Beyond Belief
Season 2007
No season overview available.
Welcome by Roger Bingham
Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series "The Human Quest". He is co-founder and Director of The Science Network.
Darrin McMahon
Darrin McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University. He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment and Happiness: A History, which was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and the Library Journal. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Daedalus, and The New Republic's "Open University."
Margaret Jacob
Margaret Jacob, a professor of History at UCLA, is an authority on the scientific roots of the Enlightenment, the origins of Western cosmopolitanism, and the freemasons, freethinkers and other radicals and revolutionaries of the 18th century. Her books include Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe; The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents; and (with Larry Stewart) Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851.
Edward Slingerland
Edward Slingerland is Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. His research includes Warring States Chinese thought, cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, methodologies for comparative religion, virtue ethics and the classical Chinese language. His forthcoming book, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body & Culture, argues for the relevance of the natural sciences to the humanities, and outlines an integrated, embodied approach to the study of culture.
Donald Rutherford
Donald Rutherford is a member of the UCSD Philosophy Department whose main research interests are in the history of modern philosophy. Much of his work has dealt with the philosophy of Leibniz, leading to a book, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, and to a critical edition and translation (with Brandon Look) of the Leibniz-Des Bosses correspondence. His current research focuses on the role of eudaimonistic ethical theory in the seventeenth century.
Daniel Dennett
Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell; Freedom Evolves; and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston.
David Sloan Wilson
David Sloan Wilson, Professor in the Biology and Anthropology Departments at Binghamton University, is director of EvoS, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program. He is known for championing the theory of multilevel selection, which has implications ranging from the origin of life to the nature of religion. His most recent book is Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.
Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, studies the emotional basis of moral judgment and political ideology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research in cultural psychology at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001 and is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.
Michael Shermer
Michael Shermer, a former college professor, is the founding publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine. A monthly columnist for Scientific American, he is the author of The Science of Good and Evil. His most recent book is Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, a discussion of the boundary between religion and science.
Panel
Daniel Dennett, David Sloan Wilson, Jonathan Haidt & Michael Shermer
Gregory Clark
Gregory Clark chairs the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He is author of the recent book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, which in part details how the economic systems of the long pre-industrial era helped shape modern cultures, and perhaps even modern human preferences at the genetic level.
Deirdre McCloskey
Deirdre McCloskey teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written fourteen books on economic theory, history, philosophy, rhetoric, and ethics. She taught for twelve years in economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself as a "postmodern freemarket quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian." Her latest books are The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism and (with Stephen Ziliak) The Cult of Statistical Significances.
Stuart Kauffman
Stuart Kauffman has had an unusually varied career in biological science, with forays into quantum gravity and economics. His interests are theoretical biology, origin of life, origin of agency, developmental genetics, and evolution. He has published four books: Origins of Order; At Home in the Universe; Investigations; and Reinventing the Sacred (due April 2008).
Sean Carroll
Sean Carroll is a Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He previously worked at MIT, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago. He studies topics in theoretical physics, focusing on cosmology, field theory, particle physics, and gravitation. He is currently studying the nature of dark matter and dark energy, connections between cosmology, quantum gravity, and statistical mechanics, and scenarios for the beginning of the universe. He is a contributor to the blog "Cosmic Variance".
David Albert
David Albert is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the M.A. Program in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University. He studies in particular the quantum mechanical measurement problem and the problem of the direction of time. Dr. Albert has published two books, Quantum Mechanics and Experience and Time and Chance, and numerous articles on quantum mechanics.
Welcome by Roger Bingham
Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series "The Human Quest". He is co-founder and Director of The Science Network.
Peter Atkins
Peter Atkins is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, Fellow of Lincoln College. He is the author of nearly 60 books, including Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science; Four Laws that Drive the Universe; and the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry. He has been a visiting professor in France, Israel, New Zealand, China, and Japan, and continues to lecture widely throughout the world.
Sir Harold Kroto
Sir Harold Kroto, Chairman of the Board of the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that produces science programs for television, in 1996 shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for the discovery of a new form of carbon, the C60 Buckminsterfullerene. He has received the Royal Society's prestigious Michael Faraday Award, given annually to a scientist who has done the most to further public communication of science, engineering or technology in the United Kingdom.
Scott Atran
Scott Atran, Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France, has experimented extensively on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature. He currently is an organizer of a NATO working group on suicide terrorism. His publications include In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and The Native Mind: Cognition and Culture in Human Knowledge of Nature (co-authored with Douglas Medin and forthcoming from Oxford University Press).
Lee Silver
ee Silver is Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Policy at Princeton University. He received a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard University and trained at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is the author of Challenging Nature: The Clash Between Biotechnology and Spirituality; Remaking Eden; and Mouse Genetics, and co-author of an undergraduate genetics textbook. He has published 180 articles in the fields of genetics, evolution, embryology and behavioral genetics.
Greg Epstein
Greg M. Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University, and sits on the executive committee of the 38-member interfaith corps of Harvard Chaplains. Ordained as a Humanist rabbi, Epstein holds graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School. He was lead organizer of The New Humanism, an international conference held at Harvard University in April 2007, and blogs for the Washington Post/Newsweek magazine project, "On Faith."
Roland de Sousa
Ronald de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was educated in Switzerland, Oxford, UK, and Princeton, USA. He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion and of Why Think?: Evolution and the Rational Mind. His current research interests focus on emotions, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, sex, and the puzzle of religious belief.
Patricia Churchland
Patricia Churchland, who chairs the University of California, San Diego Philosophy Department, focuses also on neuroethics and attempts to understand choice, responsibility and the basis of moral norms in terms of brain function, evolution and brain-culture interactions. Her books include Brain-Wise, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. She is the author of eight books, including the novels The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics. Her last two books were non-fiction: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel and Betraying Spinoza. She has received many awards for her fiction and scholarship, including a MacArthur, and is currently at work on a novel.
John Allen Paulos
John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, Philadelphia, is an author, public speaker, and columnist for ABCNews and the Guardian. His writings include Innumeracy, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Once Upon a Number, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and scholarly papers on probability, logic, and the philosophy of science as well as OpEds, book reviews, and articles in publications from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Discover, The American Scholar, and the London Review of Books.
V.S. Ramachandran
VS Ramachandran, Director for the Center of Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, co-authored Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, with Sandra Blakeslee, and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.
Adam Kolber
Adam Kolber is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a law professor at the University of San Diego. He writes about the legal and ethical implications of emerging neurotechnologies, including drugs to dampen traumatic memories and brain imaging techniques to assess subjective experiences. He runs the "Neuroethics & Law Blog" and is an associate editor of the journal Neuroethics.
Jonathan Gottschall
Jonathan Gottschall teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. His work seeks to bridge the humanities-sciences divide. He is co-editor of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, and the author of The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. His next book will be Literature, Science, and a New Humanities.
David Brin
David Brin's bestselling novels, such as Earth and Kiln People, have been translated into more than 20 languages. The Postman was loosely Kevin Costnerized in 1998. A scientist and futurist, Brin speaks and consults widely about over-the-horizon social and technological trends. The Transparent Society won the nonfiction Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association.
Robert Winter
Robert Winter, scholar, pianist, and media author, holds the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at UCLA. His very non-linear career has encompassed Beethoven scholarship, the evolution of the piano, several public radio series, popular culture, the history of technology, seven new media projects (starting with Beethoven's 9th) hailed as milestones in multimedia publishing, and countless appearances as an advocate for the arts in a No-Child-Left-Behind world.
Welcome by Roger Bingham
Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series "The Human Quest". He is co-founder and Director of The Science Network.
Sam Harris
Sam Harris has authored the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Letter to a Christian Nation. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience.
Daniel Smail
Daniel Lord Smail has an abiding passion: to bring time depth back into the ways in which we teach and research history in this country. He is a history professor at Harvard University. In his book, On Deep History and the Brain, he joins other historians who seek to transcend the legacy of Judeo-Christian sacred chronology. When not otherwise pursuing a history that begins in Africa, he is a European historian who works on law and justice in late medieval Mediterranean cities.
Jeff Hawkins
Jeff Hawkins is the founder of two computer companies, Palm and Handspring, and the designer of many computing products including the PalmPilot and Treo Smartphone. He also founded and ran the nonprofit Redwood Neuroscience Institute (now part of UC Berkeley) and founded the for-profit Numenta, which is developing a new technology, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, based on neocortical memory architecture. Hawkins has a BSEE from Cornell University. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2003.
PZ Myers (overview from audience)
PZ Myers is a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris who focuses on the interplay of developmental and evolutionary processes. He is a columnist for Seed magazine and maintains a somewhat popular weblog, "Pharyngula", which takes a ruthlessly godless view of biology, evolution and the culture wars.
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