women has improved considerably in the last century. But in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), they remain underrepresented in all but one field, according to a recent study conducted by the Institute for Women's Policy Research. Often, femininity can seem incompatible with STEM and other male-dominated careers—but can young women today find an unlikely role model in Elizabeth Taylor, an actress dogged by the Catholic Church because of her sex appeal and promotion of secular ideas, including gay and lesbian rights? Cultural critic and acclaimed author M.G. Lord explores the contributions of Elizabeth Taylor to feminism—and her struggles against the Church—in her latest book, The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted By Her Beauty to Notice.

Host: Chris Mooney This week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a conference convened entitled "Science Writing in the Age of Denial." The keynote speaker was a former Point of Inquiry guest and a very popular one—Naomi Oreskes, co-author of the influential book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Point of Inquiry caught up with Dr. Oreskes at the conference and interviewed her about her lecture there, entitled "Neoliberalism and the Denial of Global Warming." Naomi Oreskes is professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, written with Eric Conway, described how a small group of scientists sought to undermine a large body of research on issues like global warming, the health risks of smoking, and ozone depletion. She is the author of the famed 2004 essay for the journal Science entitled "The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change," which was cited in the Academy Award winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Host: Chris Mooney This week, our guest is a return one: Austin Dacey. He's a philosopher, a writer, and a human rights activist, and the creator of the Impossible Music Sessions, which we featured in a past show. Austin's books include The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life and, just out, The Future of Blasphemy: Speaking of the Sacred in an Age of Human Rights. This show focused on Austin's new book on blasphemy. But he helped enhance the discussion with a few pieces of music that have been called blasphemous—which is why we wanted to distribute them as widely as possible.

Guest Host: John Shook In this special episode of Point of Inquiry, we interview our host himself—about his new book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality. From climate change to evolution, the rejection of mainstream science among Republicans is growing, as is the denial of expert consensus on the economy, American history, foreign policy and much more. Why won't Republicans accept things that most experts agree on? Why are they constantly fighting against the facts? Science writer and host of Point of Inquiry Chris Mooney explores brain scans, polls, and psychology experiments to explain why conservatives today believe more wrong things; appear more likely than Democrats to oppose new ideas and less likely to change their beliefs in the face of new facts; and sometimes respond to compelling evidence by doubling down on their current beliefs.

Host: Chris Mooney This week, Point of Inquiry is thrilled to welcome back one of our most popular guests: Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famed astrophysicist and Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. Last time we had him on, Dr. Tyson engaged in a wide ranging discussion about science communication and the place of science in America. This time, we focus in on his new book—Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier—and his call for revitalizing NASA and letting it play a central role in reconnecting America and science. Neil deGrasse Tyson is America's most pre-eminent science communicator. In addition to his work at the Hayden Planetarium and his books and television appearances, he is also the host of Star Talk Radio.

Host: Indre Viskontas The end is nigh. 2012 is a banner year for doomsday prophecies, though there still seems to be debate concerning precisely how life as we know it will be snuffed out. Hollywood seems to prefer the 'death from the skies' scenario, with Lars von Trier's latest film Melancholia exploring the psychological consequences of believing that another planet is on a collision course with ours. But would we know? How much warning would we receive if such a catastrophe were to occur? There is no better source for this information than Dr. David Morrison, the founder of the field of astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe. Once the Director of Space at NASA Ames, he is best known for his work on assessing the risk of near earth objects such as asteroids and comets. As the mind behind the popular 'Ask an Astrobiologist' blog on NASA's website, Dr. Morrison has all the answers. David Morrison is the senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute, NASA Ames Research Center, where he participates in a variety of research programs in astrobiology—the study of the living universe. Dr. Morrison obtained his doctorate in astronomy from Harvard University. He is the author of more than 155 technical papers and has published a dozen books. He has been a science investigator on NASA's Mariner, Voyager and Galileo space missions. Morrison is recipient of the Dryden Medal for research of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Sagan Medal of the American Astronomical Society for public communication, and the Klumpke-Roberts award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific for contributions to science education. He has received two NASA Outstanding Leadership medals and he was awarded the Presidential Meritorious Rank for his work as director of space at NASA Ames. Morrison is perhaps best known for his leadership since 1991 in defining the hazard of asteroid impacts and seeking ways to mitigate this risk. Asteroid 2410 Morrison is named in his honor.

Host: Chris Mooney Why is it that some of us are religious, some of us not... some of us liberal, some of us not? If you've been paying attention, then by now you might have noticed that this doesn't really have a lot to do with the intellectual validity of religious, or irreligious, or liberal, or conservative ideas. So what causes it? And why can't we all get along? To get at this, Point of Inquiry invited on a scholar and thinker who has become famous for his scientific approach to this question—Jonathan Haidt, author of the new book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. Jonathan Haidt is a professor of social psychology at the University of Virginia, and a visiting professor of business ethics at the NYU-Stern School of Business. Haidt's research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures. He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and he and his collaborators conduct research at the website YourMorals.org.

Host: Chris Mooney If there's one thing Point of Inquiry is concerned about, it's ensuring a rational, sensible conversation in politics, in public life. And you simply can't have such a conversation if the culture is awash in political, and politicized, misinformation. What do we mean by "misinformation"? The denial of global warming. Claims about "death panels." Assertions that the President of the United States wasn't actually born here. One thing all these falsehoods have in common is that if you watch Fox News, you're more likely to believe them. Fox increases your risk, so to speak, of believing factually wrong things to support a political agenda. With other networks, this "Fox effect" just isn't there. How did it get this way? How did one leading network become a fount of misinformation? For that, we turn to the most dedicated Fox monitors of them all—Media Matters. They've got a new book out on Fox, and I've invited their Executive Vice President, Ari Rabin-Havt, on to talk about it. Ari Rabin-Havt is Executive Vice President at Media Matters. He is co-author, with David Brock, of The Fox Effect: How Roger Ailes Turned a Network into a Propaganda Machine.

Host: Chris Mooney A common goal of freethinkers, humanists, skeptics, and atheists is to preserve Thomas Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state. But we haven't always been successful in this area—help from the courts notwithstanding—or at beating back the steady advances of the religious right. How can we do better? Our guest this week has a new book on the topic, and just as important, a new way of thinking. His name is Sean Faircloth, the director of strategy and policy for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Before that, Faircloth served five terms in the Maine Legislature and went on to serve as executive director for the Secular Coalition for America. He's author of the newly released book Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms Us All and What to Do About It.

Host: Indre Viskontas One of the costs of being conscious is that, once in a while, we are forced to contemplate the fact that we are mortal. Ironically, a close brush with the grim reaper leaves many people more convinced than ever that our minds are not tethered to our bodies, and therefore can survive physical death. What can these near-death experiences tell us about how well we understand our own consciousness? To explore this topic, we first talked to anesthesiologist Gerald Woerlee, author of Mortal Minds: The Biology of NDEs to get a sense of what makes NDEs so compelling to people looking for evidence of an afterlife. Then, we sought the expertise of Susan Blackmore, psychologist and author, whose book Consciousness: An Introduction breaks down the complex theories of consciousness into digestible chunks. Dodging the sandtraps of dualism along the way, we speculate on implications of NDEs for meta-consciousness while keeping the mind strictly within the confines of the body.

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Michael Mann, the prominent climatologist and, above all, leading defender of his field—and himself—against political attacks. Mann is out with a new book this month, which details his ten year battle against political attacks and misrepresentations. It's called The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches From the Front Lines. And already, people are attacking it on Amazon.com without having even read it. Michael Mann is an American climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University. He's a co-founder and contributor to the blog RealClimate.org, and a fellow of the American Geophysical Union. He has over 150 peer reviewed publications to his name, and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars is his second book.

Host: Chris Mooney So who's right, factually, about politics and science? Who speaks truth, and who's just spinning? It's kind of the million dollar question. If we could actually answer it, we'd have turned political debate itself into a... well, a science. And is such an answer possible? What does the scientific evidence suggest? In this episode of Point of Inquiry, Chris Mooney brought back a popular guest from last year, Yale's Dan Kahan, to discuss this very question-one that they've been emailing about pretty much continually ever since Kahan appeared on the show. In the episode, Kahan and Mooney not only review but debate the evidence on whether "motivated" ideological biases are the same on both sides of the political aisle—or alternatively, whether they're actually "asymmetrical." Dan Kahan is the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Law and Professor of Psychology at the Yale Law School. He's also the Eli Goldston Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. His research focuses on "cultural cognition"-how our social and political group affiliations affect our views of what's true in contested areas like global warming and nuclear power-and motivated reasoning. Before then, he served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall, of the U.S. Supreme Court (1990-91) and to Judge Harry Edwards of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit (1989-90).

Host: Chris Mooney We had Lawrence Krauss on Point of Inquiry less than a year ago, to discuss his recent book on the scientific works of Richard Feynman. But in order to keep up with him, we had to have him on again. Already. You see, Krauss has a new book out that's causing quite a stir right now—A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing. Here's a hint as to why: Krauss's answer to this age-old question isn't God. In fact, as discussed on the program, Krauss has arguably written the book that "kicks God out of physics." And along the way, he also manages to explain a heck of a lot of science. Lawrence Krauss is an the internationally known theoretical physicist and popular author. He has published hundreds of scientific papers, as well as acclaimed books like the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek and Fear of Physics. He's director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University.

Host: Chris Mooney Earlier this month, Point of Inquiry host Chris Mooney attended Science Online, the premiere science blogging conference, in the research triangle area. There were many science aficionados, communicators, and wonks present, but Chris found himself hanging out a lot with Brian Malow—aka, the Science Comedian. And get this—Malow lived up to his name. He was pretty funny. Chris decided he had to get him on air. Now, obviously, we couldn't have Malow do stand up for this program. Instead, Chris had to try to... draw humor out of him. And in the process, however inadvertently, he may have even told a joke himself. Brian Malow describes himself as Earth's Premier Science Comedian. He makes science videos for Time Magazine's website and contributes to Neil deGrasse Tyson's radio show—and performs widely. He's been featured on the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and in Nature, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.