Podcasts about darwinian revolution

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/secularism

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/popular-culture

From Darwin's The Origin of Species to the twenty-first century, Peter Bowler reinterprets the long Darwinian Revolution by refocussing our attention on the British and American public. By applying recent historical interest in popular science to evolutionary ideas, he investigates how writers and broadcasters have presented both Darwinism and its discontents.  Casting new light on how the theory's more radical aspects gradually grew in the public imagination, Evolution for the People: Shaping Popular Ideas from Darwin to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2024) extends existing studies of the popularization of evolutionism to give a more comprehensive picture of how attitudes have changed through time. In tracing changes in public perception, Bowler explores both the cultural impact and the cultural exploitation of these ideas in science, religion, social thought and literature. The first comprehensive study of popular evolutionism from the 1860s to the present day Reassesses the impact of Darwinism on the wider public through the study of popular science Provides insights beyond the study of popular science relevant to cultural history, the history of religion, and the history of social though Peter J. Bowler is Professor Emeritus of the History of Science at Queen's University Belfast, a fellow of the British Academy, a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a past president of the British Society for the History of Science. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Alan talks with David Sloan Wilson, renowned biologist and author, to explore the broader applications of Darwin's theory beyond genetics to cultural and personal evolution. Wilson argues against conflating evolution with Social Darwinism and highlights cooperation as a crucial trait for societal progress. He emphasizes the need for experimental and inclusive decision-making and discusses how failure drives improvement, the impact of cultural interventions, and the role of religion in fostering community. Wilson also critiques traditional economic models and explains his aim to integrate evolutionary science into global cooperation.     Guest Bio David Sloan Wilson is a distinguished evolutionary biologist with a doctorate from Michigan State University. His impressive academic career spans institutions such as Harvard University, the University of Washington, and the State University of New York Binghamton, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus. David founded the Evolution Institute and co-founded the nonprofit ProSocial World, including the New Paradigm Coalition Initiative. He is an award-winning author known for his influential works, including This View of Life, Evolution for Everyone, The Neighborhood Project, and his novel Atlas Hugged. David's research and writing explore the applications of evolutionary theory to society and culture.     Show Notes (2:21) - What the evolution paradigm is (4:22) - How the evolution paradigm is seen in cultures and how it differs from Social Darwinism (6:56) - The special conditions necessary for the evolution paradigm to be effective (11:51) - The importance of a common goal for cooperation to work when people have conflicting opinions (14:11) - How failure is handled under the evolution paradigm (16:16) - Applying the evolution paradigm to education (26:17) - How the evolution paradigm applies to faith and religion (37:13) - How the cooperative approach works when it comes to national economics (39:20) - How individuals express themselves when they don't agree with the larger group (44:07) - Wilson's novel, Atlas Hugged   Links Referenced ProSocial World: https://www.prosocial.world New Paradigm Coalition Initiative: https://www.prosocial.world/community/new-paradigm-coalition This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution: https://www.amazon.com/This-View-Life-Completing-Revolution/dp/1101870206 Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way we Think About Our Lives: https://www.amazon.com/Evolution-Everyone-Darwins-Theory-Change-ebook/dp/B000OI0GCA The Neighborhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve my City, One Block at a Time: https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Project-Using-Evolution-Improve-ebook/dp/B0047Y0FHS Atlas Hugged: https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Hugged-David-Sloan-Wilson-ebook/dp/B0C3GCWVMQ  Email: mailto:hello@prosocial.world  

Shownotes and Transcript Intelligent Design may not be an idea you are familiar with but it has interested me since I was a child.  I find it impossible to accept that the world we live in and the complexity of human beings is all based on luck and chance. There has to be an intelligent designer.  Stephen C Meyer is one of the most renowned experts on this very topic and his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience has made many people question the theory of a universe without God.  At what point did intellectuals decide that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic beliefs? Is it even statistically possible for such complexity to just appear? What about the question of who is this intelligent designer?  Stephen Meyer will help you view the world around you with a brand new perspective. Dr. Stephen C. Meyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science. A former geophysicist and college professor, he now directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. In 2004, Meyer ignited a firestorm of media and scientific controversy when a biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published his peer-reviewed scientific article advancing intelligent design. Meyer has been featured on national television and radio programs, including The Joe Rogan Experience, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CBS's Sunday Morning, NBC's Nightly News, ABC's World News, Good Morning America, Nightline, FOX News Live, and the Tavis Smiley show on PBS. He has also been featured in two New York Times front-page stories and has garnered attention in other top-national media. Dr. Meyer is author of the New York Times bestseller Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and Signature in the Cell, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He is also a co-author of Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism and Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique. Connect with Stephen... WEBSITE           https://stephencmeyer.org/                            https://www.discovery.org/                            https://returnofthegodhypothesis.com/ X                         https://x.com/StephenCMeyer?s=20 BOOKS               https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B001K90CQC Interview recorded 13.12.23 Connect with Hearts of Oak... WEBSITE            https://heartsofoak.org/ PODCASTS        https://heartsofoak.podbean.com/ SOCIAL MEDIA  https://heartsofoak.org/connect/ TRANSCRIPTS   https://heartsofoak.substack.com/ Support Hearts of Oak by purchasing one of our fancy T-Shirts....  SHOP                  https://heartsofoak.org/shop/ *Special thanks to Bosch Fawstin for recording our intro/outro on this podcast. Check out his art https://theboschfawstinstore.blogspot.com/ and follow him on GETTR https://gettr.com/user/BoschFawstin and Twitter https://twitter.com/TheBoschFawstin?s=20  Transcript (Hearts of Oak) Dr. Stephen Meyer. It's wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for your time today. (Stephen C Meyer) Thanks for inviting me, Peter.  No, it's great to have you. And people can find you on Twitter @StephenCMayer. It's on the screen there. And also discovery.org, the Discovery Institute. And you obviously received your PhD in philosophy of sciences from England, from University of Cambridge, your a former geophysicist, college professor, and you now are the director of Discovery Institute, author of many books. The latest is Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, and the links for those books will be in the description. But, Dr. Meyer, if I can maybe, I think I remember as a child, church loyalty, being at church and getting a stamp for attending. I remember asking for a book on creationism then, and we may touch on different creationism, intelligent design. I mean, it was 10 or 11. And I remember being fascinated by this whole topic of how God can be seen in the world around us. Maybe I can ask you about your journey. What has been your journey to being one of the, I guess, main proponents on intelligent design? Well, I've always been interested in questions at the intersection between science and philosophy or science and  larger worldview questions or science and religion the questions that are addressed about, you know, how do we get here and what is, is there a particular significance to human life, what is the meaning of life, in the early part of my scientific career I was working as a geophysicist as you mentioned the introduction and in the city where I was working, a conference came to town that was investigating that intersection of science and philosophy, science and belief, and it was addressing three big questions, and they were the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness. And the conference was unique in that it had invited leading scientists and philosophers representing both theism, broadly speaking, belief in God, and scientists and philosophers who rejected theism and who affirmed the more common view among leading scientists at that time, which was materialism or sometimes called naturalism. We have the New Atheist Movement with their scientific atheists and people of more of that persuasion. So it was, let's look at the origin of the universe from the standpoint. What do the data say, what do you theists say about it, what do you non-theist materialists say about it, and it was a fascinating conference and I was particularly taken by the panels on the origin of the universe and the origin of life because surprisingly to me it seemed that the theists had the intellectual initiative that the the evidence in those about the origin of the universe, and then about the complexity of the cell and therefore the challenges it posed to standard chemical evolutionary theories of the origin of life that in both these two areas, both these two subjects, it seemed that there were powerful, theistic friendly arguments being developed, in one case about the, what you might call, a reviving of the ancient cosmological argument because of the evidence that scientists had discovered about the universe having a beginning. And in the other case, what we now call the theory of intelligent design, that there was evidence of design in the cell, in particular, in the digital code that is stored in the DNA molecule, the information and information processing system of the cell. And was it that time? And still to this day is something that undirected theories of chemical evolution have not been able to explain. And instead, what we know from our experience is that information is a mind product, which is a point that some of these scientists made at this panel, that when we see digital code or alphabetic text or computer code, and many people have likened the information and DNA to a computer code, we always find a mind behind that. So this was the first time I was exposed to that way of thinking. I got fascinated with that. A year later, after the conference, I ended up meeting one of the scientists on the Origin of Life panel, a man named Charles Thackston, who had just written a book with two other co-authors called The Mystery of Life's Origin. He was detailing in that book, he and his colleagues were detailing sort of chapter and verse the problems with trying to explain the origin of the first cell from simpler chemicals in some alleged or presupposed prebiotic soup. And the three authors showed that this was implausible in the extreme, given what we know scientifically about how chemistry works versus how cells work. And over the ensuing year, he kind of mentored me and I got fascinated with the subject and ended up getting a fellowship. A Rotary Fellowship to study at Cambridge for a year and then ended up extending on. I did my master's thesis and then my PhD thesis both on origin of life biology within the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge. And while I was there, I started to meet other scientists and scholars who were having doubts about standard Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories of life's origin. And by the early 90s, a number of us had met each other and connected and had some private conferences. And out of that was born a formal program investigating the evidence for intelligent design in biology, in physics, in cosmology, and in 96, we started a program at Discovery Institute. You were very kind to me to call me the director of the whole institute. I direct a program within the institute called the Center for Science and Culture, which is the institutional home. A network of scientists who are investigating whether or not there is, empirical scientific evidence for a designing mind behind life in the cosmos and and the program just continues to grow, the network especially continues to grow, we've got fantastic scientists from all around the world now who are sympathetic to that position and I would mention too that it's a position that's kind of reviving an ancient view going back to certainly the time of the scientific revolution. In particular, we've discovered back to the scientific revolution in Cambridge where I had been fortunate enough to study. There's a, in the college that I was part of, St. Catherine's, there was back in the 17th century, one of the founders of modern botany, who was also one of the first authors of what's called British National Theology. His name was John Ray. Ray was the tutor of Isaac Barrow, a mathematician who in turn tutored Newton and so this whole tradition of seeing the fingerprints of a creator in the natural world is something that was launched in Britain, particularly in Cambridge there were other figures like Robert Boyle who were in other places but the Cambridge tradition of natural theology was very strong from that time period in the 17th century, late 17th century, right up to figures like James Clerk Maxwell, the great physicist in the late 19th century who was critical, sceptical of Darwinism and articulated the idea of design. And I think that's now being revived within contemporary science. There's a growing minority of scientists who see evidence of design in nature.  Now, the understanding of intelligent designer, that's a new thinking, but through the millennia, that's been the norm. Individuals have viewed the world through the lens that there is a God, and that has helped them understand and see the world. But there must have been a point, I guess, when intellectuals decided that scientific knowledge conflicts with that that traditional belief, that traditional theistic belief. Yeah, that's a great way of framing the discussion, Peter. There's a historian of science in Britain named Steve Fuller, who's at Warwick. And he's argued that the idea of intelligent design has been the framework out of which science has been done since the period of the scientific revolution at least and that the the post Darwinian deviation from that, denying that there's actual design and only instead as the Darwinian biologists say the appearance or illusion of design, you may remember from Richard Dawkins's famous book the blind watchmaker, page one he says biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. And of course, for Dawkins and his followers, and for Darwinians from the late 19th century forward, the appearance of design is an illusion. And it was thought to be an illusion because Darwin had formulated an undirected, or had identified an undirected, unguided process, which he called natural selection that could mimic the powers of a designing intelligence, or so he argued, without itself being designed or guided in any way. And that's kind of where we've engaged the argument. Is that appearance of design that nearly all biologists recognize merely an appearance, or is it the product of an actual guiding intelligence? And that's why we call our theory intelligent design. We're not challenging the idea that there has been change over time, one of the other meanings of evolution we're not challenging even the idea of universal common descent though some of us myself included are quite sceptical of that, the main thing we're challenging with the theory of intelligent design is that is that the appearance of design is essentially an illusion because an unguided undirected mechanism has the capability of generating that appearance without itself being guided or directed in any way and that's, to us the key issue. Is the design real or merely apparent? You may remember that Francis Crick also once said that biologists must constantly keep in mind, that what they see was not designed, but instead evolved. So there's this, the recurrence of that strong intuition among people who have studied biological systems. And I would say, going back all the way to Aristotle, you know, this has been, the Western tradition in biology has been suffused with this recognition. That organisms look designed, they look like they're designed for purpose, they exhibit purpose of behaviour. And now in the age following Watson and Crick, following the molecular biological revolution of the late 50s and 1960s and 70s, we have extraordinarily strong appearances of design. We've got digital code. We have a replication system. We have a translation system as part of this whole information processing system. Scientists can't help but use teleological wording to describe what's going on. We see the purpose of nature, of all of the biological systems and subsystems. And so what we've argued is that, at least at the point of the origin of life, there is no unguided, undirected, or there is no theory that invokes, that has identified an unguided, undirected mechanism that can explain away that appearance of design. Many people don't realize that Darwin did not attempt to explain the origin of the first life. He presupposed the existence of one or a few very simple forms. And so he started it effectively with assuming a simple cell and then said, well, what would have come from that? We now know, however, that the simple cell was not simple at all and displays this many very striking appearances of design that have not been explained by undirected chemical evolutionary processes. Dawkins himself has said that the machine code of the genes is strikingly computer-like. And so you have this striking appearance of design at the very foundation of life that has not in any way been explained by undirected processes. Well, I want to pick up on a number of that, the new discoveries, how things have changed, the complexity. But I can go back, you're challenging, I guess, hundreds of years of new thinking that the complexity of the universe simply points to luck and chance. And I guess there's a statistical side of that, whether that's even possible. We look around and we see things just working perfectly. And I wonder whether it's even possible for a chance element to make all those things come together and make the world as it is. Well, in my book, Signature in the Cell, which was the first of the three books that I've written on these big topics, I look at the argument for the chance origin of life and even more fundamentally, the chance origin of, say, DNA and the protein products that the DNA codes for. And one of the first things to take note of in addressing the chance hypothesis is that no serious origin of life researcher, no origin of life biochemist or biologist today reposes much hope in the chance hypothesis, it's it's really been set aside and the reason for that, I explained the reason for that in in signature in the cell and then do some calculations to kind of back up the thinking that most origin of life biologists have adopted and that is that the cell is simply far too complicated to have arisen by chance. And you can, and the large biomacromolecules, DNA and proteins, are molecules that depend on a property known as sequence specificity, or sometimes called specified complexity. That is to say, they contain informational instructions in essentially a digital or typographic form. So you have in the DNA you have the four character chemical subunits that biologists actually represent with the letters A, T, G, and C. And if you want to build a protein, you have to arrange the A's, C's, G's, and T's or the evolutionary process or somehow the A's, C's, G's, and T's must have been sequenced in the proper way so that when that genetic message is sent to the ribosome, which is the the translation apparatus in the cell, then what comes out of that is a properly sequenced protein molecules. Proteins also are made of subunits called amino acids. There are 20 or so, maybe as many as 22 now, protein-forming amino acids. And to get the protein chain that is built from the DNA instructions to fold into a proper functional conformation or three-dimensional shape, those amino acids have to be arranged in very specific ways. If they're not arranged properly, the long peptide chain, as it's called, will not fold into a stable protein. And so in both cases, you have this property of sequence specificity that the function of the whole, the whole gene in the case of DNA or the whole protein in the case of the the amino acids, the function of the whole depends upon the precise sequencing of the constituent parts. And that's the difficulty, getting those things to line up properly. Turns out there's all kinds of difficulties in trying to form those subunits, those chemical parts, out of any kind of prebiotic chemical environment that we've been able to think of. But the most fundamental problem is the sequencing. And so you can actually run, because there's, if you think of the protein chain, you have 1 in 20 roughly chances of getting the right amino acid at each site. Sometimes it's more or less because in some cases you can have any one of, there is some variability allowed at each site, but you can run numbers on all this and get very precise numbers on the probability of generating even a single functional protein in the known history of the universe. And it turns out that what are called the combinatorials or the probabilities associated with combinatorials, the probabilities are so small that they are small even in relation to the total number of possible events that might have occurred from the Big Bang till now. In other words, here's an example I often use to use to illustrate, if you have a thief trying to crack a bike lock. If the thief has enough time, even though the combination is hidden among all the possibilities, and then the probability of getting the combination in one trial is very small, if the thief has enough time and can try and try and try again, he may crack it by sheer chance. But if the lock is, we have a standard four-dial bike lock, but if the thief encounters a 10-dial bike lock, and I've had one rendered by my graphic designer to get the point across, then in a human lifetime, there's not enough opportunities to sample that number of possible combinations. If you've got 10 dials, you've got 10 to the 10 possibilities, or 10, that's 10 billion. And if the thief spins the dial once every 10 seconds for 100 years and does nothing else in his entire life, he'll only sample 3% of those total combinations, which means it's much more likely that the thief will fail than it is that he will succeed by chance alone. And that's the kind of, that's the, so the point is that there are, there are degrees of complexity or improbability that dwarf what we call probabilistic resources, the opportunities. And that's the situation we have when we're talking about the origin of the first biomacromolecules by reference to chance alone. Only it's not just that you would with those events, you know, all the events that have occurred from the beginning of the universe until now could only sample about one, I think I've calculated about one ten trillion trillionth of the total possibilities that correspond to a modest length protein. So it's like the bike thief trying to sample that 10-dial lock, only much, much worse. You know, it turns out that 14 billion years isn't enough time to have a reasonable chance to find informational biomolecules by chance alone. I mean, is the whole scientific argument that removes God, is it just an attempt by science to play God, because whenever we are told that scientific principles break down and no longer exist at the very beginning, for instance, and it doesn't make sense, but we're told that that's just how it happened and you have to accept that. And it seems to be people jumping over themselves with a desperation to try and remove the idea that there is an intelligent designer. Well, I tend to think that the questions of motivation in these debates are kind of a wash. I think as theists, we have to, I'm a theist, okay, I believe in God. In my first two books, I argued for designing intelligence of some kind as being, of some unspecified kind as being the best explanation for the information, for example, in the cell or the information needed to build fundamentally new body plans in the history of life on earth. So, but in my last book, I extend that argument, I bring in evidence from cosmology and physics and suggest that the best explanation for that, the ensemble of evidence that we have about biological and physical and cosmological origins is actually a designing intelligence that has attributes that, for example, Jews and Christians have always described to God, transcendence, as well as intelligence. For example, no being within the cosmos, no space alien, and some scientists have proposed even Crick, Francis Crick in 1981 in a little book called Life Itself floated the idea that yes we do see evidence of design in life. The origin of life is a very hard problem, we can't see how it could possibly have happened on Earth so maybe there was an intelligent life form from space who seeded life here. He was subsequently ridiculed a bit and said, I think he was embarrassed that he'd floated this and said he would not, he foreswore any further speculation on the origin of life problem. It was too difficult, he said. But in any case, back to your question, I think the whole question is. Oh, I was finishing a thought, and that is that the evidence of design that we have from the very beginning of the universe and what's called the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe, the basic parameters of physics, which were said at the beginning, are exquisitely finely tuned against all odds. And no space alien, no intelligence within the cosmos could be responsible for the evidence of design that we have from the very beginning of the universe because any alleged space alien would itself have had to evolve by some sort of naturalistic processes further down the timeline, once you have stable galaxies and planets and that sort of thing and so no being within the cosmos could be responsible for the conditions that made its future evolution possible nor could a space alien to be responsible for the origin of the universe itself. So when you bring in the cosmological and the physical evidence, I think the only type of designing intelligence that can explain the whole range of evidence we have is one that is transcendent, that is beyond the cosmos, but also active in the creation, because we see evidence of information arising later, and information, as I've mentioned, is a mind product based on our uniform and repeated experience.  But as to the motivation issue, I kind of think it's a wash. I think theists have to acknowledge that all people, including those of us who are theists, have a motivation, maybe a hope that there is a purposeful intelligence behind the cosmos. I think there's a kind of growing angst in young people. Harvard study recently showing that over 50% of young people have doubts about there being any purpose to their existence. And this is contributing to the mental health crisis. And so I think all of us would like, to be possible, for there to be life after death, for there to be an enduring purpose to our lives that does not extinguish when we die or when eventually there's a heat death of the universe. I think theism, belief in God, gives people a sense of purpose in relation, the possibility of a relationship to our creator. That's a positive thing. I think there's also a common human motivation to not want to be accountable to that creator and to have moral, complete moral freedom to decide what we want to do at any given time. And so oftentimes theists or God-believers, religious people will say, well, you just like these materialistic theories of origins because you don't want to be accountable to a higher power. That might be true, But it's equally true that the atheist will often say, well, but you guys just need a cosmic crutch. You need comfort from the idea of a divine being, a loving creator, father, whatever, you know, the divine father figure. And Freud famously critiqued or criticized religious belief in those terms. So I think that those two kind of motivation, arguments about motivation are something of a wash and that what I've tried to do in Return of the God Hypothesis is set all of that aside, look at the evidence that we have, and then evaluate it using some standard methods of scientific reasoning and standard methods of evaluating hypotheses, such as a Bayesian analysis, for example, that come out of logic and philosophy. And set the motivation questions aside. And my conclusion is that the evidence for an intelligent designer of some unspecified kind is extremely strong from biology, and that when you bring in the cosmological and physical evidence, the evidence of fine-tuning and the evidence we have that the material cosmos itself had a beginning, I think materialism fails as an explanation, and you need to invoke an intelligence that is both transcendent and active in the creation to explain the whole range of evidence. Well, let me pick you up on that change, because initially there is a change from someone who believes the evolutionary model, big bang, there is no external force. That step from there to there is an external force, there is intelligent design feeding into the universe we have. And then it's another step to take that to there is an intelligent designer, now there is a personal God. And that step certainly, I assume, is frowned upon in the scientific community. Tell us about you making that step, because it would have been much safer to stay, I guess, in the ID side and not to make the step into who that individual is. Tell us about kind of what prompted you to actually make the step into answering that who question.  Right. Well, I've been thinking about this question for 35, 36, I don't know, since the mid-80s when I was a very young scientist. And it was at the conference that inspired it, because at the conference, there were people already thinking about the God question, especially the cosmologists. At that conference, Alan Sandage announced his conversion from scientific agnosticism he was a scientific materialist to theism and indeed I think he became Christian, and he talked about how the evidence for the singularity at the beginning of the universe, the evidence that the material cosmos itself had a beginning was one of the things that moved him off of that materialistic perspective, that it was clear to him that as he described it, that the evidence we had for a beginning was evidence for what he called a super, with a space in between, natural events, nothing within the cosmos could explain the origin of the cosmos itself, if matter, space, time and energy have a beginning and as best we can tell they do and there are multiple lines of evidence and theoretical considerations that lead to that conclusion and I developed that in return of the god hypothesis, it is the evidence from observational astronomy and also developments in theoretical physics converge on that conclusion. And if that's the case, if matter and energy themselves have a beginning, and indeed if space and time themselves have a beginning, then we can't invoke any materialistic explanation to explain that. Because before there was matter, before the beginning of matter, there was no matter to do the causing. And that's the problem. There must be something. For there to be a causal explanation for the universe, it requires a transcendent something. And when you also consider that we have evidence for design from the very beginning in the fine-tuning of the initial physical parameters of the universe, the initial conditions of the universe, the initial establishment and fine-tuning of the physical laws, then you have evidence for that transcendent something being a transcendent intelligent something. And if something is intelligent, capable of making choices between one outcome or another, that's really what we mean by personhood. I mean, this is very close to a, the idea of a personal gun, now that entity may not want to have anything to do with us, but we're talking about a conscious agent when we talk about evidence for intelligent design, and then we have further evidence I think in biology with the presence of the information and information processing system inside cells. And so when you bring all that together, I think you can start to address the who question. So after I wrote Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, a lot of my readers were asking, OK, that's great. We have evidence of a designing intelligence, but who would that intelligence have been? Is it a space alien, something imminent within the cosmos, like Crick and others have proposed? Or is it a transcendent intelligence? And what can science tell us about that question? So I thought it's a natural question that flows from my first two books. I would stipulate that the theory of intelligent design, formally as a theory, is a theory of design detection. And it allows us to detect the action of an agent as opposed to undirected material processes. We have this example that we often use. If you look at the faces on the mountains at Mount Rushmore, you right away know that a designing intelligence of some kind was responsible for sculpting those faces. And those faces exhibit two properties which, when found together, invariably and reliably indicate a designing intelligence. And we've described those properties as high probability and what's called a specification, a pattern match. And we have evidence of small probability specifications in life. If something is an informational sequence, it's another way of revealing design, so that we can get into all of that. The point is, we've got evidence of design in life, but, the cosmology and fine-tuning allow us to adjudicate between two different design hypotheses, the imminent intelligence and the transcendent one. And I thought, well, let's take this on. It's a natural, it goes beyond the theory of intelligent design, formally speaking, and it addresses one of the possible implications of the evidence of design that we have in biology, that maybe we're looking at a theistic designer, not a space alien.  I just want to pick one or two things from different books. Signature in the Cells, you have it there behind you. And when you simply begin to look at the complexity of cells. You realize that they are like little mini cities, that actually everything, so much happens within. And I guess we are learning more and more about everything in life. And you talk to doctors and they tell you that they are learning more and more about how the body functions. And there's a lot of the unknown. But when you look at that just complexity of, we call it the simple cell, which isn't really very simple, that new research and that new understanding, surely that should move people to a position that, this is impossible, that this level of complexity simply just happens. So tell us about that, just the cell, which is not simple.  Yeah, that's the sort of ground zero for me in my research and interest in the question was this origin of life problem. That's what I did my PhD on. And I think it's really interesting. We could have debates about the adequacy of Darwinian evolutionary theory. I'm sceptical about what's called macroevolutionary theory. But set that all aside. Darwin presupposed one or a few simple forms. And in the immediate wake of the Darwinian Revolution, people like Huxley and Heckel started to develop theories of the origin of those first simple cells. And they regarded the cell in the late 19th century as a very simple, as Huxley put it, a simple homogenous globule or homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. And they viewed the essence of the cell as a simple chemical, it's coming from a simple chemical substance they called protoplasm. And so it kind of, and they viewed it as a kind of jello or goo, which could be produced by a few simple chemical reactions. That viewpoint started to fall by the wayside very, very quickly. By the 1890s, early part of the 20th century, we were learning a lot more about the complexity of metabolism. When you get to the molecular biological revolution in the late 1950s and 1960s, nobody any longer thinks the cell is simple because the most important biomacromolecules are large information-bearing molecules that are part of a larger information processing system. And so this is where I think, and in confronting that. And so any origin of life theory has to explain where that came from. My supervisor used to say that the nature of life and the origin of life topics are connected. We need to know what life is in order to formulate a plausible theory of how it came to be. And now that we know that life is much more complex and that we have an integrated informational complexity that characterizes life, those 19th century theories and the first origin of life theories associated with figures like Alexander Oparin, for example, from the 1920s and 30s. These are not adequate to explain what we see. But what's happened, and this is what I documented in Signature in the Cell, is that none of the subsequent chemical evolutionary theories, whether they're based on chance or based on self-organizational laws or somehow based on somehow combining the two, none of those theories have proven adequate either. This problem of sequence specificity or functional information has defied explanation by reference to theories that start from lower level chemistry. It's proven very, very difficult, implausible in the extreme. Here's the problem. Getting from the chemistry to the code is the problem. And undirected chemical processes do not, when observed, move in a life-friendly, information-generative direction. And this has been the problem. So the impasse in origin of life research, which really began in the late 70s, was documented by this book I mentioned, the mystery of life's origin and books, another book, for example, by Robert Shapiro called, Origins, A Sceptic's Guide. That impasse from the 1980s has continued right to the present. Dawkins was interviewed in a film in 2009 by Ben Stein, the American economist and comic. And very quickly, Stein got Dawkins to acknowledge that nobody knows how we got from from the prebiotic chemistry to the first cell. Well, that's kind of a news headline. We get the impression from textbooks that the evolutionary biologists have this all sewed up. They don't by any means. This is a longstanding conundrum. And it is the integrated complexity and informational properties of the cell that have, I think, most fundamentally defied explanation by these chemical evolutionary theories. And I think that's very significant when you think of the whole kind of evolutionary story. Darwin thought that if you could start with something simple then the mutation selection, oh, he didn't have mutations, but the mutation, sorry, the natural selection variation mechanism, could generate all the complexity of life. You'd go from simple to complex very gradually. Well, if the simplest thing is immensely complex and manifest a kind of complexity that defies any undirected process that we can think of, well, then you don't have a seamless evolutionary story from goo to you. Because I guess when you're Darwin's doubt, the next book you wrote, I guess when Charles Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, he assumed it was settled. But science is never settled. There are always developments. And yet it seems, oh, that's sacrosanct, and that cannot be touched and must be accepted. Yeah, and what I did in the second book was show or argue that the information problem is not something that only resides at the lowest level in the biological hierarchy, at the point of the origin of the first cell, but it also emerges later when we have major innovations in the history of life as documented by the fossil record, events such as the Cambrian explosion or the origin of the mammalian radiation or the angiosperm revolution. There are many events in the history of life where you get this sudden or abrupt appearance in the fossil record of completely new form and structure. And we now know in our information age, as it's come to biology, that if you want to build a new cell, you've got to have new proteins. So you have to to have information to build the first cell. But the same thing turns out to be true at the higher level. If you want to build a completely new body plan, you need new organs and tissues. You need to arrange those organs and tissues in very specific ways. And you need new proteins to service the new cell types that make the organs and tissues possible. So anytime we see the abrupt appearance of new biological form, that implies the origin of a vast amount of new biological information.  And so in Darwin's doubt, I simply asked, well, is there, can the standard mutation natural selection mechanism explain the origin of the kind of information that arises and the amount of information arises? And I argue there that no, it doesn't. That we have, there are many, many kinds of biological phenomena that Darwin's mechanism explains beautifully, the small scale variation adaptation, that sort of thing. So 2016, a major conference at the Royal Society in London. First talk there was by the evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller. The conference was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who think we need a new theory of evolution. Whereas Darwinism does a nice job of explaining small-scale variation, it does a poor job or a completely inadequate job of explaining large-scale morphological innovation, large-scale changes in form. And Mueller, in his first talk at this 2016 event, outlined what he called the explanatory deficits of Neo-Darwinism, and he made that point very clearly. And so it's, I think it's a new day in evolutionary biology, the word of this is not percolating so well perhaps but that was part of the reasons I wrote Darwin's doubt is that within the biological peer-reviewed biological literature it's well known that the problem of the origin of large-scale form, the origin of new body plans is not well explained by the mutation selection mechanism. At this 16 conference, the conveners included many scientists who were trying to come up with new mechanisms that might explain the problem of morphological innovation. Afterwards, one of the conveners said the conference was characterized by a lack of momentousness. Effectively, the evolutionary biologists proposing new theories of evolution and new evolutionary mechanisms had done a good job characterizing the problems, but had not really come up with anything that solves the fundamental problems that we encounter in biology when we see these large jumps in form and structure arising. And in Darwin's Doubt, I didn't just critique standard neo-Darwinian theories of evolution, but many of these newer theories as well, showing that invariably the problem of the origin of biological information and the form that arises from it is the key unsolved problem in contemporary evolutionary theory.  Mueller and Newman wrote a book with MIT Press called On the Origins of Organismal Form, which was a kind of play on the origin of species. Darwinism does a nice job of explaining speciation, small-scale changes within the limits of the pre-existing genomic endowments of an organism, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining new form that requires new genetic information. And these authors, Newman and Mueller, listed in a table of unsolved problems in evolutionary theory, the problem of the origin of biological form. That's what we thought Darwin explained back in 1859, and instead we realized that the mechanisms that he first envisioned have much more limited creative power and much more limited explanatory scope. So that's what my second book was about, and also I think it's still, this is still very much right at the cutting edge of the discussion in evolutionary biology. We can explain the small scale stuff, but not the big scale stuff. Let's just finish off with actually disseminating the information, because all of this is about taking issues which are complex and actually making it understandable to the wider public. And I guess part of that is, I mean, obviously being on the most popular podcast in the world, Joe Rogan, I was like, oh, there's Steve Meyer and Joe Rogan. And taking that information and that turbocharges that. So maybe just to finish off on the ability to disseminate this, because I think in the US, the ID movement is more understood, where I think maybe in Europe, it's certainly it's more misunderstood and not as accepted where there is an acceptance in the States. But tell us about that and how being on something like podcasts like that turbocharge the message. Yeah, well, I can tell you, you know, now that I'm getting introduced at conferences and things after The Joe Rogan Experience, it's as if I never did anything else in my life. No, that's the only thing people care to mention. I mean, he's got a monster reach. He's extremely, his questions on the interview were very probative. Of course, slightly to moderately sceptical, maybe more, but I thought they were fair. I thought it was a great discussion and it was a lot of fun. And, you know, we've had not only, I think he gets something like 11 million downloads on average for his podcast. We couldn't even believe these numbers when we were told them. But there have been over 25 million derivative videos that social media influencers and podcasters have made about the Rogan interview, analysing different sections of our conversation. So, yeah, that was a huge boost to the dissemination of our message. But one thing I realized in our conversation that there's a simple way to understand the information argument. And that's one of our tools in getting some of these ideas out is distilling some of these things that we've been talking about at a fairly deep level to a more understandable level. So let me just run that argument, that argument sketch or the distillation of the argument by your audience. And then they would talk about some of the things we're doing to get the word out. Our local hero in the Seattle area here is Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. And he has said, like Dawkins, that the digital code in the DNA, that the DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. Dawkins, as I mentioned before, says it's like a machine code. It contains machine code. Well, if you think about that, those are very suggestive quotations because what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, is that information always arises from an intelligence source. If you have a section of software, there was a programmer involved. If you have a hieroglyphic inscription, there was an ancient scribe involved. If you have a paragraph in a book, there was a writer involved. As we're effectively broadcasting, we're transmitting information, that information ultimately issues from our mind. So whenever we look at information, an informational text or sequence, and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind rather than a material process. All attempts to explain the origin of life based on undirected material processes have failed because they couldn't explain the information present in DNA, RNA proteins. So the presence of that information at the foundation of life, based on our uniform and repeated experience about what it takes to generate information is therefore best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence. It takes a programmer to make a program, to make a software program. And what we have in life is, from many different standpoints, identical to computer code. It is a section of functional digital information. So that's a kind of more user-friendly sketch of the argument but the point is some of these some of these key ideas that are that make intelligent design so, I think so persuasive at a high scientific level if you actually look at the evidence, can be also explained fairly simply and so we're generating a lot of not just Joe Rogan podcast interviews but coming on many many podcasts and that sort of thing but also we're generating a lot of YouTube video short documentaries that get some of these ideas across and for your viewers, one that I might recommend which is on of any it was out on the internet it's called science uprising and it's a series of 10 short documentary videos, another one that we've done called the information enigma which I think would would help people get into these ideas fairly quickly, the information enigmas I think it's a 20 minute short documentary it's up online and we've had hundreds of thousands of views so we're doing a lot to sort of translate the most rigorous science into accessible ideas and disseminate that in user-friendly ways. The best website for finding a lot of this compiled is actually the website for my most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis. So the website there is returntothegodhypothesis.com. Okay, well, we will have the link for that in the description.  Dr. Stephen Meyer, I really appreciate you coming along. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your experience and understandings of writing and making that understandable, I think, to the viewers, many of them who may not have come across this before.  So thank you for your time today. I really appreciate you having me on, Peter.

After a lively discussion of international football, Paul, Lubo and Matt assess the season so far and discuss whether or not Liverpool are in the title race. The guys look at the performances and statistics contributing to the success Liverpool have had so far. They finish with a discussion about the upcoming game away to Manchester City and whether it is a must win. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week's guest is Ian Hesketh, an intellectual historian and historian of science at the University of Queensland. His work in HPS revolves around 19th century scientific practices and their intricacies. He works to situate this science not only in its temporal history, but to delve into the ways in which the practice itself helped to form the science of the day.He joins the podcast to discuss how scientific and historical writing practices can effect the way in which science itself is shaped, as well as the rich tradition of science history present in the discipline of science itself. To demonstrate how the writing of science history can shape how science is produced, he turns to the Darwinian Revolution. Darwin was not simply a scientist, but was well versed in the history of his field as well as its changing nature, a fact integral to his development of the theory of evolution.Transcript of the episode is now available here: https://www.hpsunimelb.org/post/ian-hesketh-transcript-s2-e7 Resources related to the episode:Book: The Science of History in Victorian Britain: Making the Past Speak https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dnppv7  Book: Imagining the Darwinian Revolution: Historical Narratives of Evolution from the Nineteenth Century to the Present https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2k4fwprIan's Chapter: Imagining the Darwinian Revolution https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:005e875Article:  From Copernicus to Darwin to you: history and the meaning(s) of evolution https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:4d9ee19Thanks for listening to The HPS Podcast with your current hosts, Samara Greenwood and Carmelina Contarino.You can find more about us on our blog, website, bluesky, twitter, instagram and facebook feeds. This podcast would not be possible without the support of School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne.www.hpsunimelb.org

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/sociology

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/religion

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

The Darwinian Revolution--the change in thinking sparked by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, which argued that all organisms including humans are the end product of a long, slow, natural process of evolution rather than the miraculous creation of an all-powerful God--is one of the truly momentous cultural events in Western Civilization. Darwinism as Religion: What Literature Tells Us about Evolution (Oxford UP, 2017) is an innovative and exciting approach to this revolution through creative writing, showing how the theory of evolution as expressed by Darwin has, from the first, functioned as a secular religion.  Drawing on a deep understanding of both the science and the history, Michael Ruse surveys the naturalistic thinking about the origins of organisms, including the origins of humankind, as portrayed in novels and in poetry, taking the story from its beginnings in the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century right up to the present. He shows that, contrary to the opinion of many historians of the era, there was indeed a revolution in thought and that the English naturalist Charles Darwin was at the heart of it. However, contrary also to what many think, this revolution was not primarily scientific as such, but more religious or metaphysical, as people were taken from the secure world of the Christian faith into a darker, more hostile world of evolutionism. In a fashion unusual for the history of ideas, Ruse turns to the novelists and poets of the period for inspiration and information. His book covers a wide range of creative writers - from novelists like Voltaire and poets like Erasmus Darwin in the eighteenth century, through the nineteenth century with novelists including Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Henry James and H. G. Wells and poets including Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins, and on to the twentieth century with novelists including Edith Wharton, D. H. Lawrence, John Steinbeck, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ian McEwan and Marilynne Robinson, and poets including Robert Frost, Edna St Vincent Millay and Philip Appleman. Covering such topics as God, origins, humans, race and class, morality, sexuality, and sin and redemption, and written in an engaging manner and spiced with wry humor, Darwinism as Religion gives us an entirely fresh, engaging and provocative view of one of the cultural highpoints of Western thought. Michael Ruse was born in England in 1940. In 1962 he moved to Canada and taught philosophy for thirty-five years at the University of Guelph in Ontario, before taking his present position at Florida State University in 2000. He is a philosopher and historian of science, with a particular interest in Darwin and evolutionary biology. The author or editor of over fifty books and the founding editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, he is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, a former Guggenheim Fellow and Gifford Lecturer, and the recipient of four honorary degrees. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel.

Dr. David Sloan Wilson is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Co-founder of the Evolution Institute and Prosocial World, Wilson is the author of Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior,  Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and  Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III. A self-described evolutionist, Wilson is perhaps best known in the scholarly world as the champion of multi-level selection theory. In this episode of Unsupervised Learning, Razib talks to Wilson about where multi-level selection theory is in 2023 and the progress made in the last five decades in understanding evolutionary processes through this pluralistic framework. This discussion is a sequel; in 2010, they discussed multi-level selection theory for bloggingheads.tv. Right off the bat, Wilson outlines his view that evolutionary theory has been too narrowly constrained within the straitjacket of the gene-centric view, which violates the spirit of Charles Darwin's more expansive original vision, where adaptation driven by selection was inclusive of both culture and biology. Razib and Wilson also observe the growth of the field of cultural evolution that applies a Darwinian framework to understanding the variation across human societies and discuss Wilson's early work on the adaptive value of religion in human societies. Wilson touches on the numerous fields in which he has been involved over the past few decades, from evolutionary psychology to revisionist economics. In keeping with attempting to apply his scholarship to the real world, Wilson's latest project is ProSocial World, a nonprofit that aims to “facilitate and inspire positive cultural change using evolutionary and behavioral science.” 

It's easy to tell ourselves we're living in the world we want – one where Darwinian evolution drives competing technology platforms and capitalism pushes nations to maximize GDP regardless of externalities like carbon emissions. It can feel like evolution and competition are all there is.If that's a complete description of what's driving the world and our collective destiny, that can feel pretty hopeless. But what if that's not the whole story of evolution? This is where evolutionary theorist, author, and professor David Sloan Wilson comes in. He has documented where an enlightened game, one of cooperation, rather than competition, is possible. His work shows that humans can and have chosen values like cooperation, altruism and group success – versus individual competition and selfishness – at key moments in our evolution, proving that evolution isn't just genetic. It's cultural, and it's a choice. In a world where our trajectory isn't tracking in the direction we want, it's time to slow down and ask: is a different kind of conscious evolution possible? On Your Undivided Attention, we're going to update the Darwinian principles of evolution using a critical scientific lens that can help upgrade our ability to cooperate – ranging from the small community-level, all the way to entire technology companies that can cooperate in ways that allow everyone to succeed. RECOMMENDED MEDIAThis View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan WilsonProsocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups by David Sloan WilsonAtlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III by David Sloan WilsonGoverning the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action by Elinor OstromHit Refresh by Satya NadellaWTF? What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'ReillyHard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by James Wallace & Jim Erickson RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES An Alternative to Silicon Valley Unicorns with Mara Zepeda & Kate “Sassy” SassoonA Problem Well-Stated is Half-Solved with Daniel Schmachtenberger Your Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_

On this episode, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson joins Nate to unpack how evolution can be used to explain and understand modern human behavior, particularly with respect to cooperation and pro-social behavior. David is a leading scholar in this field, especially on the resurgence of the concept ‘multi-level selection'. How can an evolutionary idea, first thought of by Darwin and subsequently ignored until recently, shed light on human's inherent balance between competition and cooperation? And how might our improved knowledge of where we come from inform our behaviors and collective governance in the decades ahead? About David Sloan Wilson: David Sloan Wilson is one of the foremost evolutionary thinkers and gifted communicators about evolution to the general public. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology Emeritus at Binghamton University and President of the nonprofit organization ProSocial World, whose mission is "To consciously evolve a world that works for all".  His most recent books are This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, Prosocial: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups (with Paul Atkins and Steven C. Hayes), and his first novel, Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III. For Show Notes and More visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/56-david-sloan-wilson  

In this episode, Gavin Watson, Chairman of Conscious Capitalism CT, talks about Conscious Capitalism and how it uses our current understanding of evolutionary biology to enable business to run in a way that makes people happier and more productive, while still making a profit.   Gavin talks in depth about the 4 main principles: Conscious culture Conscious leadership Stakeholder orientation Higher purpose beyond making profit   Gavin's Favorite book: This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, David Sloan Wilson   Gavin Watson, Conscious Capitalism CT Website: https://connecticut.consciouscapitalism.org/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Consciouscapitalismct Twitter: https://twitter.com/ConsciousCapCT YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdZhwu9_u8FjKcb6hzA7CMw/videos LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/conscious-capitalism-ct/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/concapct/ Gavin's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gavin-watson-225420163/   Ari Santiago, CEO, CompassMSP Company Website: https://compassmsp.com/ Company Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MadeinAmericaPodcast Company LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/made-in-america-podcast-with-ari Company YouTube:  https://youtube.com/c/MadeinAmericaPodcastwithAri Ari's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/asantiago104/   Podcast produced by Miceli Productions: https://miceliproductions.com/   Ari and Gavin discuss: Conscious Capitalism Culture Leadership Higher purpose Evolutionary biology

The word ‘prosocial' describes an orientation toward the welfare of others and society as a whole.  My guest today is David Sloan Wilson. David is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is a son of the author Sloan Wilson, co-founder of the Evolution Institute, and co-founder of the recent spinoff nonprofit Prosocial World. In this episode, you'll hear about the following: Expanding Darwin's Theory of Evolution The fight or flight response while in groups and while we're alone Privatization of resources The Core Design Principles How to select enlightened behaviors to reach valued goals And much more! Thanks again for listening to the Humanitarian Entrepreneur podcast!  We're not in this alone.  We're a community and we're all in this together to help the planet. Don't forget to share this episode and leave us a review if you found it helpful. Enjoy my conversation with David!   In This Episode: [1:26] – We're introduced to our guest, David Sloan Wilson, and learn what it means to be one of the world's foremost evolutionary biologists.  [3:19] – What called David to create Evolution Institute and Prosocial World? [5:36] – We've always lived in a group context.  Here's what that has meant over the centuries for our species. [7:44] – David expands on how our brains interpret the fight or flight response while we're in a group and while we're alone.  [9:42] – This is how Prosocial World helps people get out of their turtle shell. [13:02] – David explains the tragedy of the commons. [15:22] – David lists the core design principles. [19:07] – We hear about the two pillars of Prosocial World. [20:22] – How to learn to be flexible in “approach and avoid” situations. [24:10] – What are the different ways that people interested in working with David can get a hold of him?  [25:55] – Tiffany wraps up the conversation.   Resources: To connect with Tiffany to solve problems or affect the kind of change you want: calendly.com/humanitarianentrepreneur   Website:https://humanitarian-entrepreneur.com    Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes, and the Welfare of Others https://bookshop.org/a/54969/9780300219883   The Neighborhood Project:  Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time https://bookshop.org/a/54969/9780316037679   This View of Life:  Completing the Darwinian Revolution https://bookshop.org/a/54969/9781101872819   Evolution for Everyone:  How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think about Our Lives https://bookshop.org/a/54969/9780385340922   Connect with David: Twitter: https://twitter.com/David_S_Wilson    David Sloan Wilson Archive: https://davidsloanwilson.world/ About: https://davidsloanwilson.world/about-david-sloan-wilson/ Evolution Institute Website: https://evolution-institute.org Prosocial World Website: https://www.prosocial.world   Contact:  hello@prosocial.world

Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute and host of the Bible Answer Man broadcast, reflects on The 1619 Project and what motivated the Nazi Holocaust. Nikole Hannah-Jones, director of The 1619 Project, reimagines America as a ‘slaveocracy'—and says that even Nazi Germany used America as inspiration for its racial policies. But actually Nazi Germany was motivated by Darwinism and its implications. Nazi Germany took eugenics, which was increasingly promoted throughout the West, to its logical conclusion. Namely, to take those that were not well born and exterminate them in order to bring about the uber race. Thus at the heart of the problem is the notion that we're not created in the image and likeness of God, such that we have intrinsic worth, but rather we are merely molecules in motion—and the goal is always to progress to a higher ideal. The amoeba becomes the ape; and ultimately, the ape becomes the astronaut. For evolution to work, you have to eliminate the weak, otherwise they will pollute the gene pool and render evolutionary progress impossible. The educational system in concert with The 1619 Project is bent on eradicating the God of the Bible—because if we eradicate God, then anything becomes possible. In truth it has always been sin, not skin color, that animates racism. And we know that because slavery has existed throughout all of human history. So if we are to re-imagine America, we must do so based on the communication that, as human beings, we are all created in the image of God.See Mary Grabar, Debunking The 1619 Project: Exposing the Plan to Divide America (Regnery History, 2021) https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-awake-not-woke-a-christian-response-to-the-cult-of-progressive-ideology-wa2209fl2/; and Richard Weikart, Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism (Discovery Institute, 2022), https://www.equip.org/product/cri-resource-darwinian-racism-how-darwinism-influenced-hitler-nazism-and-white-nationalism/.

On this ID the Future, hear the concluding episode of I, Charles Darwin, in which author Nickell John Romjue's time-traveling Darwin returns to his family home and offers some final reflections on his eye-opening visit to the twenty-first century. Part 1 of the audio series is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here. Part 4 is here. To learn more and to purchase the book, visit www.icharlesdarwin.com. Source

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Dr. David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. His books include Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society; and This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. In this episode, we focus on religion and multilevel selection. We start by talking about religion from an evolutionary perspective, its functions, and its individual benefits. We discuss the New Atheists' take on religion, and the idea of “atheism as stealth religion”. We also talk about group selection (cultural and genetic), how it works, its relationship with kin selection, and why so many biologists dismiss it. Throughout the conversation we mention multilevel selection. We also discuss policy as a branch of biology, the eight core design principles for groups and institutions. Finally, we discuss if it will ever be possible to plan societies. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, NICOLE BARBARO, ADAM HUNT, PAWEL OSTASZEWSKI, AL ORTIZ, NELLEKE BAK, KATHRINE AND PATRICK TOBIN, GUY MADISON, GARY G HELLMANN, SAIMA AFZAL, ADRIAN JAEGGI, NICK GOLDEN, PAULO TOLENTINO, JOÃO BARBOSA, JULIAN PRICE, EDWARD HALL, HEDIN BRØNNER, DOUGLAS P. FRY, FRANCA BORTOLOTTI, GABRIEL PONS CORTÈS, URSULA LITZCKE, DENISE COOK, SCOTT, ZACHARY FISH, TIM DUFFY, TRADERINNYC, TODD SHACKELFORD, AND SUNNY SMITH! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, THOMAS TRUMBLE, AND NUNO ELDER! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, MATTHEW LAVENDER, SERGIU CODREANU, AND BOGDAN KANIVETS!

Brilliant evolutionary biologist and important social theorist David Sloan Wilson joins Terry to clarify the real implications of what we know about evolution, focusing on how “multi-level selection,” interpersonal cooperation and altruism are no less central to evolution than is competition. Groups of “prosocial” individuals, under the right conditions, robustly outcompete groups of self-interested individuals.   David shares important concrete principles that can be applied by small and medium-sized groups who are attempting prosocial experiments of their own. He gets specific about which special conditions and shared agreements are required to nurture prosocial behaviors — and, very importantly, protect them. We ask: Is rapid social transformation possible? What kinds of behavior would qualify human beings as a “superorganism” that prioritizes the wellbeing of the whole and responds collectively and effectively to its existential crises? In the coming week, we will release a second “bonus” conversation I had with David. In it, he goes into much greater detail about the core design principles that enable prosocial cooperation to succeed, and the practices of acceptance and commitment that make them possible. David Sloan Wilson is a "hard" evolutionary scientist who also champions Conscious Evolution. He is the author of books such as Darwin's Cathedral, Does Altruism Exist? and This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. His new book is a novel: Atlas Hugged: The Autobiography of John Galt III — a critique of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism and its impact on the world. In addition to his writing and university teaching, David is President of the nonprofit organization Prosocial World, whose mission is to accomplish rapid positive multilevel cultural evolution in the real world. Here are some of the questions we explore in the episode: How is the latest evolutionary science now contradicting past misunderstandings, and actually validating spiritual and evolutionary perspectives? How do groups of altruistic or “prosocial” individuals outcompete groups of self-interested individuals? What makes individuals & groups “prosocial?” How can groups of prosocial individuals protect their cultures and ways of cooperating from selfish or predatory individuals and groups? Can groups reach a critical level of efficacy or creativity that catalyzes rapid transformation? What agreements, design principles & mechanisms are required? For more information on David Sloan Wilson and Terry Patten, check out the following resources: David’s new novel, Atlas Hugged is gifted, not sold, for whatever the reader wishes to give in return, with all proceeds going to Prosocial World. For this reason, it is available only on its website: www.AtlasHugged.world. David’s nonprofit organization, Prosocial World David’s book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution David’s book, Does Altruism Exist?: Culture, Genes and the Welfare of Others David’s book, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society Terry Patten’s nonprofit, A New Republic of the Heart Terry Patten’s personal website Join us as a Friend of State of Emergence We will be exploring this episode in greater depth during our next State of Emergence live Q&A (date and time to be announced soon). If you haven’t already joined us, we invite you to become a Friend of State of Emergence and join these monthly Q&A sessions with me and other listeners episodes, as well as help the podcast become financially sustainable. A vibrant, intelligent, and caring community is already gathering around State of Emergence and we’d love for you to be part of it. Sign up here.

If you’re one of the many people who have asked us to take down the concepts in Atlas Shrugged, which argues that we’re a fundamentally selfish species, this episode is for you! If you’re not one of those people, well, this episode is ALSO for you! Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has infused the idea of prosociality (the desire to help others) into his new book, Atlas Hugged, and he joins us to explain why Atlas Hugged is a better predictor of how people act than Atlas Shrugged. David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist and SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. His books include This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution and the recently published Atlas Hugged.  Twitter: @David_S_Wilson Show us some love by leaving a rating or a review! RateThisPodcast.com/pitchforkeconomics  Ayn Rand Meets Her Match: David Sloan Wilson Fights Fiction with Fiction: https://evonomics.com/rand-meets-david-sloan-wilson-atlas-hugged/  Get Atlas Hugged for free: https://atlashugged.world/  Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

I talk with David Sloan Wilson about his book “This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution”. We discuss multilevel selection theory, core principles for healthy groups, cooperation vs selfishness, Agile, self-organization, leadership, personality theory and more!

[1:30] Does altruism exist? How does it evolve?[4:00] What is multi-level selection?"Selfishness beat altruism within groups, but altruistic groups beat selfish groups."[6:30] How our ability to cooperate sets us apart from our closest evolutionary relativesThe core design principles as adapted from David's work with Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics: https://www.prosocial.world/post/the-origins-of-prosocial[13:30] Why being well adapted to your current circumstances is different than being adaptable to changing circumstances - The Toyota Innovation principles[20:00] Nobel Prize for Enlightened Businesshttps://evonomics.com/humanizing-corporations-a-nobel-prize-for-enlightened-business-leaders/[23:00] Re-thinking the "invisible hand" and bringing an evolutionary lens to our economic system"There is a vitality for capitalism that we want to celebrate, but if it's not harnessed then it becomes destructive.""Becoming wise managers of evolutionary processes."[29:00] How to adapt the core design principles to coach groups to make them more cooperative and adaptableLearn more about how David is applying evolutionary principles to creating more Prosocial groups and companies in his book PROSOCIAL: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable and Collaborative Groups: https://www.amazon.com/Prosocial-Evolutionary-Productive-Equitable-Collaborative/dp/1684030242...or on the Prosocial website: https://www.prosocial.world/Learn more about The Evolution Institute: https://evolution-institute.org/Learn about David's vision for "Completing the Darwinian Revolution" in his latest book: https://www.amazon.com/This-View-Life-Completing-Revolution/dp/1101870206

For Steve’s book, Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Thought You Knew (2012) see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/darwin-god-and-the-meaning-of-life/A3055F89051D5F4ADE4AFE9473BF0AAB For Steve’s book, The Ape that Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve (2019) see: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ape-that-understood-the-universe/3448755E3BF801C936343555DA7AECBB Find out more about Steve here: https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/ Follow Steve on Twitter @SteveStuWill Further References Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (1976) David Sloan Wilson, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution (2019) Erwin Frey, see the survival of the weakest Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature (2001) Tim Taylor, The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution (2010) Wilhelm von Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) Iona Italia, “A Wrong against Boys: An Impossible Conversation about Circumcision,” in Areo Magazine (2019) Battlestar Galactica remake (TV series, 2004) Timestamps 2:08 The gene’s eye view 7:04 Explaining altruism and strong reciprocity 13:44 Culture as an evolutionary accelerator 15:06 Lactose tolerance 16:12 The survival of the weakest 17:56 Sexual selection as an evolutionary ratchet 23:13 Intelligence and language 24:46 Homosexuality 32:22 Evolution and ethics 33:48 Technology and cumulative culture 38:39 The meme’s eye view 44:50 Inclusive fitness 48:46 Evolutionary psychology doesn’t provide a moral template 53:03 Memes and ethics 53:57 Gene-culture co-evolution 57:06 Traits vs. the selection processes that produce them 58:09 Romantic love and jealousy 1:00:39 Why do men hunt? 1:04:00 How will humanity develop in the future? 1:06:40 Intrasexual competition and mate choices 1:15:46 Why women prefer pretty boys 1:19:07 Memetic fitness 1:20:53 Misconceptions about evolutionary psychology; & when adaptationism goes too far

In this episode, Dr. Keith Witt and I discuss evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson’s latest book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, where he challenges mainstream science to broaden its inquiry to include cultural and consciousness evolution, two pillars of integral theory.  The post Cultural Evolution Goes Mainstream appeared first on The Daily Evolver.

2:07 Evolutionary theory as a comprehensive way of looking at life 7:20 Evolutionary theory and English literature 11:52 Gene-centric evolutionary theory versus the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis 15:50 Looking at learning and management from an evolutionary standpoint: Toyota 17:07 How a knowledge of evolution can influence public policy 25:40 An evolutionary view of psychotherapy 27:00 Multi-level selection theory. Application to cancer therapies. 28:20 How chicken farming illustrates group level selection theory 33:37 The problem of good—how did altruism evolve? 36:54 Water striders 41:11 How these ideas apply to introverts and extroverts and business school hirings 42:41 How they apply to Battlestar Galactica 44:37 The neighbourhood project 48:25 Systems of meaning 50:15 Measuring prosociality among schoolchildren: what influences it? How to increase it? 54:03 Response from more gene-based evolutionary theorists; social science and humanities scholars who have adopted evolutionary approaches 57:10 Equivalence 58:35 Replicators versus vehicles 1:02:14 Applying these principles to our own lives: success and the morality of the cancer cell David’s book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution (2019) can be found here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246844/this-view-of-life-by-david-sloan-wilson/9781101870204/. For more about David’s work see: https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/persons/david-sloan-wilson/ And https://evolution-institute.org/profile/david-sloan-wilson/ And https://www.prosocial.world/ Find David’s other books here: https://www.amazon.com/David-Sloan-Wilson/e/B001H6MNP6%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share, esp. The Neighbourhood Project: Using Evolution to Improve My City, One Block at a Time (2012): https://www.amazon.com/Neighborhood-Project-Using-Evolution-Improve/dp/0316037672 Follow David on Letter.Wiki: https://letter.wiki/DavidSloanWilson/conversations Follow David on Twitter: @David_S_Wilson Further Notes I discuss Sloan Wilson’s ideas and correspondence with Massimo Pigliucci here: https://areomagazine.com/2019/07/10/human-cultural-evolution-a-letter-exchange/ For the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis see: https://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/ Steven C. Hayes and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): https://stevenchayes.com/category/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy/ For Omar Tonsi Eldakar’s work on waterstriders see https://phys.org/news/2009-11-mom-nice-guys-girls.html Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking (2012). See also: https://www.quietrev.com/ Battlestar Galactica: https://www.syfy.com/battlestargalactica For a critical view, see Jerry Coyne: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/03/09/david-sloan-wilson-loses-it-again/ See David Sloan Wilson on social constructivism: https://evolution-institute.org/saving-social-constructivism/ Richard Dawkins: The Selfish Gene (1976)

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Dr. Michael Ruse is a philosopher of science who specializes in the philosophy of biology and works on the relationship between science and religion, the creation–evolution controversy, and the demarcation problem within science. He currently teaches at Florida State University, where he is Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor and Director of HPS Program. He's also a very prolific writer, author of books like The Darwinian Revolution, Darwin and Design, and On Purpose. In this episode, we talk about the scientific and philosophical revolution operated by Darwinism, and the many beliefs that it undermined. We go through how natural selection works; gene-culture coevolution; what are the units of selection in evolution; the concept of species; race and its biological basis; the problems with genetic engineering; and the schism between science and religion. Time Links: 00:56 Darwinism as a scientific and philosophical revolution 07:34 On purpose 15:11 Natural selection and the modern synthesis 28:29 Gene-culture coevolution 37:38 Units of selection in natural selection 45:23 The concept of species 54:11 About race and its biological basis 58:15 The potential troubles with genetic editing 1:01:30 Is there still any merit to natural theology? 1:13:28 The moral and existential components of religion 1:27:46 Dr. Ruse's account of my yet to be unveiled personal history -- Follow Dr. Ruse's work: Faculty page: https://tinyurl.com/y98bvauc Books: https://tinyurl.com/y7dygsce -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, JUNOS, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, MIGUEL ESTRADA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JIM FRANK, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORD, AND HANS FREDRIK SUNDE! I also leave you with the link to a recent montage video I did with the interviews I have released until the end of June 2018: https://youtu.be/efdb18WdZUo And check out my playlists on: PSYCHOLOGY: https://tinyurl.com/ybalf8km PHILOSOPHY: https://tinyurl.com/yb6a7d3p ANTHROPOLOGY: https://tinyurl.com/y8b42r7g

One of the world’s leading evolutionary thinkers David Sloan Wilson offers a bold new approach to solving the problems of our age. Darwin's theory of evolution provides a single theoretical framework for biology, and all life sciences, today. But among humanities scholars, it is widely assumed that our rich cultural and behavioural development operates outside the rules of evolutionary theory. In fact, Darwin's theory has been considered taboo in the study of the social sciences, in the light of the inhumane theories of social Darwinism that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century. But, now, David Sloan Wilson, one of the world’s foremost evolutionary thinkers, expands on what we traditionally consider biological. This event was recorded live at Thursday 20th June 2019. Discover more about this event here: https://www.thersa.org/events/2019/06/completing-the-darwinian-revolution

Classical economics argues that the economy is an equilibrium system—that for every winner there must be a loser. In this episode, author and professor David Sloan Wilson joins Nick live on stage at Town Hall Seattle to argue that economies are actually evolutionary systems—and once we shed the winner-take-all philosophy that has dominated Econ 101 classes for a century, we can change economic policy for the better. David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist, a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, and co-founder of the Evolution Institute. In addition to his latest book ‘This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution’, he has also written ‘Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society’, and ‘Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives’.  Twitter: @David_S_Wilson Further reading: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/246844/this-view-of-life-by-david-sloan-wilson/9781101870204/  http://evonomics.com/the-new-invisible-hand-david-sloan-wilson/ http://evonomics.com/complexity-economics-shows-us-that-laissez-faire-fail-nickhanauer/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David Sloan Wilson is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. He is widely known for his fundamental contributions to evolutionary science and for explaining evolution to the general public. Listen as David talks to Ken Wilber about his recent book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution, in this fascinating discussion of conscious, cultural, and biological evolution — and how we can use the fundamental patterns running through all three in order to create a more adaptable and sustainable future. It is often said that humanity represents the process of evolution becoming self-aware. We are a universe awakening to itself — and part of that awakening is a capacity to reflect upon the various core design principles and strategies that have been guiding our evolutionary emergence ever since the Big Bang, and to then consciously employ these same strategies in order to create a genuinely multi-cellular society for the human superorganism.

It is widely understood that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution completely revolutionized the study of biology. Yet, according to David Sloan Wilson, the Darwinian revolution won’t be truly complete until it is applied more broadly—to everything associated with the words “human,” “culture,” and “policy.” Wilson took Town Hall’s stage for a conversation with political activist Nick Hanauer. Together they explored the ways an evolutionary worldview can provide a practical toolkit for understanding not only genetic evolution but also the fast-paced changes that are having an impact on our world and ourselves. Wilson offered us a series of engaging and insightful examples—from the breeding of hens to the timing of cataract surgeries to the organization of an automobile plant. Join Wilson and Hanauer to learn how we can become wise managers of evolutionary processes to solve the problems of our age at all scales—from the efficacy of our groups to our well-being as individuals to our stewardship of the planet. David Sloan Wilson is an evolutionary biologist with a special interest in human biocultural evolution. He is the SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Wilson is the author of Evolution for Everyone, The Neighborhood Project, Does Altruism Exist?, and Darwin’s Cathedral. He is the president of the Evolution Institute and editor in chief of the institute’s magazine, This View of Life. Nick Hanauer is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist, and the founder of Civic Ventures, a Seattle-based public policy incubator. He has worked with over 30 companies as a founder, manager or financier since 1982, and serves on the boards of many public and private institutions. He has served as a director for the Democracy Alliance, and hosts his own podcast Pitchfork Economics. Recorded live at The Forum at Town Hall Seattle on May 20, 2019.

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything, however, and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit. Ever since, with the rise of science and decline of religious belief, there has been growing interest––and growing doubt––about whether human life really does have meaning. If it does, where might we find it? Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse investigates this question in his new book A Meaning to Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) asking whether we can find a new meaning to life within Darwinian views of human nature. Rather than promoting a bleak nihilism, many Darwinians think we can convert Darwin into a form of secular humanism. Ruse explains, in a tradition going back to the time of Darwin himself, positive meaning is found in continuing and supporting the upwards path of life provided by the process of evolution itself. However, this is a false turn, he argues, because there is no real progress in the evolutionary process. Rather, meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. Ruse argues that it is only by accepting our true nature, evolved over millennia, that humankind can truly find what is meaningful. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, The Darwinian Revolution, and On Purpose.

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything, however, and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit. Ever since, with the rise of science and decline of religious belief, there has been growing interest––and growing doubt––about whether human life really does have meaning. If it does, where might we find it? Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse investigates this question in his new book A Meaning to Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) asking whether we can find a new meaning to life within Darwinian views of human nature. Rather than promoting a bleak nihilism, many Darwinians think we can convert Darwin into a form of secular humanism. Ruse explains, in a tradition going back to the time of Darwin himself, positive meaning is found in continuing and supporting the upwards path of life provided by the process of evolution itself. However, this is a false turn, he argues, because there is no real progress in the evolutionary process. Rather, meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. Ruse argues that it is only by accepting our true nature, evolved over millennia, that humankind can truly find what is meaningful. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, The Darwinian Revolution, and On Purpose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything, however, and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit. Ever since, with the rise of science and decline of religious belief, there has been growing interest––and growing doubt––about whether human life really does have meaning. If it does, where might we find it? Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse investigates this question in his new book A Meaning to Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) asking whether we can find a new meaning to life within Darwinian views of human nature. Rather than promoting a bleak nihilism, many Darwinians think we can convert Darwin into a form of secular humanism. Ruse explains, in a tradition going back to the time of Darwin himself, positive meaning is found in continuing and supporting the upwards path of life provided by the process of evolution itself. However, this is a false turn, he argues, because there is no real progress in the evolutionary process. Rather, meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. Ruse argues that it is only by accepting our true nature, evolved over millennia, that humankind can truly find what is meaningful. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, The Darwinian Revolution, and On Purpose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Does human life have any meaning? Does the question even make sense today? For centuries, the question of the meaning or purpose of human life was assumed by scholars and theologians to have a religious answer: life has meaning because humans were made in the image of a good god. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution changed everything, however, and the human organism was seen to be more machine than spirit. Ever since, with the rise of science and decline of religious belief, there has been growing interest––and growing doubt––about whether human life really does have meaning. If it does, where might we find it? Historian and philosopher of science Michael Ruse investigates this question in his new book A Meaning to Life (Oxford University Press, 2019) asking whether we can find a new meaning to life within Darwinian views of human nature. Rather than promoting a bleak nihilism, many Darwinians think we can convert Darwin into a form of secular humanism. Ruse explains, in a tradition going back to the time of Darwin himself, positive meaning is found in continuing and supporting the upwards path of life provided by the process of evolution itself. However, this is a false turn, he argues, because there is no real progress in the evolutionary process. Rather, meaning in the Darwinian age can be found if we turn to a kind of Darwinian existentialism, seeing our evolved human nature as the source of all meaning, both in the intellectual and social worlds. Ruse argues that it is only by accepting our true nature, evolved over millennia, that humankind can truly find what is meaningful. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. He has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, The Darwinian Revolution, and On Purpose. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

David's new book, This View of Life ... In what sense, if any, could evolution be conscious? ... The need to complete the Darwinian revolution ... An evolutionary psychology discussion makes Bob tape his mouth shut ... How successful groups avert the tragedy of the commons ... Convergent cultural evolution ... David: Evolution shows that neither laissez faire nor centralized planning works ... A preview of the coming Bob vs. David showdown over group selection ...

We talk to influential evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson about his new book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution.

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter SubscribeStar: https://www.subscribestar.com/the-dissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter ------------------Follow me on--------------------- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thedissenteryt/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheDissenterYT Anchor (podcast): https://anchor.fm/thedissenter Dr. Anthony Biglan is a Senior Scientist at Oregon Research Institute and the Co-Director of the Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium. He has been conducting research on the development and prevention of child and adolescent problem behavior for the past several decades. His work has included studies of the risk and protective factors associated with tobacco, alcohol, and other drug use; high-risk sexual behavior; and antisocial behavior. He and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences published a book summarizing the epidemiology, cost, etiology, prevention, and treatment of youth with multiple problems, called Helping Adolescents at Risk (2004). He is a former president of the Society for Prevention Research. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Prevention. He's also the author of The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World. In this episode, we focus on some of the main topics of Dr. Biglan's book, The Nurture Effect. We refer to the role of evolution in the behavioral sciences, and to aspects of the environment from families to schools and societies, and the negative effects of coercive environments. We also discuss specifically addictive behaviors involving tobacco, alcohol and drugs, risky sexual behavior, and anti-social behavior. In the latter part of the interview, we also talk about cultural evolution, psychological flexibility, and their relationship to the development of nurturing socities. -- Follow Dr. Biglan's work: Faculty page: https://bit.ly/2tPIbcv Articles of Researchgate: https://bit.ly/2XxKX3p Values To Action: https://bit.ly/2TfFi3J Evolving a More Nurturing Capitalism: https://bit.ly/2tOIrs7 Association for Contextual Behavioral Science: https://bit.ly/2NODclz Association for Behavior Analysis International: https://bit.ly/2mQqzHY Society for Prevention Research: https://bit.ly/1CiEXuR The Evolution Institute: https://bit.ly/1MmXlbv Books: The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World: https://amzn.to/2EoRwwt Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives: https://amzn.to/2NGekvV This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution: https://amzn.to/2ECm0LA -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, SCIMED, PER HELGE HAAKSTD LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, RUI BELEZA, MIGUEL ESTRADA, ANTÓNIO CUNHA, CHANTEL GELINAS, JIM FRANK, JERRY MULLER, FRANCIS FORD, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BRIAN RIVERA, ADRIANO ANDRADE, YEVHEN BODRENKO, SERGIU CODREANU, ADAM BJERRE, JUSTIN WATERS, AND ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY FIRST PRODUCER, Yzar Wehbe!

David Sloan Wilson talks about the application of evolutionary theory to policy and people, and his book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. https://pxlme.me/PqJs9Qy6

This View of Life (starts 6:56) In this episode of How on Earth, we talk with David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist with a special interest in human biocultural evolution. Dr. Wilson is Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at SUNY Binghamton, and president of the Evolution Institute as well as editor in chief of its online magazine This View of Life.  It is not just about biology, these ideas are formed by decades of research and drawing on studies that cover topics from the breeding of hens to the timing of cataract surgeries for infants to the organization of of an automobile plant.  Last month he published his latest book, also titled This View of Life to present a comprehensive case for what he calls Completing the Darwinian Revolution. Hosts: Chip Grandits, Joel Parker Producer and Engineer: Joel Parker Additional Contributions: Shelley Schlender, Susan Moran, Alejandro Soto Executive Producer: Beth Bennett Listen to the show:

In this dialogue Dr. Shermer speaks with Dr. David Sloan Wilson, the renowned evolutionary biologist and Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. His previous books include Evolution for Everyone, The Neighborhood Project, Does Altruism Exist? and Darwin’s Cathedral. He is the president of the Evolution Institute and editor in chief of its online magazine, This View of Life. His new book, out this week, is This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. He and Shermer discuss… what it means to complete the Darwinian Revolution solving the “is-ought” and “naturalistic fallacy” through proper science and philosophy why evolutionary psychology is an equal opportunity offender for liberals and conservatives why both laissez faire and command economies fail what is morality? dispelling the myth of social darwinism policy as a branch of biology solving the tragedy of the commons through game theory the evolutionary origins of good and evil natural selection, group selection, multi-level selection and the debate with Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins over selfish genes why nationalism is like religion how a biologist thinks about immigration, nuclear deterrence and other policy issues the rise of nationalism and what to do about it. Listen to Science Salon via iTunes, Spotify, Google Play Music, Stitcher, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and Soundcloud. This Science Salon was recorded on February 1, 2019. We apologize for the quality of this episode; it was recorded before Michael moved to the new recording studio. We still have a couple episodes to release from the old studio. Quality of subsequent episodes will be better. You play a vital part in our commitment to promote science and reason. If you enjoy the Science Salon Podcast, please show your support by making a donation, or by becoming a patron.  

This week, Liberty and Vanessa discuss The Priory of the Orange Tree, Go Ahead in the Rain, Kid Gloves, and more great books. This episode was sponsored by Audible, Blinkist, and The Night Tiger by Yangtze Choo, out now from Flatiron Books. Subscribe to All the Books! using RSS or iTunes and never miss a beat book. Sign up for the weekly New Books! newsletter for even more new book news. Books discussed on the show:  The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman Kid Gloves: Nine Months of Careful Chaos by Lucy Knisley Go Ahead in the Rain by Hanif Abdurraqib The Atlas of Reds and Blues by Devi S. Laskar To Night Owl from Dogfish by Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer What we're reading: Early Riser by Jasper Fforde Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir More books out this week: An Unconditional Freedom (The Loyal League) by Alyssa Cole Four Dead Queens by Astrid Scholte PTSD by Guillaume Singelin Magic Is Dead: My Journey into the World’s Most Secretive Society of Magicians by Ian Frisch The Lost Night by Andrea Bartz No Way by S. J. Morden California Girls by Susan Mallery Women Warriors: An Unexpected History by Pamela D. Toler The Game of Stars (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond) by Sayantani DasGupta Rayne & Delilah's Midnite Matinee by Jeff Zentner Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh The Beauty of the Moment by Tanaz Bhathena Rise of the Dragons by Angie Sage Savage Feast: Three Generations, Two Continents, and a Dinner Table (a Memoir with Recipes) by Boris Fishman We Must Be Brave by Frances Liardet Hunting Game (An Embla Nyström Investigation) by Helene Tursten and Paul Norlen That Time I Loved You: Stories by Carrianne Leung Mother Country: A Novel by Irina Reyn We Set the Dark on Fire by Tehlor Kay Mejia An Affair of Poisons by Addie Thorley The Huntress by Kate Quinn Goulash: A Novel by Brian Kimberling The Big Crush by David J. Schow American Duchess: A Novel of Consuelo Vanderbilt by Karen Harper The Border by Don Winslow This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution by David Sloan Wilson Lady Derring Takes a Lover: The Palace of Rogues by Julie Anne Long Low Country Hero by Lee Tobin McClain It’s Getting Scot in Here by Suzanne Enoch The Lost Prince: A Search for Pat Conroy by Michael Mewshaw Fay Wray and Robert Riskin: A Hollywood Memoir by Victoria Riskin Binstead's Safari by Rachel Ingalls The Very Best of the Best: 35 Years of The Year's Best Science Fiction by Gardner Dozois Captain Marvel: Liberation Run by Tess Sharpe The Body Myth by Rheea Mukherjee After She's Gone: A Novel (Hanne Lagerlind-Schon) by Camilla Grebe and Elizabeth Clark Wessel Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe Birthday by César Aira and Chris Andrews The Stars Below (Vega Jane, Book 4) by David Baldacci Chaos, A Fable by Rodrigo Rey Rosa and Jeffrey Gray Drawn and Buttered (A Lobster Shack Mystery) by Shari Randall Political Action: A Practical Guide to Movement Politics (New York Review Books Classics) by Michael Walzer and Jon Wiener The Weight of a Thousand Feathers by Brian Conaghan More Walls Broken by Tim Powers and Jon Foster Death & Honey by Kevin Hearne and Lila Bowen tsunami vs. the fukushima 50: poems by Lee Ann Roripaugh You Who Enter Here (Suny Series, Native Traces) by Erika T Wurth  

Curious What Evolution And Behavioral Sciences Can Learn From Each Other? Wondering What Traits Make Humans Most Unique As A Species? Want To Hear Two “Big Picture" Thinkers Discuss Technology Use, Awe, And Altruism? Join Us In An Intellectually Rich Conversation With Evolutionary Scientist Dr. David Sloan Wilson And Behavioral Scientist Dr. Steven Hayes! Evolution science and behavioral science both have strong theories that can help us understand humans in context, and yet, until now, the two fields have been mostly separate. In this episode, Dr. Steven Hayes and Dr. David Sloan Wilson share how they are collaborating to bridge this divide. They discuss their recent co-edited book,Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Human Behavior, and they explore about how taking an evolutionary view of humans can be helpful in daily life, and in psychotherapy practice. Dr. Steven C. Hayes is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of 44 books and nearly 600 scientific articles, he is especially known as a co-developer of "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy" or “ACT,” one of the most widely used and researched new methods of psychological intervention over the last 20 years. His popular bookGet Out of Your Mind and Into Your Lifehas sold over a quarter million copies worldwide. Dr. Hayes has received several national awards, such as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy, and is ranked among the top most cited psychologists in the word. Dr. David Sloan Wilson is an American evolutionary biologist and a Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and Anthropology at Binghamton University, part of the State University of New York. He applies evolutionary theory to all aspects of humanity in addition to the rest of life. His numerous books include Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society, Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, andThis View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution. Dr. Wilson publishes in anthropology, psychology, and philosophy journals in addition to his mainstream biological research, and is the Editor-in-Chief of Evolution: This View of Life. He started the Evolutionary Studies program at Binghamton University to unify diverse disciplines under the theory of evolution. Resources: Evolution and Contextual Behavioral Science: An Integrated Framework for Understanding, Predicting, and Influencing Human Behavior, Edited by David Sloan Wilson and Steven C. Hayes Steve Hayes on "Wowfulness"

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natural selection profoundly shook the idea, it was unable to kill it. In fact, the belief in teleology seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious proponents of intelligent design and even some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. In his book On Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2017), Michael Ruse explores the history of the idea of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. He argues that three distinct ideas about purpose have been at the heart of Western thought for more than two thousand years and then traces their profound and fascinating implications. Along the way, Ruse takes up tough questions about the purpose of life and whether would be possible to have meaning without it, revealing that purpose is still a vital and pressing issue. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. In addition to On Purpose, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, and The Darwinian Revolution. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natural selection profoundly shook the idea, it was unable to kill it. In fact, the belief in teleology seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious proponents of intelligent design and even some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. In his book On Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2017), Michael Ruse explores the history of the idea of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. He argues that three distinct ideas about purpose have been at the heart of Western thought for more than two thousand years and then traces their profound and fascinating implications. Along the way, Ruse takes up tough questions about the purpose of life and whether would be possible to have meaning without it, revealing that purpose is still a vital and pressing issue. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. In addition to On Purpose, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, and The Darwinian Revolution. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natural selection profoundly shook the idea, it was unable to kill it. In fact, the belief in teleology seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious proponents of intelligent design and even some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. In his book On Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2017), Michael Ruse explores the history of the idea of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. He argues that three distinct ideas about purpose have been at the heart of Western thought for more than two thousand years and then traces their profound and fascinating implications. Along the way, Ruse takes up tough questions about the purpose of life and whether would be possible to have meaning without it, revealing that purpose is still a vital and pressing issue. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. In addition to On Purpose, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, and The Darwinian Revolution. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can we live without the idea of purpose? Should we even try to? Immanuel Kant thought we were stuck with purpose, and while Darwin’s theory of natural selection profoundly shook the idea, it was unable to kill it. In fact, the belief in teleology seems to be making a comeback today, as both religious proponents of intelligent design and even some prominent secular philosophers argue that any explanation of life without the idea of purpose is missing something essential. In his book On Purpose (Princeton University Press, 2017), Michael Ruse explores the history of the idea of purpose in philosophical, religious, scientific, and historical thought, from ancient Greece to the present. He argues that three distinct ideas about purpose have been at the heart of Western thought for more than two thousand years and then traces their profound and fascinating implications. Along the way, Ruse takes up tough questions about the purpose of life and whether would be possible to have meaning without it, revealing that purpose is still a vital and pressing issue. Michael Ruse is the Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Program at Florida State University. In addition to On Purpose, he has written or edited more than fifty books, including Darwinism as Religion, The Philosophy of Human Evolution, and The Darwinian Revolution. Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD student at Universite Laval in Quebec City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Lloyd Praeger and the Darwinian Revolution Greta Jones, University of Ulster Ulster naturalists long sought to gain an insight into the nature of God through the study of nature. Greta Jones looks at how Darwin's theories affected Praeger and influenced his work. www.ria.ie Disclaimer: The Royal Irish Academy has prepared the content of this website responsibly and carefully, but disclaims all warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy of the information contained in any of the materials. The views expressed are the authors' own and not those of the Royal Irish Academy.

In this episode on the Darwinian Revolution and the relationship between natural science and Christian theology, Fr. Thomas Hopko reflects on the issue of death.

In the 5th part of his series on Charles Darwin, Fr. Thomas talks about the relationship of this Darwinian Revolution and natural science in general to the issue of Orthodox Christian theology.