Podcasts about Dawkins

Hall of Fame safety Brian Dawkins and sports agent Kelli Masters join host Rob Maaddi. Dawkins talks about the Philadelphia Eagles starting 7-0, shares his thoughts on rough-the-passer penalties and more. Masters, the first female agent to represent a top-5 NFL draft pick, discusses her journey in a male-dominated industry and what led her to become a sports agent 18 years ago.    

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction,” wrote the atheist Richard Dawkins. He went on to describe God as “jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” Dawkins, who is frequently wrong but never in doubt, isn't the only person to perceive problems with God in the Old Testament. The second-century heretic Marcion was so struck by the difference between the Old Testament and New Testament that he believed they taught about different gods altogether. He went on to delete the Old Testament from the biblical canon, along with any New Testament book he perceived as being too friendly with the Old Testament. So, how do we reconcile the portrayals of God in the two testaments of Christian Scripture? That's the question I pose to Paul Copan in this episode of the Influence Podcast. I'm George P. Wood, executive editor of Influence magazine and your host. Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University in West Palm Beach, Florida. He is the author of numerous books dealing with questions in philosophy, ethics, and apologetics. His most recent book is, Is God a Vindictive Bully? published by Baker Academic. ----- This episode of the Influence Podcast is brought to you by My Healthy Church, distributors of Bible Engagement Project. Bible Engagement Project gives churches access to a library of kids curriculum and small group resources all in one subscription. Visit BibleEngagementProject.com to download sample lessons.

After many discussions with Darth on his presuppositionalism and conflating epistemology vs ontology, I have mod powers in this discussion for a change. Don't want to miss this one that ends in a fiery exchange before Darth rage quits.

Josh, Dustin, and Raul are excited to have sharpshooter and 2010 National Champion Andre Dawkins on the podcast. In light of Tyrese Proctor's reclassification, they talk with Andre about his decision to enroll at Duke early and the challenges that came with that. They discuss the 2010 season and what made that team special. What are his memories of Jon Scheyer, and what will make him a good coach? Then they get into the back half of Andre's college career, which included first round exits to Lehigh and Mercer. Which one bothered him more? Lastly, they wrap up the episode by having Andre name his favorite shooters of all time. You can check out Andre's own podcast, Dawkins on Duke, here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dawkins-on-duke/id1539709266 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Jack talks to Channel 8 Meteorologist Rusty Dawkins about his little known career as an electrician, how and why he has left and returned to the TV Market in LIncoln during different times in his life, why snowfall is so much more difficult to predict than other weather, which weather apps he has on his phone and of course, we debate whether the DOME is real!

J. Arvid Agren's book The Gene's Eye View of Evolution (Oxford University Press, 2021), is a highly praised scholarly account of the concept of selfish genes, which Richard Dawkins made hugely popular in 1976. Dawkins himself calls Agren's book "the most thorough reading of the relevant literature that I have ever encountered...he gets it right." But what does this mean? In this nearly two hour conversation, I take a deep dive with Agren into the history and current status of the selfish gene concept. You might be surprised by how much we agree upon and how much the concept of selfish genes has been scaled down, compared to its original pretensions. 

Stephanie Nicole Dawkins is a dynamic woman. She founded Black Girls Hike Too in 2020! Black Girls Hike Too! is a bold declaration that she is making to say we can hike, camp, swim, kayak, canoe, hunt, fish and take up space in the great outdoors as well. One of Stephanie's objectives with this passion project is to debunk myths that black women are “afraid” of the outdoors. Stephanie has many other ventures coming up in the future. Fun Fact: Started a hiking group a month later was DM'd on instagram to participate in an all expense paid BIPOC Expedition to Alaska and stayed for two weeks. In this episode Melissa and Stephanie discuss: * The start of her hiking journey led to the creation of Black Girls Hike Too! * Hiking is free but Hiking Groups are not * Being Grateful for the opportunity to get paid for being herself during the Hiking Sessions * Realizing that nobody can write your story but yourself * Everything is under control and there's no need to control the direction of your life The Reawakened Mom Circle has officially launched. We would love to have you join us in the sacred space HERE: https://www.melissaclampitt.com/work-with-me You can find me at: Website FB IG Youtube The Reawakened FB Group You can find Stephanie at: www.blackgirlshiketoo.com Social Media : @stephithelight Enjoy the conversation!

Dion Dawkins joined Zach to discuss if the Chiefs playoff loss is still on the mind of the Bills and how Josh Allen has progressed his game since his rookie year. 

We lick our wounds from the South Carolina game and look ahead to Ole Miss. Anna Tarullo of BBN Tonight and Ben Sudderth and Ivan Dawkins of the BS3 Network join us. Fun conversations! --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/cats-talk-wednesday/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/cats-talk-wednesday/support

Interview: Jack Dawkins of Recruit Scouting

In today's episode of Talk Heathen, Katy Montgomerie and Secular Rarity will sort through callers as Katy drops us some fun lichen facts. First caller is D in DC who is wondering about the distinction between religion, deism, and theism when it comes to ecological circumstances. There could be a cultural practice linked with religion such as vegetarianism that can help. Having a ritualistic set of practices can have its benefits, but what happens if people decide to stop doing these things? Will ecologically beneficial religious practices be harmful in 1,000 years? Employ critical thinking to help guide that process. Next is Thomas in Canada who states that not having a belief in Jesus leads to murder. Do Christians murder and if so, were they just not real Christians? If we start throwing rules down on what makes an actual Christian, how many Christians will we have left? How does not knowing if you are going to heaven or hell have anything to do with your current state of belief? If someone isn't a Christian if they sin, and everyone sins, does that mean that no one is a Christian? This is a textbook No True Scotsman fallacy.Patrick in FL is curious about what Dawkins means by Pantheism being sexed-up atheism. When someone describes god as literally everything, it can be agreed that everything exists but to call it god is just a word game. With this definition, at the end of the day, god is indistinguishable from reality. How have you demonstrated to yourself that the universe is conscious? Even if you have, we would just have one new fact.Jasmine in Canada has some thoughts about atheists perceiving other atheists negatively. Some atheists will carry their arrogance to other domains just because they might be right about some things. Atheists can appear to be the only one that has a problem with something when in the minority, and there are also atheists that are just dickheads. Just being an atheist can put you in a position where you can't really live, while not affecting Christians. It does not matter what the label is and there is no sense in being worried where you land. It is okay to be apathetic and not care about what you call yourself. Tom in MI says that as a critical thinker, he uses Greek history as proof of the existence of gods. What is your definition of existing? Where does your god sit on this definition? What is the correspondence of ancient beliefs and the world we live in now? If people in the past thought something was real, does that make it real? We remain unconvinced of Zeus and Poseidon. Thank you for tuning into today's show, remember to thank the essential workers and turn us on next time for more of Katy's facts!

Why do we have to go through storms? Are they really necessary, or is that just what people tell us to get us through them? Do we cause our storms?

Episode 179 – 10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know 7 – Declining Narratives Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God. Script: They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” 2 Peter, chapter 3, verse 4, New International Version ******** VK: Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re very glad to be with you today as we continue the series we started a few weeks ago on Anchored by Truth. We are calling this series “10 Facts Every Christian Needs to Know.” In the studio today we have RD Fierro. RD is an author and the founder of Crystal Sea Books. So far we have covered 5 of the 10 facts and we have done that over 6 episodes. RD, let’s do a quick review of the first 5 facts and maybe take a quick look at where we are and where we’re going. RD: Well, I would also like to say hello to all the listeners joining us here today. I do think it is a good idea for us to do a status check at this point because I think that this is one of the most important series that we’ve ever done on Anchored by Truth. VK: Why is that? RD: Well, to say our society is in a mess today probably a bit of an understatement. I don’t want to spend too much time listing the litany of social and cultural issues that are afflicting us because they are apparent and well known. But one of my observations has been for a long time is that while we normally talk about economic problems, social problems, health problems, political problems, etc. – all of those really stem from a spiritual problem. And the heart of that spiritual problem is people turning away from the only source of truth and light that can make a difference in the human heart – the Bible. Over the last 75 years or more there has been a steady decline in the United States and in just about all western cultures in Biblical literacy. Most surveys tell us that far less than 10% of Americans have any real depth of knowledge about the Bible. VK: And you believe that one reason for that is that today in America and the west most people have come to regard the Bible as either being only partially true at best and outright myth and fairy tale at worst? And part of what has caused this profound doubt is the counter Biblical narratives that have arisen over the last 150 plus years. These counter Biblical narratives have become so deeply embedded in our society that the counter narratives hold much greater sway over our population than the transcendent truth of the Bible. And so far we have talked about an unholy trinity of those narratives: Deep Time, uniformitarianism, and evolution. Geological uniformitarianism played key role in convincing people like Charles Darwin that the earth was millions or billions of years old. This, in turn, allowed Darwin that to extend those uniformitarian ideas beyond geology to biology which turned into the General Theory of Evolution. So, those three ideas became instrumental in creating widespread doubt or indifference to the Scripture. RD: We pointed out last time that the most prominent atheist of the last 3 or 4 decades is Richard Dawkins. Lest anyone think that this dark, despotic chain of decline … VK: Uh, that’s easy for you to say … dark, despotic chain of decline … RD: … not really. Just so that listeners don’t think I’m being unduly melodramatic even Richard Dawkins has connected Darwin and a lack of faith in God – what I am calling a dark, despotic chain of decline. Dawkins has written that “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” In other words Dawkins admits that without Darwin, or at least his ideas, someone who wanted to be an atheist was continually confronted with some very troubling question that his belief system couldn’t answer. Without God where did everything come from? Without God who created life? Without God who made a creature so different from all of the other creatures we see about us on the earth? VK: The Bible clearly tells us that “God created the heavens and earth.” The Bible tells us that God created man in His image. And the Bible describes God’s original creative activity as taking place thousands of years ago – not millions or billions. So, to replace God as being necessary to the world as we know it, these counter narratives had to be created, circulated, and adopted. And they were … so successfully, that if anyone dares suggest that the earth is only thousands of years old they are immediately attacked or ridiculed. And you think that this “10 Facts” series is important because it represents the launching point for knocking that unholy trinity of dark, despotic narratives off of their high, exalted perch. RD: Exactly. Right now most of our attention gets focused on what I call secondary narratives. The narratives we notice, such as the prominent social and political narratives, are secondary ones - the acceptability of abortion or same sex marriage, the difference between "green" energy and fossil fuels, increased government control and regulation over our daily lives, etc. The secondary ones emerge from and are dependent on the primary ones. Primary narratives are the overarching paradigms so embedded in the culture that they are not even noticed any more. As we said last time, these primary narratives are like the framed art prints on your wall. Initially you see them and think about them, but as time goes by you notice them less and less. Eventually you only notice them when a visitor comes in and makes a comment about them. Deep time, evolution, and uniformitarianism - among others - are now primary narratives in our culture. Only fools and the suspect disagree with them. VK: So – as we mentioned last time - briefly put Deep Time, along with its close cousin the Big Bang, does away with the need for God as Creator of the universe. The General Theory of Evolution does away with the need for God as the Author of life. Biological uniformitarianism provides the mechanism we need to explain the amazing biodiversity around us and does away with God as Sustainer and Multiplier. And geological uniformitarianism explains why the earth’s surface looks the way it does. And, in doing so, geological uniformitarianism does away with God as the Administrator of justice. The big lesson that came out of the Genesis flood is that if you practice evil continually God will wipe you off the face of the earth. That’s a pretty potent lesson in how seriously God takes sin. The sum of these parts is that we have now done away with any need to acknowledge God since we can explain the universe, life, and the surface of the earth without Him. And … since we've done away with God we now create our own standards for what constitutes "personhood," family, man's dominion over the earth, etc. RD: Right. So, these primary so-called scientific narratives give rise to another primary moral or ethical narrative that I want to spend some time on today – a narrative that is sometimes phrased homo mensura. VK: According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary homo mensura [MEN-SUR-AH] is a doctrine first propounded by the Greek philosopher Protagoras which holds that humankind is the measure of all things. It is sometimes simply stated “as man is the measure.” This means that everything is relative to human apprehension and evaluation, and that there is no objective truth. We’ve talked before on Anchored by Truth that we live in a post-modernistic world that not only denies that we can know absolute truth but also that it even exists. RD: Right. Nature abhors a vacuum. Once we did away with God we had to have something to fill the void so man stepped up and stepped in. So, as you’ve already noted this freed man up to begin to redefine any of the transcendent standards that God had established for man. Man felt free to do away with the Ten Commandments because supposedly science had done away with the Being who sent the commandments down the mountain. VK: The problem is, of course, we didn't do away with God or His truth. And the house built on intellectual sand falls when the river of reality hits it. And we are seeing all around us the reality of what happens with man starts to see himself as, in fact, being the only measure by which all standards should be established or moral or ethical judgments be made. RD: There’s an old saying that “ideas have consequences.” We can now see the consequences these primary narratives have on communities and societies and I think many people are waking up to the fact that they don’t like these consequences. But … and this a big but … these primary narratives are so deeply embedded within our culture we have moved past the point where we can simply dismiss them out of hand. It’s no longer enough just to say, as the old bumper sticker used to read, “The Bible says it. I believe it. End of discussion.” That may be true for many people. They do believe the Bible and that’s great. But when you simply proclaim but fail to “explain” you have given the other person no reason they should accept your proclamation. VK: And even Jesus modeled this approach in providing a witness to the watching world. In the Gospel of John, chapter 14, verse 11 Jesus said, “Believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. If not, believe because of the things I do.” That’s from the Good News Translation. RD: Right. The predominant result of the primary narratives supposedly coming from science – Deep Time, evolution, uniformitarianism - was to get rid of a perceived need for God. This gave rise to a primary narrative that man was now the highest and only judge for how life was to be lived, how the universe was to be explained, and how the affairs of man were to be governed. So, if we are going to get back to a world in which God’s transcendent truth supplants homo mensura we can’t just dispute the child we must begin to engage the false parent. VK: So in this “10 Facts” series we are challenging the so-called truth of those primary narratives that we supposedly get from science? And we’ve gone through 5 of the 10 facts so far? RD: Right. But rather than moving on to fact 6 today I want to take a little time and give a broader overview of what we are trying to accomplish. With the first 5 of our “10 facts” we have challenged the prevailing view of what might be termed natural history. With the next 5 facts I want to shift from talking just about natural history to talking about human history. I specifically want to talk about how what we know about human history is not only consistent with the Bible but how certain events within human history actually help confirm the Bible’s supernatural origin. VK: We have often said on Anchored by Truth that any book that claims to be the word of God must possess at least attributes. First, the book must be consistent with what we know from making observations about the world around us. And I’ll add that we’re not just talking about observations of the physical universe but also what we know about the history that has preceded us – both natural history and human history. Second, that book would have to give evidence of a supernatural point of origin. These criteria are important. You obviously wouldn’t want to trust a book claiming to come from God that is manifestly inconsistent with observations you can easily make. Why trust a book’s depiction of heaven if you can easily verify it can’t even accurately tell you about earth? Why trust a prophecy about the future if what that book tells you about the past is inaccurate? RD: Yes. So, with our first 5 facts we demonstrated that the natural history related by the Bible is reliable. In saying this we are not trying to turn the Bible into a history or a science textbook. As the Westminster Shorter Catechism puts it, the principle purpose of the Bible is “primarily teach what we are to believe concerning God and what duty God requires of us.” In other words, the purpose of the Bible is to tell us about God and to transmit God’s expectations for us to us. But as the Bible accomplished its purpose it has to necessarily relate observations about the world and the people upon whom it reports. If those observations weren’t accurate we would have valid reasons for not accepting the reliability of the Bible. VK: And, notwithstanding man’s attempts to dispute with the Bible, the observations the Bible reports about natural history are accurate when we are honest with the science and honest with the Bible’s literary constructs. The Bible does contain poetry, allegory, and even romantic poetry. No responsible Bible interpreter tries to construe non-historical sections literally. But one section of the Bible that does contain history is very often maligned. That is the opening chapters of Genesis. The opening chapters of Genesis contain a significant amount of material about natural history. And the point of our first 5 facts was to demonstrate that contrary to current attempt to defame that history, the natural history in the opening chapters of Genesis remains stubbornly accurate. RD: The first fact that we discussed was that every Christian needs to know is that science confirms that the universe and earth are thousands of years old, not millions or billions of years old. This confirms the age of the earth we can calculate from the genealogies in Genesis. The second fact we covered was that the complexity of life makes it impossible for life to have arisen as a result of the random collision of atoms and molecules – even if you could explain the existence of the atoms and molecules to begin with. This confirms the Bible’s record of God creating all life beginning on day 3 of the creation week. Fact number 3 is that there is solid scientific evidence that the tallest mountains on earth were underwater at one time. This confirms the account of a worldwide flood in chapters 6 through 8 of Genesis. VK: The 4th fact we discussed is that the fossil record does not support any kind of gradual development of the many different types of plants and animals we see on earth. Instead, life on earth is fundamentally discontinuous at both a biochemical level as well as at the level of visible morphology. The first fossils we see in the rocks show plants and animals fully formed and functional and even those phyla that are supposedly hundreds of millions of years old so closely resemble their modern counterparts they are easily recognized. The 5th fact we talked about is that the dating methods that are used to assign dates to rocks or fossils all depend on assumptions that are unproved and unprovable. Moreover, those methods have been shown to dramatically misdate certain specimens when we know when a particular sample of rock was formed by volcanic eruption. RD: Right. So, in our first 5 facts we have concentrated on showing that the natural history related by the Bible is entirely reasonable when compared with empirical observations of the world we live on. We now want to turn out attention to showing that Bible is equally reliable when it comes to the facts that it chooses to relate about human history. VK: Can you give us a preview of what we will be talking about? RD: Well, I don’t want to give away too much right now but let me just touch on one subject that will be relevant - geography. Just about every good study Bible has one or more maps as a part of it. VK: I think most people know that. RD: I think they do too. I think they take them for granted. But in taking them for granted what they are unconsciously doing is acknowledging the reliability of the underlying historical text. Remember, that those maps are being produced by modern users of the Bible. None of the Bible writers created maps and inserted them into their scroll, clay tablet, or codex. It’s not that they couldn’t have. Maps have been around for thousands of years. But that wasn’t their purpose. They were simply preparing records or accounts initially for the Jewish nation. But in the course of making their record they described names, dates, and places. Now calendar systems have changed down through history. So, we have to “translate” their dates into the Gregorian calendar that we use today. And names have a certain amount of variation. The same man might be called Richard, Rick, or Dick and no one in our society would think anything about it. The same thing was true in ancient times. King Uzziah was also known as King Azariah. VK: But geographic places don’t change. That doesn’t mean that the boundaries of a particular kingdom or nation won’t vary over time. The United States started out as 13 colonies but today is 50 different states. But it is distinctly the same nation. But even while the nation is changing New York City is still in the same place today as it was when the Dutch first bartered for the right to the property. But New York City was originally called New Amsterdam. The name was changed in honor of the Duke of York following the British acquisition of it from the Dutch. And that is a phenomenon that we also see in the Bible. Name of places will change although the place is obviously still in the same geographic location. RD: Right. And the fact that we can know with a high degree of confidence what places those ancient names applied to means that modern scholars can construct accurate maps. But they couldn’t do that if the ancient Bible texts were unreliable. This reliability and accuracy distinguished the Bible from many other books that claim to be the word of God. VK: I see what you’re saying. Biblical scholars often have discussions about the exact route that the Israelites took when they left Egypt. There are often 3 possible routes that are discussed: the Northern Coastal route, the Bitter Lakes route, or the Suez route. But the fact that they can discuss various possibilities at all means that the description of the route in the book of Exodus is accurate enough that it corresponds to the known geography of that region. It corresponds well enough that there are multiple possibilities that could satisfy the described path. I suppose people might say that since we can’t identify the exact route that casts doubt on the accuracy of the text. RD: But that makes as much sense as a friend asking how you went from Macon, Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee and wondering whether you went straight through Atlanta or took the beltway around it. You reply you don’t know because you were asleep and someone else was driving. Your friend wouldn’t say that you couldn’t have made the trip because you weren’t sure which route you took. The Bible record is proven to be true and accurate regardless of which of those 3 possibilities, or another one, is true. The point is that the Bible texts are accurate enough to permit scholars to identify the location of Bible events on modern maps. This, then, is a testimony to the accuracy of the text that we have received. VK: So, one of the points that we will be making in the next 5 facts that we will be covering is that we can have confidence in the reliability and accuracy of the Bible’s text. And that is true of both the Old and the New Testaments. The book of Exodus which is in the Old Testament is accurate when it relates information pertaining to the geography of modern day Israel and Egypt. The book of Acts is equally accurate when it relates information pertaining to the Roman Empire of the 1st century AD. The books of Exodus and Acts are separated by approximately 1,500 years in terms of their time of preparation. But both books display the concern of the inspired Bible writers for accuracy and fidelity. RD: Right. So, this example helps reinforce the fact that the Bible is accurate when it relates human history as well as natural history. And that’s a point we want to reinforce in the next 5 facts. But in our next 5 facts we are also going to introduce a couple of facts that demonstrate that the Bible also has a supernatural point of origin. VK: Many, many writers would be competent at relating history. There is an abundance of ancient historians and while their reliability varies there are still many of them who prepared very accurate accounts of certain historical events or people. But the Bible contains evidence that its writers weren’t just working with their human gifts as impressive as some might have been. The Bible contains evidence that there was a supernatural Presence superintending and inspiring the records they were preparing. When God directed the individual writers to pick up their pen or stylus He provided them information that would have been impossible for them to discern unless He was choosing to give them supernatural insights. RD: The point of this series and today’s discussion is to help Christians guard against as the Apostle Paul put it “Satan’s wiles.” Ever since the Garden of Eden Satan has used the same strategy. First Satan casts doubt on God’s goodness. Then He denies God’s truth. The next he elevates the self-importance of man. Finally, he establishes a replacement for God’s truth in the mind and heart of men. That’s what we see with these primary narratives we’ve been talking about. The Bible tells us the earth is thousands of years old. But then someone got the idea that the topographic features of the earth needed millions of years to form. Then that idea was extended beyond geology to biology. Then we invented dating mechanisms based on unprovable assumptions but asserted that anyone who doubted them must be doubting science. Then after God was deemed no longer necessary all that was left was to decide that man was the measure of all things. VK: As you said it’s a dark, despotic chain of decline and it’s been going on for a long time. But in the 150 years since uniformitarian ideas began to seize popular culture the decline has accelerated and one of those primary narratives has become that science has proven that our world and universe can exist just fine without God. But when we start taking a hard look at the available evidence our brains confirm what our hearts already know – there is no coherent explanation for the universe that doesn’t include God. This sounds like a great time to go to the Lord in prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer that we and our friends and neighbors would set aside all of the narratives that our culture pushes and instead return to the inerrant, infallible, and inspired worship of the One True God. ---- PRAYER FOR RESTORATION OF THE WORSHIP OF THE ONE TRUE GOD VK: Before we close we’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes in this series or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.” If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not perfect but our Boss is!” (Opening Bible Quote from the New International Version) 2 Peter, chapter 3, verse 4, New International Version Immeasurable Age - creation.com Radio-dating in Rubble - creation.com Dinosaur footprint treasure trove found in Britain - creation.com The Bright Angel Trail trackways - creation.com Flat gaps - creation.com Dinosaur and mammal tracks found together - creation.com Genesis in clay - creation.com New archaeological find affirms Old Testament historicity - creation.com Debunking the Documentary Hypothesis - creation.com Noahs Flood - creation.com Satan’s Strategy • Cast doubt on God’s goodness • Deny God’s truth • Elevate self-importance • Establish a replacement in the mind and heart for God’s truth Cultural Narratives One way to look at narratives is that there are primary and secondary narratives that circulate in our culture. The primary narratives are so embedded in our culture that they are not even noticed any more. They are like the framed prints on your wall. Initially you see them but as time goes by you notice them less and less. Eventually you only know they are there when a visitor comes in and remarks about them. Deep time, evolution, uniformitarianism, and the equality of all religious viewpoints are now primary narratives in our culture. Only fools and the suspect disagree with them. The narratives we notice (such as the prominent social and political narratives) are secondary ones - the acceptability of abortion, same sex marriage, the difference between "green" energy and fossil fuels, "public" education, increased government control and regulation, etc. The secondary ones emerge from and are dependent on the primary ones. • The Big Bang/deep time does away with the need for God as Creator. • Evolution does away with the need for God as the Author of life. • Uniformitarianism does away God as the Administrator of justice (become evil continually and God will wipe you off the face of the earth). Since we've done away with God we now create our own standards for what constitutes "personhood," family, man's dominion over the earth, etc. The problem is, of course, we didn't do away with God or His truth. And the house built on intellectual sand falls when the river of reality hits it. So, we will proclaim the truth to try to save some and maybe by God's grace many or most. People who doubt the inerrancy of scripture never think about any of this but they should. The line from that which they doubt the Word to a life they don't want to live is very straight. The line grows even more straight as it uncoils - just like the hangman's rope.

Go Bills !!!

Though it's not always clear when a movement is over, there are many indicators that suggest this is the case of the “New Atheism,” a cultural wave that rose in the 2000s and aggressively attacked religion in the guise of scientific rationalism. Despite the name, the New Atheism wasn't really new, at least not in the sense of presenting new arguments. Instead, leveraging the global shock of 9/11, New Atheists pushed an anti-religious mood along with a vision of a society free from the cobwebs of religion, defined by scientific inquiry, free speech, and a morality not built on God or religious traditions.  In 1996, prominent New Atheist Richard Dawkins articulated this mood in his acceptance speech for the “Humanist of the Year” Award: “I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils,” he said, “comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.” There was a commercial aspect to the New Atheism, with bumper stickers and T-shirts carrying well-worn slogans, such as one coined by Victor Stenger: “Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.”   Though, at the time, it grew into somewhat of a cultural force and platformed a group of minor celebrities, the New Atheism now seems to have run out of steam. Divided by progressive politics and haunted by the obnoxious tone of many of its own founders, the movement is being devoured by other ideologies. Concepts like freedom of expression, scientific realism, and morality without God have all met their antitheses, often in clashes featuring the New Atheists themselves.   One watershed moment was a conflict over the role of science. Just last year, the American Humanist Association revoked Richard Dawkins' “Humanist of the Year” award for his long history of offensive tweets. For example, Dawkins told women who experience sexual harassment to “stop whining” and parents of babies with Down syndrome to “abort it and try again.” These tweets were among the cringeworthy, but the one that completed Dawkins' long transformation from champion of free thought to persona non grata, at least for the American Humanist Association, questioned gender ideology: “In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.”   The New Atheist commitment to seeking truth via the objectivity of science has collided with a new ideology that deifies the subjective sense of self. Ironically, this is the kind of religious dogmatism Dawkins and other New Atheists always accused organized religions of promoting, only less scientific.  New Atheism has been further undermined by a cultural shift in censorship and tolerance for freedom of expression. Organized religion, New Atheists claimed, suppressed dissent. Only by enthroning secularism could we remove the fear of speaking or hearing the truth, even when truth is shocking and offensive. As it turned out, religion's retreat only left a secular progressivism to censor and suppress at will.   In 2017, for example, The End of Faith author Sam Harris ignited a firestorm when he interviewed political scientist Charles Murray. Just a month earlier, a violent mob had shouted Murray down at Middlebury College, injuring moderator Dr. Allison Stanger as the two tried to reach the exit. Harris defended Murray, arguing his research was unfairly maligned as racist and he should be allowed to speak. In retaliation, Ezra Klein published a piece in Vox that landed Harris on the Southern Poverty Law Center's “Hatewatch Headlines,” while in Salon Émile P. Torres accused Harris and the New Atheists of “merging with the far right.”   That same year, Richard Dawkins was barred from speaking at UC Berkeley for his comments about radical Islam, not by Christians or Muslims but by progressives. Turns out that freedom of expression wasn't faring as predicted in a post-religious world.  In addition to their own jarring polemics and personal misfires, the New Atheists failed to realize that religion, especially Christianity, was the proverbial branch upon which they were sitting. For example, the freedom of expression depends on a number of assumptions, that there is objective truth, that it can be discovered, that it is accessible to people regardless of race or class, that belief should be free instead of coerced, that people have innate value, and that because of this value they should not be silenced. Every one of these ideas assumes the kind of world described in the Bible and mediated across centuries of Christian thought. Not one of these assumptions can be grounded in a purposeless world that is the product of only natural causes and processes.   Maybe that's what led Dawkins, just a few years ago, to warn against celebrating the decline of Christianity across the world. Turns out that all of the efforts that he and the other New Atheists extended to root out organized religion have left him with “a fear of finding something worse.”   Today's Breakpoint was coauthored by Kasey Leander. For more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, go to colsoncenter.org. 

Are you drinking your wine at the wrong temperature? Which wine gadgets will help you explore new wines without overindulging? Why should you breathe out through your nose after sipping wine?   In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I'm interviewing by Sandy Dawkins and Michelle Lester, hosts of the Wines To Find podcast.   You can find the wines we discussed at https://www.nataliemaclean.com/winepicks   Highlights Which dishes do Sandy and Michelle love to cook and which wines make great pairings? What are the sisters' all-time favourite wine and food pairings? Where are Sandy and Michelle's favourite places to enjoy a glass of wine? What makes the tasting experience of Kinero Cellars Alice Grenache Blanc particularly enjoyable? What's the flavour profile of Sperling Vineyards Pinto Gris? Which foods can you pair with Kinero Cellars Alice Grenache Blanc? Which wine gadgets are Sandy and Michelle's favourite? What controversial wine opinions do the sisters hold? What were the memorable smells from Sandy and Michelle's childhood? Which favourite childhood food would Sandy and Michelle now pair with wine? What are Sandy and Michelle's favourite wine books? How can you choose the right wine to gift? In a dream world, who would Sandy and Michelle want to share a bottle of wine with? Which red wine warning would Sandy and Michelle want to put on a downtown billboard? What are Sandy and Michelle's top tips for improving your wine enjoyment?   Key Takeaways I loved their tips on drinking wine at the right temperature and breathing out through your nose after you sip it for maximum pleasure. They also had some great suggestions for gadgets will help you explore new wines without overindulging. And I couldn't agree more that sparkling wine is the perfect wine for gifting as well as pairing with fries.   Join me on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Live Join the live-stream video of this conversation on Wed at 7 pm ET on Instagram Live Video, Facebook Live Video or YouTube Live Video. I want to hear from you! What's your opinion of what we're discussing? What takeaways or tips do you love most from this chat? What questions do you have that we didn't answer? Want to know when we go live? Add this to your calendar: https://www.addevent.com/calendar/CB262621   About Sandy Dawkins and Michelle Lester The Wines To Find Podcast was created after the two hosts, sisters Sandy and Michelle, travelled together to France and Italy in 2019. Both sisters are wine enthusiasts that have tracked their wine purchases, palates and pairings for years. As a way to continue the thrill of their European trip and to document their wine journey, they created the Wines To Find Podcast with the goal of spending time together, further growing their palates, and sharing wine stories from guests. Wines To Find features two new wines tasted for the first time by the sisters & guests, who span the spectrum of the wine industry from winemakers, owners, growers, sommeliers, fellow enthusiasts and more.     To learn more, visit https://www.nataliemaclean.com/199.

Brief Episode Summary: One only sees the truth when one is ready. As we age, the laundry list of dis-eases and health problems we encounter with the accompanying pharmaceuticals and prescriptions, for most of us, seems to be a never-ending one! Ask yourself this question and be honest with the answer! In recent years, are your medical referrals and visits increasing in number, staying the same or decreasing? I know how I would answer the question. The answer to this dilemma doesn't lie with doing more of the same for that will produce even more of the same results. The answer irrefutably can be found in self-healing. Let's get started.#truth #diseases #health #pharmaceuticals #prescriptions #self-healing #holistic #alternativemedicine #pain #soul #gratitude #mindfulness #laughter #joy #irrational #hopelessness #anxiety #healing #freedomKey Topics:Some of the most powerful modalities you can use to self-heal...and they're free!If self-healing is to be on your short list, believing in what you believe is crucial!The 2 types of pain, how they differ and how does the approach to treatment differ?Sarah's top 6 life-giving steps to pursuing self-care.Your soul needs gratitude, mindfulness, appreciation, love of self and others and joy to be nourished.Anxiety...its symptoms and how we can victoriously overcome it.Changing discomfort, pain, and hopelessness into meaningful healing and freedom!Resources: Email link to episode...https://www.buzzsprout.com/859273/11331588Connect with Sarah on her website at sdessentialhealth.com           Get your own copy of Sarah's life-changing book "HEAL YOURSELF" at Amazon worldwide or Barnes & Noble.com    Alan's link to register to receive new podcasts and other updates: http://eepurl.com/g1DSf9   Link to tell us what podcast themes you'd like to  see us cover: https://form.jotform.com/210597899275071  Sheri Sperry's website to connect with her, https://sellsedona.com/sedona-lifestyleCall to Action If you enjoyed this week's podcast episode, I would greatly appreciate it if you would rate and review it where you listen to your podcasts. Thank you!    Sheri Sperry is YOUR SOLUTIONS  REALTOR!A Realtor in AZ for 10 years, her main goal is to take the stress off you.Support the show (https://www.paypal.com/biz/fund?id=NYYG9FE928BF6)       Support the show Support the show

Today's guest is Sarah Dawkings. Sarah is a Holistic Health Coach, Keynote Speaker, Multi-Award Winning Entrepreneur & Author of the book “Heal Yourself. She has extensive experience in health & wellness and is on a mission to help others improve their overall health through natural means. During this episode we discuss her own self-healing journey, we reflect on the debate between traditional & natural medicine, how to take a holistic approach to your health & her experience writing her book. And the last message she wanted to share is “Your body is a natural healing machine. You were born a healer & you need to believe in your belief that you can heal.”

What's the single best thing you can do to improve your tasting skills? How can you discover some unusual but delicious food and wine pairings? How does music change the taste of wine?   In this episode of the Unreserved Wine Talk podcast, I'm interviewing by Sandy Dawkins and Michelle Lester, hosts of the Wines To Find podcast.   You can find the wines we discussed at https://www.nataliemaclean.com/winepicks   Highlights When did Sandy and Michelle discover their love of wine? How did a trip to European wine country inspire Sandy and Michelle to start the Wines To Find Podcast? How do the sisters use YouTube to give their audience added value? Where did the name “Wines To Find” come from? How do Sandy and Michelle choose new wines to try in each podcast episode? How does the Wines to Find scoring system work? Which online systems does Michelle use to find new wines and wineries she might like? Is there a grape style over which the sisters disagree? Who have been Sandy and Michelle's favourite Wines To Find guests so far? Can music affect our perception of wine?   Key Takeaways I love their approach to learning about wine through vertical and horizontal tastings, whether that's picking maybe one grape, but it's grown in different countries, or perhaps go with one region. It's that side-by-side comparison that is so illustrative of the differences between wines. They share some interesting tips on how you discover some unusual but delicious food and wine pairings. I found their insights into how music can change the taste of wine fascinating.   Join me on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube Live Join the live-stream video of this conversation on Wed at 7 pm ET on Instagram Live Video, Facebook Live Video or YouTube Live Video. I want to hear from you! What's your opinion of what we're discussing? What takeaways or tips do you love most from this chat? What questions do you have that we didn't answer? Want to know when we go live? Add this to your calendar: https://www.addevent.com/calendar/CB262621   About Sandy Dawkins and Michelle Lester The Wines To Find Podcast was created after the two hosts, sisters Sandy and Michelle, travelled together to France and Italy in 2019. Both sisters are wine enthusiasts that have tracked their wine purchases, palates and pairings for years. As a way to continue the thrill of their European trip and to document their wine journey, they created the Wines To Find Podcast with the goal of spending time together, further growing their palates, and sharing wine stories from guests. Wines To Find features two new wines tasted for the first time by the sisters & guests, who span the spectrum of the wine industry from winemakers, owners, growers, sommeliers, fellow enthusiasts and more.     To learn more, visit https://www.nataliemaclean.com/198.

Watch the Full Episode for FREE:  https://londonreal.tv/richard-dawkins-the-selfish-gene-the-god-delusion-understanding-nature-humanity-consciousness/  

We began the show with the latest updates as the Bills get in their final days of practice ahead of Thursday's game and we shared news and notes from around the NFL. Bills OL Dion Dawkins joined the show fresh off the practice field to discuss the high expectations for this year's team, the matchup with the Rams, and his bounce back from COVID he had to endure last season. NFL Network Analyst and former NFL RB Maurice Jones-Drew kicked off the second hour to share his thoughts on the Week 1 matchup, including the strength of the Rams defense, Allen Robinson's impact on LA's offense, and why this will be a close game.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

09-06 OBL Hour 1 - Dion Dawkins catches up with Chris and Steve ahead of the Bills season opener on Thursday. 

Original Air Date: February 15, 2021“We need to have an honest conversation on Black Maternal Health and the disparities in healthcare that threaten Black Women's lives.”This is the core conversation that takes place on this week's episode.This week's episode is a panel discussion, where I am joined by 3 professional doulas - Iman Seraaj, Nicky Dawkins, and Deej.Iman Seraaj is a trained full-spectrum doula passionate about VBACs, breastfeeding, birthrights education, orgasmic birthing, postpartum and prenatal care. With over 12 years of doula and birth advocacy experience; she founded FullCircle Doula Services in 2014.Nicky Dawkins is a holistic Full-Spectrum Doula and Feminine Health Coach. She is also the founder of Werk it Moms — a mom-driven, soon-to-be charity organization — that focuses on providing educational workshops, products, and a safe space for moms in need to connect. Deej is a mother of three little boys, a wife, a doula, childbirth educator, and breastfeeding specialist. Deej also owns a brand that focuses on educating women on their birthrights and all things from pregnancy to postpartum called The Nurtured Baby. During this episode, we have an honest and real conversation on how Black women in the United States experience disproportionately high rates of death related to pregnancy or childbirth - irrespective of income or education level. Iman, Nicky, and Deej provide candid and professional insights into the cause of these health disparities and share solutions we can implement. They also provide questions, advice, and tactics Black Women can use when they are having to engage with a racist medical system and provider. We also have an open conversation on infertility, miscarriages, and loss. I highly encourage that everyone listens to this episode and to the important conversation that Iman, Nicky, and Deej shared with us. I am grateful to my guests for the energy, brilliance, and generosity that they brought to this week's episode. This is an issue that all of us must address. I hope you will listen to this episode and take action.Here's how you can connect with this week's guest: Iman - https://www.instagram.com/imanseraajfc/Nicky - https://www.instagram.com/thankyounicky/Deej - https://www.instagram.com/the.nurturedbaby/tomearl.me/doula

Season two, a conversation about Religious Structures in Western Civilization.

Celina Texas Podcast: Would you order a Wagu burger from a guy with a beard and tattoos of food covering his right arm? What if one of the tattoos was of an armed and dangerous avocado? Believe it or not, most of Celina Texas does precisely that -for a good reason! Chef Joey (as his Toasted Walnut regulars affectionately call him) combines exceptional culinary talent with his love for Celina, Texas. The result? An incredible dining experience in the downtown Celina square. But there's so much more to Chef Joey Dawkins than raw kitchen skills. For example, did you know that Chef Joey started out making sandwiches in the back of another local Celina landmark, the Annie Jack Boutique? Or that Chef Joey recently discovered a way to make lots of money selling, well, let's leave that for you to discover in this episode of CelinaRadio.com. Chef Joey is funny, articulate, and has so much to offer Celina, Texas. You might want to watch Host Ron Lyons and Chef Joey's video created while recording this episode. In a word, what started as a mission to make a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich turned into something hilarious that you aren't going to want to miss!

The Dawkins and Harris New Atheist message has dramatically declined in credibility in the last few years. This leaves plenty of people with an openness to religious answers to some big, life, death and the universe questions to which they thought they had an answer. There are also many within the church who are wrestling with questions bigger than the average church is prepared to answer. An “Estuary” is where the church “river” mingles with the secular “sea” to create an interesting ecosystem. It's a high risk – but potentially high reward – strategy for engaging both these groups by providing a space for them to explore questions together in good faith. We have the opportunity to listen to two Christian Reformed Church pastors from America who have worked with this model on-line and in person for several years and are keen to share their experience in UK. The Pheasant Inn 19 Salt Ln, Salisbury SP1 1DT, United Kingdom

Steve Hsu is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at Michigan State University and cofounder of the company Genomic Prediction.We go deep into the weeds on how embryo selection can make babies healthier and smarter. Steve also explains the advice Richard Feynman gave him to pick up girls, the genetics of aging and intelligence, & the psychometric differences between shape rotators and wordcels.Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.Subscribe to find out about future episodes!Read the full transcript here.Follow Steve on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Please share if you enjoyed this episode! Helps out a ton!Timestamps(0:00:14) - Feynman’s advice on picking up women(0:11:46) - Embryo selection(0:24:19) - Why hasn't natural selection already optimized humans?(0:34:13) - Aging(0:43:18) - First Mover Advantage(0:53:49) - Genomics in dating(1:00:31) - Ancestral populations(1:07:58) - Is this eugenics?(1:15:59) - Tradeoffs to intelligence(1:25:01) - Consumer preferences(1:30:14) - Gwern(1:34:35) - Will parents matter?(1:45:25) - Word cells and shape rotators(1:57:29) - Bezos and brilliant physicists(2:10:23) - Elite educationTranscriptDwarkesh Patel  0:00  Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Steve Hsu. Steve, thanks for coming on the podcast. I'm excited about this.Steve Hsu  0:04  Hey, it's my pleasure! I'm excited too and I just want to say I've listened to some of your earlier interviews and thought you were very insightful, which is why I was excited to have a conversation with you.Dwarkesh Patel 0:14That means a lot for me to hear you say because I'm a big fan of your podcast.Feynman’s advice on picking up womenDwarkesh Patel  0:17  So my first question is: “What advice did Richard Feynman give you about picking up girls?”Steve Hsu  0:24   Haha, wow! So one day in the spring of my senior year, I was walking across campus and saw Feynman coming toward me. We knew each other from various things—it's a small campus, I was a physics major and he was my hero–– so I'd known him since my first year. He sees me, and he's got this Long Island or New York borough accent and says, "Hey, Hsu!"  I'm like, "Hi, Professor Feynman." We start talking. And he says to me, "Wow, you're a big guy." Of course, I was much bigger back then because I was a linebacker on the Caltech football team. So I was about 200 pounds and slightly over 6 feet tall. I was a gym rat at the time and I was much bigger than him. He said, "Steve, I got to ask you something." Feynman was born in 1918, so he's not from the modern era. He was going through graduate school when the Second World War started. So, he couldn't understand the concept of a health club or a gym. This was the 80s and was when Gold's Gym was becoming a world national franchise. There were gyms all over the place like 24-Hour Fitness. But, Feynman didn't know what it was. He's a fascinating guy. He says to me, "What do you guys do there? Is it just a thing to meet girls? Or is it really for training? Do you guys go there to get buff?" So, I started explaining to him that people are there to get big, but people are also checking out the girls. A lot of stuff is happening at the health club or the weight room. Feynman grills me on this for a long time. And one of the famous things about Feynman is that he has a laser focus. So if there's something he doesn't understand and wants to get to the bottom of it, he will focus on you and start questioning you and get to the bottom of it. That's the way his brain worked. So he did that to me for a while because he didn't understand lifting weights and everything. In the end, he says to me, "Wow, Steve, I appreciate that. Let me give you some good advice."Then, he starts telling me how to pick up girls—which he's an expert on. He says to me, "I don't know how much girls like guys that are as big as you." He thought it might be a turn-off. "But you know what, you have a nice smile." So that was the one compliment he gave me. Then, he starts to tell me that it's a numbers game. You have to be rational about it. You're at an airport lounge, or you're at a bar. It's Saturday night in Pasadena or Westwood, and you're talking to some girl. He says, "You're never going to see her again. This is your five-minute interaction. Do what you have to do. If she doesn't like you, go to the next one." He also shares some colorful details. But, the point is that you should not care what they think of you. You're trying to do your thing. He did have a reputation at Caltech as a womanizer, and I could go into that too but I heard all this from the secretaries.Dwarkesh Patel  4:30  With the students or only the secretaries? Steve Hsu  4:35  Secretaries! Well mostly secretaries. They were almost all female at that time. He had thought about this a lot, and thought of it as a numbers game. The PUA guys (pick-up artists) will say, “Follow the algorithm, and whatever happens, it's not a reflection on your self-esteem. It's just what happened. And you go on to the next one.” That was the advice he was giving me, and he said other things that were pretty standard: Be funny, be confident—just basic stuff. Steve Hu: But the main thing I remember was the operationalization of it as an algorithm. You shouldn’t internalize whatever happens if you get rejected, because that hurts. When we had to go across the bar to talk to that girl (maybe it doesn’t happen in your generation), it was terrifying. We had to go across the bar and talk to some lady! It’s loud and you’ve got a few minutes to make your case. Nothing is scarier than walking up to the girl and her friends. Feynman was telling me to train yourself out of that. You're never going to see them again, the face space of humanity is so big that you'll probably never re-encounter them again. It doesn't matter. So, do your best. Dwarkesh Patel  6:06  Yeah, that's interesting because.. I wonder whether he was doing this in the 40’–– like when he was at that age, was he doing this? I don't know what the cultural conventions were at the time. Were there bars in the 40s where you could just go ahead and hit on girls or? Steve Hsu  6:19  Oh yeah absolutely. If you read literature from that time, or even a little bit earlier like Hemingway or John O'Hara, they talk about how men and women interacted in bars and stuff in New York City. So, that was much more of a thing back than when compared to your generation. That's what I can’t figure out with my kids! What is going on? How do boys and girls meet these days? Back in the day, the guy had to do all the work. It was the most terrifying thing you could do, and you had  to train yourself out of that.Dwarkesh Patel  6:57  By the way, for the context for the audience, when Feynman says you were a big guy, you were a football player at Caltech, right? There's a picture of you on your website, maybe after college or something, but you look pretty ripped. Today, it seems more common because of the gym culture. But I don’t know about back then. I don't know how common that body physique was.Steve Hsu  7:24  It’s amazing that you asked this question. I'll tell you a funny story. One of the reasons Feynman found this so weird was because of the way body-building entered the United States.  They  were regarded as freaks and homosexuals at first. I remember swimming and football in high school (swimming is different because it's international) and in swimming, I picked up a lot of advanced training techniques from the Russians and East Germans. But football was more American and not very international. So our football coach used to tell us not to lift weights when we were in junior high school because it made you slow. “You’re no good if you’re bulky.” “You gotta be fast in football.” Then, something changed around the time I was in high school–the coaches figured it out. I began lifting weights since I was an age group swimmer, like maybe age 12 or 14. Then, the football coaches got into it mainly because the University of Nebraska had a famous strength program that popularized it.At the time, there just weren't a lot of big guys. The people who knew how to train were using what would be considered “advanced knowledge” back in the 80s. For example, they’d know how to do a split routine or squat on one day and do upper body on the next day–– that was considered advanced knowledge at that time. I remember once.. I had an injury, and I was in the trainer's room at the Caltech athletic facility. The lady was looking at my quadriceps. I’d pulled a muscle, and she was looking at the quadriceps right above your kneecap. If you have well-developed quads, you'd have a bulge, a bump right above your cap. And she was looking at it from this angle where she was in front of me, and she was looking at my leg from the front. She's like, “Wow, it's swollen.” And I was like, “That's not the injury. That's my quadricep!” And she was a trainer! So, at that time, I could probably squat 400 pounds. So I was pretty strong and had big legs. The fact that the trainer didn't really understand what well-developed anatomy was supposed to look like blew my mind!So anyway, we've come a long way. This isn't one of these things where you have to be old to have any understanding of how this stuff evolved over the last 30-40 years.Dwarkesh Patel  10:13  But, I wonder if that was a phenomenon of that particular time or if people were not that muscular throughout human history. You hear stories of  Roman soldiers who are carrying 80 pounds for 10 or 20 miles a day. I mean, there's a lot of sculptures in the ancient world, or not that ancient, but the people look like they have a well-developed musculature.Steve Hsu  10:34  So the Greeks were very special because they were the first to think about the word gymnasium. It was a thing called the Palaestra, where they were trained in wrestling and boxing. They were the first people who were seriously into physical culture specific training for athletic competition.Even in the 70s, when I was a little kid, I look back at the guys from old photos and they were skinny. So skinny! The guys who went off and fought World War Two, whether they were on the German side, or the American side, were like 5’8-5’9 weighing around 130 pounds - 140 pounds. They were much different from what modern US Marines would look like. So yeah, physical culture was a new thing. Of course, the Romans and the Greeks had it to some degree, but it was lost for a long time. And, it was just coming back to the US when I was growing up. So if you were reasonably lean (around 200 pounds) and you could bench over 300.. that was pretty rare back in those days.Embryo selectionDwarkesh Patel  11:46  Okay, so let's talk about your company Genomic Prediction. Do you want to talk about this company and give an intro about what it is?Steve Hsu  11:55  Yeah. So there are two ways to introduce it. One is the scientific view. The other is the IVF view. I can do a little of both. So scientifically, the issue is that we have more and more genomic data. If you give me the genomes of a bunch of people and then give me some information about each person, ex. Do they have diabetes? How tall are they? What's their IQ score?  It’s a natural AI machine learning problem to figure out which features in the DNA variation between people are predictive of whatever variable you're trying to predict.This is the ancient scientific question of how you relate the genotype of the organism (the specific DNA pattern), to the phenotype (the expressed characteristics of the organism). If you think about it, this is what biology is! We had the molecular revolution and figured out that it’s people's DNA that stores the information which is passed along. Evolution selects on the basis of the variation in the DNA that’s expressed as phenotype, as that phenotype affects fitness/reproductive success. That's the whole ballgame for biology. As a physicist who's trained in mathematics and computation, I'm lucky that I arrived on the scene at a time when we're going to solve this basic fundamental problem of biology through brute force, AI, and machine learning. So that's how I got into this. Now you ask as an entrepreneur, “Okay, fine Steve, you're doing this in your office with your postdocs and collaborators on your computers. What use is it?” The most direct application of this is in the following setting: Every year around the world, millions of families go through IVF—typically because they're having some fertility issues, and also mainly because the mother is in her 30s or maybe 40s. In the process of IVF, they use hormone stimulation to produce more eggs. Instead of one per cycle, depending on the age of the woman, they might produce anywhere between five to twenty, or even sixty to a hundred eggs for young women who are hormonally stimulated (egg donors).From there, it’s trivial because men produce sperm all the time. You can fertilize eggs pretty easily in a little dish, and get a bunch of embryos that grow. They start growing once they're fertilized. The problem is that if you're a family and produce more embryos than you’re going to use, you have the embryo choice problem. You have to figure out which embryo to choose out of  say, 20 viable embryos. The most direct application of the science that I described is that we can now genotype those embryos from a small biopsy. I can tell you things about the embryos. I could tell you things like your fourth embryo being an outlier. For breast cancer risk, I would think carefully about using number four. Number ten is an outlier for cardiovascular disease risk. You might want to think about not using that one. The other ones are okay. So, that’s what genomic prediction does. We work with 200 or 300 different IVF clinics in six continents.Dwarkesh Patel  15:46  Yeah, so the super fascinating thing about this is that the diseases you talked about—or at least their risk profiles—are polygenic. You can have thousands of SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms) determining whether you will get a disease. So, I'm curious to learn how you were able to transition to this space and how your knowledge of mathematics and physics was able to help you figure out how to make sense of all this data.Steve Hsu  16:16  Yeah, that's a great question. So again, I was stressing the fundamental scientific importance of all this stuff. If you go into a slightly higher level of detail—which you were getting at with the individual SNPs, or polymorphisms—there are individual locations in the genome, where I might differ from you, and you might differ from another person. Typically, each pair of individuals will differ at a few million places in the genome—and that controls why I look a little different than youA lot of times, theoretical physicists have a little spare energy and they get tired of thinking about quarks or something. They want to maybe dabble in biology, or they want to dabble in computer science, or some other field. As theoretical physicists, we always feel, “Oh, I have a lot of horsepower, I can figure a lot out.” (For example, Feynman helped design the first parallel processors for thinking machines.) I have to figure out which problems I can make an impact on because I can waste a lot of time. Some people spend their whole lives studying one problem, one molecule or something, or one biological system. I don't have time for that, I'm just going to jump in and jump out. I'm a physicist. That's a typical attitude among theoretical physicists. So, I had to confront sequencing costs about ten years ago because I knew the rate at which they were going down. I could anticipate that we’d get to the day (today) when millions of genomes with good phenotype data became available for analysis. A typical training run might involve almost a million genomes, or half a million genomes. The mathematical question then was: What is the most effective algorithm given a set of genomes and phenotype information to build the best predictor?  This can be  boiled down to a very well-defined machine learning problem. It turns out, for some subset of algorithms, there are theorems— performance guarantees that give you a bound on how much data you need to capture almost all of the variation in the features. I spent a fair amount of time, probably a year or two, studying these very famous results, some of which were proved by a guy named Terence Tao, a Fields medalist. These are results on something called compressed sensing: a penalized form of high dimensional regression that tries to build sparse predictors. Machine learning people might notice L1-penalized optimization. The very first paper we wrote on this was to prove that using accurate genomic data and these very abstract theorems in combination could predict how much data you need to “solve” individual human traits. We showed that you would need at least a few hundred thousand individuals and their genomes and their heights to solve for height as a phenotype. We proved that in a paper using all this fancy math in 2012. Then around 2017, when we got a hold of half a million genomes, we were able to implement it in practical terms and show that our mathematical result from some years ago was correct. The transition from the low performance of the predictor to high performance (which is what we call a “phase transition boundary” between those two domains) occurred just where we said it was going to occur. Some of these technical details are not understood even by practitioners in computational genomics who are not quite mathematical. They don't understand these results in our earlier papers and don't know why we can do stuff that other people can't, or why we can predict how much data we'll need to do stuff. It's not well-appreciated, even in the field. But when the big AI in our future in the singularity looks back and says, “Hey, who gets the most credit for this genomics revolution that happened in the early 21st century?”, they're going to find these papers on the archive where we proved this was possible, and how five years later, we actually did it. Right now it's under-appreciated, but the future AI––that Roko's Basilisk AI–will look back and will give me a little credit for it. Dwarkesh Patel  21:03  Yeah, I was a little interested in this a few years ago. At that time, I looked into how these polygenic risk scores were calculated. Basically, you find the correlation between the phenotype and the alleles that correlate with it. You add up how many copies of these alleles you have, what the correlations are, and you do a weighted sum of that. So that seemed very simple, especially in an era where we have all this machine learning, but it seems like they're getting good predictive results out of this concept. So, what is the delta between how good you can go with all this fancy mathematics versus a simple sum of correlations?Steve Hsu  21:43  You're right that the ultimate models that are used when you've done all the training, and when the dust settles, are straightforward. They’re pretty simple and have an additive structure. Basically, I either assign a nonzero weight to this particular region in the genome, or I don't. Then, I need to know what the weighting is, but then the function is a linear function or additive function of the state of your genome at some subset of positions. The ultimate model that you get is straightforward. Now, if you go back ten years, when we were doing this, there were lots of claims that it was going to be super nonlinear—that it wasn't going to be additive the way I just described it. There were going to be lots of interaction terms between regions. Some biologists are still convinced that's true, even though we already know we have predictors that don't have interactions.The other question, which is more technical, is whether in any small region of your genome, the state of the individual variants is highly correlated because you inherit them in chunks. You need to figure out which one you want to use. You don't want to activate all of them because you might be overcounting. So that's where these L-1 penalization sparse methods force the predictor to be sparse. That is a key step. Otherwise, you might overcount. If you do some simple regression math, you might have 10-10 different variants close by that have roughly the same statistical significance.But, you don't know which one of those tends to be used, and you might be overcounting effects or undercounting effects. So, you end up doing a high-dimensional optimization, where you grudgingly activate a SNP when the signal is strong enough. Once you activate that one, the algorithm has to be smart enough to penalize the other ones nearby and not activate them because you're over counting effects if you do that. There's a little bit of subtlety in it. But, the main point you made is that the ultimate predictors, which are very simple and addictive—sum over effect sizes and time states—work well. That’s related to a deep statement about the additive structure of the genetic architecture of individual differences. In other words, it's weird that the ways that I differ from you are merely just because I have more of something or you have less of something. It’s not like these things are interacting in some incredibly understandable way. That's a deep thing—which is not appreciated that much by biologists yet. But over time, they'll figure out something interesting here.Why hasn’t natural selection already optimized humans?Dwarkesh Patel  24:19  Right. I thought that was super fascinating, and I commented on that on Twitter. What is interesting about that is two things. One is that you have this fascinating evolutionary argument about why that would be the case that you might want to explain. The second is that it makes you wonder if becoming more intelligent is just a matter of turning on certain SNPs. It's not a matter of all this incredible optimization being like solving a sudoku puzzle or anything. If that's the case, then why hasn't the human population already been selected to be maxed out on all these traits if it's just a matter of a bit flip?Steve Hsu  25:00  Okay, so the first issue is why is this genetic architecture so surprisingly simple? Again, we didn't know it would be simple ten years ago. So when I was checking to see whether this was a field that I should go into depending on our capabilities to make progress, we had to study the more general problem of the nonlinear possibilities. But eventually, we realized that most of the variance would probably be captured in an additive way. So, we could narrow down the problem quite a bit. There are evolutionary reasons for this. There’s a famous theorem by Fisher, the father of population genetics (aka. frequentist statistics). Fisher proved something called Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection, which says that if you impose some selection pressure on a population, the rate at which that population responds to the selection pressure (lets say it’s the bigger rats that out-compete the smaller rats) then at what rate does the rat population start getting bigger? He showed that it's the additive variants that dominate the rate of evolution. It's easy to understand why if it's a nonlinear mechanism, you need to make the rat bigger. When you sexually reproduce, and that gets chopped apart, you might break the mechanism. Whereas, if each short allele has its own independent effect, you can inherit them without worrying about breaking the mechanisms. It was well known among a tiny theoretical population of biologists that adding variants was the dominant way that populations would respond to selection. That was already known. The other thing is that humans have been through a pretty tight bottleneck, and we're not that different from each other. It's very plausible that if I wanted to edit a human embryo, and make it into a frog, then there are all kinds of subtle nonlinear things I’d have to do. But all those identical nonlinear complicated subsystems are fixed in humans. You have the same system as I do. You have the not human, not frog or ape, version of that region of DNA, and so do I. But the small ways we differ are mostly little additive switches. That's this deep scientific discovery from over the last 5-10 years of work in this area. Now, you were asking about why evolution hasn't completely “optimized” all traits in humans already. I don't know if you’ve ever done deep learning or high-dimensional optimization, but in that high-dimensional space, you're often moving on a slightly-tilted surface. So, you're getting gains, but it's also flat. Even though you scale up your compute or data size by order of magnitude, you don't move that much farther. You get some gains, but you're never really at the global max of anything in these high dimensional spaces. I don't know if that makes sense to you. But it's pretty plausible to me that two things are important here. One is that evolution has not had that much time to optimize humans. The environment that humans live in changed radically in the last 10,000 years. For a while, we didn't have agriculture, and now we have agriculture. Now, we have a swipe left if you want to have sex tonight. The environment didn't stay fixed. So, when you say fully optimized for the environment, what do you mean? The ability to diagonalize matrices might not have been very adaptive 10,000 years ago. It might not even be adaptive now. But anyway, it's a complicated question that one can't reason naively about. “If God wanted us to be 10 feet tall, we'd be 10 feet tall.” Or “if it's better to be smart, my brain would be *this* big or something.” You can't reason naively about stuff like that.Dwarkesh Patel  29:04  I see. Yeah.. Okay. So I guess it would make sense then that for example, with certain health risks, the thing that makes you more likely to get diabetes or heart disease today might be… I don't know what the pleiotropic effect of that could be. But maybe that's not that important one year from now.Steve Hsu  29:17  Let me point out that most of the diseases we care about now—not the rare ones, but the common ones—manifest when you're 50-60 years old. So there was never any evolutionary advantage of being super long-lived. There's even a debate about whether the grandparents being around to help raise the kids lifts the fitness of the family unit.But, most of the time in our evolutionary past, humans just died fairly early. So, many of these diseases would never have been optimized against evolution. But, we see them now because we live under such good conditions, we can regulate people over 80 or 90 years.Dwarkesh Patel  29:57  Regarding the linearity and additivity point, I was going to make the analogy that– and I'm curious if this is valid– but when you're programming, one thing that's good practice is to have all the implementation details in separate function calls or separate programs or something, and then have your main loop of operation just be called different functions like, “Do this, do that”, so that you can easily comment stuff away or change arguments. This seemed very similar to that where by turning these names on and off, you can change what the next offering will be. And, you don't have to worry about actually implementing whatever the underlying mechanism is. Steve Hsu  30:41  Well, what you said is related to what Fisher proved in his theorems. Which is that, if suddenly, it becomes advantageous to have X, (like white fur instead of black fur) or something, it would be best if there were little levers that you could move somebody from black fur to white fur continuously by modifying those switches in an additive way. It turns out that for sexually reproducing species where the DNA gets scrambled up in every generation, it's better to have switches of that kind. The other point related to your software analogy is that there seem to be modular, fairly modular things going on in the genome. When we looked at it, we were the first group to have, initially, 20 primary disease conditions we had decent predictors for. We started looking carefully at just something as trivial as the overlap of my sparsely trained predictor. It turns on and uses *these* features for diabetes, but it uses *these* features for schizophrenia. It’s the stupidest metric, it’s literally just how much overlap or variance accounted for overlap is there between pairs of disease conditions. It's very modest. It's the opposite of what naive biologists would say when they talk about pleiotropy.They're just disjoint! Disjoint regions of your genome that govern certain things. And why not? You have 3 billion base pairs—there's a lot you can do in there. There's a lot of information there. If you need 1000 to control diabetes risk, I estimated you could easily have 1000 roughly independent traits that are just disjoint in their genetic dependencies. So, if you think about D&D,  your strength, decks, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma—those are all disjoint. They're all just independent variables. So it's like a seven-dimensional space that your character lives in. Well, there's enough information in the few million differences between you and me. There's enough for 1000-dimensional space of variation.“Oh, how considerable is your spleen?” My spleen is a little bit smaller, yours is a little bit bigger - that can vary independently of your IQ. Oh, it's a big surprise. The size of your spleen can vary independently of the size of your big toe. If you do information theory, there are about 1000 different parameters, and I can vary independently with the number of variants I have between you and me. Because you understand some information theory, it’s trivial to explain, but try explaining to a biologist, you won't get very far.Dwarkesh Patel  33:27  Yeah, yeah, do the log two of the number of.. is that basically how you do it? Yeah.Steve Hsu  33:33  Okay. That's all it is. I mean, it's in our paper. We look at how many variants typically account for most of the variation for any of these major traits, and then imagine that they're mostly disjoint. Then it’s just all about: how many variants you need to independently vary 1000 traits? Well, a few million differences between you and me are enough. It's very trivial math. Once you understand the base and how to reason about information theory, then it's very trivial. But, it ain’t trivial for theoretical biologists, as far as I can tell.AgingDwarkesh Patel  34:13  But the result is so interesting because I remember reading in The Selfish Gene that, as he (Dawkins) hypothesizes that the reason we could be aging is an antagonistic clash. There's something that makes you healthier when you're young and fertile that makes you unhealthy when you're old. Evolution would have selected for such a trade-off because when you're young and fertile, evolution and your genes care about you. But, if there's enough space in the genome —where these trade-offs are not necessarily necessary—then this could be a bad explanation for aging, or do you think I'm straining the analogy?Steve Hsu  34:49  I love your interviews because the point you're making here is really good. So Dawkins, who is an evolutionary theorist from the old school when they had almost no data—you can imagine how much data they had compared to today—he would tell you a story about a particular gene that maybe has a positive effect when you're young, but it makes you age faster. So, there's a trade-off. We know about things like sickle cell anemia. We know stories about that. No doubt, some stories are true about specific variants in your genome. But that's not the general story. The general story you only discovered in the last five years is that thousands of variants control almost every trait and those variants tend to be disjoint from the ones that control the other trait. They weren't wrong, but they didn't have the big picture.Dwarkesh Patel  35:44  Yeah, I see. So, you had this paper, it had polygenic, health index, general health, and disease risk.. You showed that with ten embryos, you could increase disability-adjusted life years by four, which is a massive increase if you think about it. Like what if you could live four years longer and in a healthy state? Steve Hsu  36:05  Yeah, what's the value of that? What would you pay to buy that for your kid?Dwarkesh Patel  36:08  Yeah. But, going back to the earlier question about the trade-offs and why this hasn't already been selected for,  if you're right and there's no trade-off to do this, just living four years older (even if that's beyond your fertility) just being a grandpa or something seems like an unmitigated good. So why hasn’t this kind of assurance hasn't already been selected for? Steve Hsu  36:35  I’m glad you're asking about these questions because these are things that people are very confused about, even in the field. First of all, let me say that when you have a trait that's controlled by  10,000 variants (eg. height is controlled by order 10,000 variants and probably cognitive ability a little bit more), the square root of 10,000 is 100.  So, if I could come to this little embryo, and I want to give it one extra standard deviation of height, I only need to edit 100. I only need to flip 100 minus variance to plus variance. These are very rough numbers. But, one standard deviation is the square root of “n”. If I flip a coin “n” times, I want a better outcome in terms of the number of ratio heads to tails. I want to increase it by one standard deviation. I only need to flip the square root of “n” heads because if you flip a lot, you will get a narrow distribution that peaks around half, and the width of that distribution is the square root of “n”. Once I tell you, “Hey, your height is controlled by 10,000 variants, and I only need to flip 100 genetic variants to make you one standard deviation for a male,” (that would be three inches tall, two and a half or three inches taller), you suddenly realize, “Wait a minute, there are a lot of variants up for grabs there. If I could flip 500 variants in your genome, I would make you five standard deviations taller, you'd be seven feet tall.”  I didn't even have to do that much work, and there's a lot more variation where that came from. I could have flipped even more because I only flipped 500 out of 10,000, right? So, there's this  quasi-infinite well of variation that evolution or genetic engineers could act on. Again, the early population geneticists who bred corn and animals know this. This is something they explicitly know about because they've done calculations. Interestingly, the human geneticists who are mainly concerned with diseases and stuff, are often unfamiliar with the math that the animal breeders already know. You might be interested to know that the milk you drink comes from heavily genetically-optimized cows bred artificially using almost exactly the same technologies that we use at genomic prediction. But, they're doing it to optimize milk production and stuff like this. So there is a big well of variance. It's a consequence of the trait's poly genicity. On the longevity side of things, it does look like people could “be engineered” to live much longer by flipping the variants that make the risk for diseases that shorten your life. The question is then “Why didn't evolution give us life spans of thousands of years?” People in the Bible used to live for thousands of years. Why don't we? I mean, *chuckles* that probably didn’t happen. But the question is, you have this very high dimensional space, and you have a fitness function. How big is the slope in a particular direction of that fitness function? How much more successful reproductively would Joe caveman have been if he lived to be 150 instead of only, 100 or something? There just hasn't been enough time to explore this super high dimensional space. That's the actual answer. But now, we have the technology, and we're going to f*****g explore it fast. That's the point that the big lightbulb should go off. We’re mapping this space out now. Pretty confident in 10 years or so, with the CRISPR gene editing technologies will be ready for massively multiplexed edits. We'll start navigating in this high-dimensional space as much as we like. So that's the more long-term consequence of the scientific insights.Dwarkesh Patel  40:53  Yeah, that's super interesting. What do you think will be the plateau for a trait of how long you’ll live? With the current data and techniques, you think it could be significantly greater than that?Steve Hsu  41:05  We did a simple calculation—which amazingly gives the correct result. This polygenic predictor that we built (which isn't perfect yet but will improve as we gather more data) is used in selecting embryos today. If you asked, out of a billion people, “What's the best person typically, what would their score be on this index and then how long would they be predicted to live?”’ It's about 120 years. So it's spot on. One in a billion types of person lives to be 120 years old. How much better can you do? Probably a lot better. I don't want to speculate, but other nonlinear effects, things that we're not taking into account will start to play a role at some point. So, it's a little bit hard to estimate what the true limiting factors will be. But one super robust statement, and I'll stand by it, debate any Nobel Laureate in biology who wants to discuss it even,  is that there are many variants available to be selected or edited. There's no question about that. That's been established in animal breeding in plant breeding for a long time now. If you want a chicken that grows to be *this* big, instead of *this* big, you can do it. You can do it if you want a cow that produces 10 times or 100 times more milk than a regular cow. The egg you ate for breakfast this morning, those bio-engineered chickens that lay almost an egg a day… A chicken in the wild lays an egg a month. How the hell did we do that? By genetic engineering. That's how we did it. Dwarkesh Patel  42:51  Yeah. That was through brute artificial selection. No fancy machine learning there.Steve Hsu  42:58  Last ten years, it's gotten sophisticated machine learning genotyping of chickens. Artificial insemination, modeling of the traits using ML last ten years. For cow breeding, it's done by ML. First Mover AdvantageDwarkesh Patel  43:18  I had no idea. That's super interesting. So, you mentioned that you're accumulating data and improving your techniques over time, is there a first mover advantage to a genomic prediction company like this? Or is it whoever has the newest best algorithm for going through the biobank data? Steve Hsu  44:16  That's another super question. For the entrepreneurs in your audience, I would say in the short run, if you ask what the valuation of GPB should be? That's how the venture guys would want me to answer the question. There is a huge first mover advantage because they're important in the channel relationships between us and the clinics. Nobody will be able to get in there very easily when they come later because we're developing trust and an extensive track record with clinics worldwide—and we're well-known. So could 23andme or some company with a huge amount of data—if they were to get better AI/ML people working on this—blow us away a little bit and build better predictors because they have much more data than we do? Possibly, yes. Now, we have had core expertise in doing this work for years that we're just good at it. Even though we don't have as much data as 23andme, our predictors might still be better than theirs. I'm out there all the time, working with biobanks all around the world. I don't want to say all the names, but other countries are trying to get my hands on as much data as possible.But, there may not be a lasting advantage beyond the actual business channel connections to that particular market. It may not be a defensible, purely scientific moat around the company. We have patents on specific technologies about how to do the genotyping or error correction on the embryo, DNA, and stuff like this. We do have patents on stuff like that. But this general idea of who will best predict human traits from DNA? It's unclear who's going to be the winner in that race. Maybe it'll be the Chinese government in 50 years? Who knows?Dwarkesh Patel  46:13  Yeah, that's interesting. If you think about a company Google, theoretically, it's possible that you could come up with a better algorithm than PageRank and beat them. But it seems like the engineer at Google is going to come up with whatever edge case or whatever improvement is possible.Steve Hsu  46:28  That's exactly what I would say. PageRank is deprecated by now. But, even if somebody else comes up with a somewhat better algorithm if they have a little bit more data, if you have a team doing this for a long time and you're focused and good, it's still tough to beat you, especially if you have a lead in the market.Dwarkesh Patel  46:50  So, are you guys doing the actual biopsy? Or is it just that they upload the genome, and you're the one processing just giving recommendations? Is it an API call, basically?Steve Hsu  47:03  It's great, I love your question. It is totally standard. Every good IVF clinic in the world regularly takes embryo biopsies. So that's standard. There’s a lab tech doing that. Okay. Then, they take the little sample, put it on ice, and ship it. The DNA as a molecule is exceptionally robust and stable. My other startup solves crimes that are 100 years old from DNA that we get from some semen stain on some rape victim, serial killer victims bra strap, we've done stuff that.Dwarkesh Patel  47:41  Jack the Ripper, when are we going to solve that mystery?Steve Hsu  47:44  If they can give me samples, we can get into that. For example, we just learned that you could recover DNA pretty well if someone licks a stamp and puts on their correspondence. If you can do Neanderthals, you can do a lot to solve crimes. In the IVF workflow, our lab, which is in New Jersey, can service every clinic in the world because they take the biopsy, put it in a standard shipping container, and send it to us. We’re actually genotyping DNA in our lab, but we've trained a few of the bigger  clinics to do the genotyping on their site. At that point, they upload some data into the cloud and then they get back some stuff from our platform. And at that point it's going to be the whole world, every human who wants their kid to be healthy and get the best they can– that data is going to come up to us, and the report is going to come back down to their IVF physician. Dwarkesh Patel  48:46  Which is great if you think that there's a potential that this technology might get regulated in some way, you could go to Mexico or something, have them upload the genome (you don't care what they upload it from), and then get the recommendations there. Steve Hsu  49:05  I think we’re going to evolve to a point where we are going to be out of the wet part of this business, and only in the cloud and bit part of this business. No matter where it is, the clinics are going to have a sequencer, which is *this* big, and their tech is going to quickly upload and retrieve the report for the physician three seconds later. Then, the parents are going to look at it on their phones or whatever. We’re basically there with some clinics. It’s going to be tough to regulate because it’s just this. You have the bits and you’re in some repressive, terrible country that doesn’t allow you to select for some special traits that people are nervous about, but you can upload it to some vendor that’s in Singapore or some free country, and they give you the report back. Doesn’t have to be us, we don’t do the edgy stuff. We only do the health-related stuff right now. But, if you want to know how tall this embryo is going to be…I’ll tell you a mind-blower! When you do face recognition in AI, you're mapping someone's face into a parameter space on the order of hundreds of parameters, each of those parameters is super heritable. In other words, if I take two twins and photograph them, and the algorithm gives me the value of that parameter for twin one and two, they're very close. That's why I can't tell the two twins apart, and face recognition can ultimately tell them apart if it’s really good system. But you can conclude that almost all these parameters are identical for those twins. So it's highly heritable. We're going to get to a point soon where I can do the inverse problem where I have your DNA  and I predict each of those parameters in the face recognition algorithm and then reconstruct the face. If I say that when this embryo will be 16, that is what she will look like. When she's 32, this is what she's going to look like. I'll be able to do that, for sure. It's only an AI/ML problem right now. But basic biology is clearly going to work. So then you're going to be able to say, “Here's a report. Embryo four is so cute.” Before, we didn't know we wouldn't do that, but it will be possible. Dwarkesh Patel  51:37  Before we get married, you'll want to see what their genotype implies about their faces' longevity. It's interesting that you hear stories about these cartel leaders who will get plastic surgery or something to evade the law, you could have a check where you look at a lab and see if it matches the face you would have had five years ago when they caught you on tape.Steve Hsu  52:02  This is a little bit back to old-school Gattaca, but you don't even need the face! You can just take a few molecules of skin cells and phenotype them and know exactly who they are. I've had conversations with these spooky Intel folks. They're very interested in, “Oh, if some Russian diplomat comes in, and we think he's a spy, but he's with the embassy, and he has a coffee with me, and I save the cup and send it to my buddy at Langley, can we figure out who this guy is? And that he has a daughter who's going to Chote? Can do all that now.Dwarkesh Patel  52:49  If that's true, then in the future, world leaders will not want to eat anything or drink. They'll be wearing a hazmat suit to make sure they don't lose a hair follicle.Steve Hsu  53:04  The next time Pelosi goes, she will be in a spacesuit if she cares. Or the other thing is, they're going to give it. They're just going to be, “Yeah, my DNA is everywhere. If I'm a public figure, I can't track my DNA. It's all over.”Dwarkesh Patel  53:17  But the thing is, there's so much speculation that Putin might have cancer or something. If we have his DNA, we can see his probability of having cancer at age 70, or whatever he is, is 85%. So yeah, that’d be a very verified rumor. That would be interesting. Steve Hsu  53:33  I don't think that would be very definitive. I don't think we'll reach that point where you can say that Putin has cancer because of his DNA—which I could have known when he was an embryo. I don't think it's going to reach that level. But, we could say he is at high risk for a type of cancer. Genomics in datingDwarkesh Patel  53:49  In 50 or 100 years, if the majority of the population is doing this, and if the highly heritable diseases get pruned out of the population, does that mean we'll only be left with lifestyle diseases? So, you won't get breast cancer anymore, but you will still get fat or lung cancer from smoking?Steve Hsu  54:18  It's hard to discuss the asymptotic limit of what will happen here. I'm not very confident about making predictions like that. It could get to the point where everybody who's rich or has been through this stuff for a while, (especially if we get the editing working) is super low risk for all the top 20 killer diseases that have the most life expectancy impact. Maybe those people live to be 300 years old naturally. I don't think that's excluded at all. So, that's within the realm of possibility. But it's going to happen for a few lucky people like Elon Musk before it happens for shlubs like you and me. There are going to be very angry inequality protesters about the Trump grandchildren, who, models predict will live to be 200 years old. People are not going to be happy about that.Dwarkesh Patel  55:23  So interesting. So, one way to think about these different embryos is if you're producing multiple embryos, and you get to select from one of them, each of them has a call option, right? Therefore, you probably want to optimize for volatility as much, or if not more than just the expected value of the trait. So, I'm wondering if there are mechanisms where you can  increase the volatility in meiosis or some other process. You just got a higher variance, and you can select from the tail better.Steve Hsu  55:55  Well, I'll tell you something related, which is quite amusing. So I talked with some pretty senior people at the company that owns all the dating apps. So you can look up what company this is, but they own Tinder and Match. They’re kind of interested in perhaps including a special feature where you upload your genome instead of Tinder Gold / Premium.  And when you match- you can talk about how well you match the other person based on your genome. One person told me something shocking. Guys lie about their height on these apps. Dwarkesh Patel  56:41  I’m shocked, truly shocked hahaha. Steve Hsu  56:45  Suppose you could have a DNA-verified height. It would prevent gross distortions if someone claims they're 6’2 and they’re 5’9. The DNA could say that's unlikely. But no, the application to what you were discussing is more like, “Let's suppose that we're selecting on intelligence or something. Let's suppose that the regions where your girlfriend has all the plus stuff are complementary to the regions where you have your plus stuff. So, we could model that and say,  because of the complementarity structure of your genome in the regions that affect intelligence, you're very likely to have some super intelligent kids way above your, the mean of your you and your girlfriend's values. So, you could say things like it being better for you to marry that girl than another. As long as you go through embryo selection, we can throw out the bad outliers. That's all that's technically feasible. It's true that one of the earliest patent applications, they'll deny it now. What's her name? Gosh, the CEO of 23andme…Wojcicki, yeah. She'll deny it now. But, if you look in the patent database, one of the very earliest patents that 23andme filed when they were still a tiny startup was about precisely this: Advising parents about mating and how their kids would turn out and stuff like this. We don't even go that far in GP, we don't even talk about stuff like that, but they were thinking about it when they founded 23andme.Dwarkesh Patel  58:38  That is unbelievably interesting. By the way, this just occurred to me—it's supposed to be highly heritable, especially people in Asian countries, who have the experience of having grandparents that are much shorter than us, and then parents that are shorter than us, which suggests that  the environment has a big part to play in it malnutrition or something. So how do you square that our parents are often shorter than us with the idea that height is supposed to be super heritable.Steve Hsu  59:09  Another great observation. So the correct scientific statement is that we can predict height for people who will be born and raised in a favorable environment. In other words, if you live close to a McDonald's and you're able to afford all the food you want, then the height phenotype becomes super heritable because the environmental variation doesn't matter very much. But, you and I both know that people are much smaller if we return to where our ancestors came from, and also, if you look at how much food, calories, protein, and calcium they eat, it's different from what I ate and what you ate growing up. So we're never saying the environmental effects are zero. We're saying that for people raised in a particularly favorable environment, maybe the genes are capped on what can be achieved, and we can predict that. In fact, we have data from Asia, where you can see much bigger environmental effects. Age affects older people, for fixed polygenic scores on the trait are much shorter than younger people.Ancestral populationsDwarkesh Patel  1:00:31  Oh, okay. Interesting. That raises that next question I was about to ask: how applicable are these scores across different ancestral populations?Steve Hsu  1:00:44  Huge problem is that most of the data is from Europeans. What happens is that if you train a predictor in this ancestry group and go to a more distant ancestry group, there's a fall-off in the prediction quality. Again, this is a frontier question, so we don't know the answer for sure. But many people believe that there's a particular correlational structure in each population, where if I know the state of this SNP, I can predict the state of these neighboring SNPs. That is a product of that group's mating patterns and ancestry. Sometimes, the predictor, which is just using statistical power to figure things out, will grab one of these SNPs as a tag for the truly causal SNP in there. It doesn't know which one is genuinely causal, it is just grabbing a tag, but the tagging quality falls off if you go to another population (eg. This was a very good tag for the truly causal SNP in the British population. But it's not so good a tag in the South Asian population for the truly causal SNP, which we hypothesize is the same). It's the same underlying genetic architecture in these different ancestry groups. We don't know if that's a hypothesis. But even so, the tagging quality falls off. So my group spent a lot of our time looking at the performance of predictor training population A, and on distant population B, and modeling it trying to figure out trying to test hypotheses as to whether it's just the tagging decay that’s responsible for most of the faults. So all of this is an area of active investigation. It'll probably be solved in five years. The first big biobanks that are non-European are coming online. We're going to solve it in a number of years.Dwarkesh Patel  1:02:38  Oh, what does the solution look like?  Unless you can identify the causal mechanism by which each SNP is having an effect, how can you know that something is a tag or whether it's the actual underlying switch?Steve Hsu  1:02:54  The nature of reality will determine how this is going to go. So we don't truly  know if the  innate underlying biology is true. This is an amazing thing. People argue about human biodiversity and all this stuff, and we don't even know whether these specific mechanisms that predispose you to be tall or having heart disease are the same  in these different ancestry groups. We assume that it is, but we don't know that. As we get further away to Neanderthals or Homo Erectus, you might see that they have a slightly different architecture than we do. But let's assume that the causal structure is the same for South Asians and British people. Then it's a matter of improving the tags. How do I know if I don't know which one is causal? What do I mean by improving the tags? This is a machine learning problem. If there's a SNP, which is always coming up as very significant when I use it across multiple ancestry groups, maybe that one's casual. As I vary the tagging correlations in the neighborhood of that SNP, I always find that that one is the intersection of all these different sets, making me think that one's going to be causal. That's a process we're engaged in now—trying to do that. Again, it's just a machine learning problem. But we need data. That's the main issue.Dwarkesh Patel  1:04:32  I was hoping that wouldn't be possible, because one way we might go about this research is that it itself becomes taboo or causes other sorts of bad social consequences if you can definitively show that on certain traits, there are differences between ancestral populations, right? So, I was hoping that maybe there was an evasion button where we can't say because they're just tags and the tags might be different between different ancestral populations. But with machine learning, we’ll know.Steve Hsu  1:04:59  That's the situation we're in now, where you have to do some fancy analysis if you want to claim that Italians have lower height potential than Nordics—which is possible. There's been a ton of research about this because there are signals of selection. The alleles, which are activated in height predictors, look like they've been under some selection between North and South Europe over the last 5000 years for whatever reason. But, this is a thing debated by people who study molecular evolution. But suppose it's true, okay? That would mean that when we finally get to the bottom of it, we find all the causal loci for height, and the average value for the Italians is lower than that for those living in Stockholm. That might be true. People don't get that excited? They get a little bit excited about height. But they would get really excited if this were true for some other traits, right?Suppose the causal variants affecting your level of extraversion are systematic, that the average value of those weighed the weighted average of those states is different in Japan versus Sicily. People might freak out over that. I'm supposed to say that's obviously not true. How could it possibly be true? There hasn't been enough evolutionary time for those differences to arise. After all, it's not possible that despite what looks to be the case for height over the last 5000 years in Europe, no other traits could have been differentially selected for over the last 5000 years. That's the dangerous thing. Few people understand this field well enough to understand what you and I just discussed and are so alarmed by it that they're just trying to suppress everything. Most of them don't follow it at this technical level that you and I are just discussing. So, they're somewhat instinctively negative about it, but they don't understand it very well.Dwarkesh Patel  1:07:19  That's good to hear. You see this pattern that by the time that somebody might want to regulate or in some way interfere with some technology or some information, it already has achieved wide adoption. You could argue that that's the case with crypto today. But if it's true that a bunch of IVF clinics worldwide are using these scores to do selection and other things, by the time people realize the implications of this data for other kinds of social questions, this has already been an existing consumer technology.Is this eugenics?Steve Hsu  1:07:58  That's true, and the main outcry will be if it turns out that there are massive gains to be had, and only the billionaires are getting them. But that might have the consequence of causing countries to make this free part of their national health care system. So Denmark and Israel pay for IVF. For infertile couples, it's part of their national health care system. They're pretty aggressive about genetic testing. In Denmark, one in 10 babies are born through IVF. It's not clear how it will go. But we're in for some fun times. There's no doubt about that.Dwarkesh Patel  1:08:45  Well, one way you could go is that some countries decided to ban it altogether. And another way it could go is if countries decided to give everybody free access to it. If you had to choose between the two,  you would want to go for the second one. Which would be the hope. Maybe only those two are compatible with people's moral intuitions about this stuff. Steve Hsu  1:09:10  It’s very funny because most wokist people today hate this stuff. But, most progressives like Margaret Sanger, or anybody who was the progressive intellectual forebears of today's wokist, in the early 20th century, were all that we would call today in Genesis because they were like, “Thanks to Darwin, we now know how this all works. We should take steps to keep society healthy and (not in a negative way where we kill people we don't like, but we should help society do healthy things when they reproduce, and have healthy kids).” Now, this whole thing has just been flipped over among progressives. Dwarkesh Patel  1:09:52  Even in India, less than 50 years ago, Indira Gandhi, she's on the left side of India's political spectrum. She was infamous for putting on these forced sterilization programs. Somebody made an interesting comment about this where they were asked, “Oh, is it true that history always tilts towards progressives? And if so, isn't everybody else doomed? Aren't their views doomed?”The person made a fascinating point: whatever we consider left at the time tends to be winning. But what is left has changed a lot over time, right? In the early 20th century, prohibition was a left cause. It was a progressive cause, and that changed, and now the opposite is the left cause. But now, legalizing pot is progressive. Exactly. So, if Conquest’s second law is true, and everything tilts leftover time, just change what is left is, right? That's the solution. Steve Hsu  1:10:59  No one can demand that any of these woke guys be intellectually self-consistent, or even say the same things from one year to another? But one could wonder what they think about these literally Communist Chinese. They’re recycling huge parts of their GDP to help the poor and the southern stuff. Medicine is free, education is free, right? They're clearly socialists, and literally communists. But in Chinese, the Chinese characters for eugenics is a positive thing. It means healthy production. But more or less, the whole viewpoint on all this stuff is 180 degrees off in East Asia compared to here, and even among the literal communists—so go figure.Dwarkesh Patel  1:11:55  Yeah, very based. So let's talk about one of the traits that people might be interested in potentially selecting for: intelligence. What is the potential for us to acquire the data to correlate the genotype with intelligence?Steve Hsu  1:12:15  Well, that's the most personally frustrating aspect of all of this stuff. If you asked me ten years ago when I started doing this stuff what were we going to get, everything was gone. On the optimistic side of what I would have predicted, so everything's good. Didn't turn out to be interactively nonlinear, or it didn't turn out to be interactively pleiotropic. All these good things, —which nobody could have known a priori how they would work—turned out to be good for gene engineers of the 21st century. The one frustrating thing is because of crazy wokeism, and fear of crazy wokists, the most interesting phenotype of all is lagging b

On this episode of Black & Published, Nikesha is speaking with author, Georgia Dawkins,  about her memoir, Everybody Knows: The Power of Being in Position. Georgia is The Purpose Producer. From ABC's Good Morning America to Will Packer's Central Ave, Georgia has worked within a multitude of television genres including local news, network news, talk shows, reality television, and entertainment news. In 2018 she published Everybody Knows while at the same time launching Georgia Dawkins Media to cement herself as a young media tycoon in the making. During the conversation, Georgia and Nikesha discuss how they came to their respective media careers--which is where their paths first crossed some 10 years ago--and why they left. Georgia also shares why she can't help but tell the truth, how she can't help but to seek bigger for herself after years of playing small, and why it's sometimes necessary to burn bridges in your life in the name of self-preservation. Support the show

Welcome to our 'Summer Nights' Series sponsored by Liza Pruitt! We are so excited to continue to share your favorite artist's summer memories throughout the month of August and how those moments inspire the art they create now! Stay tuned for our group show going live on August 24th on LizaPruitt.com! Today's guest, Mary Craven Dawkins is a Nashville-based photographer. Her process of photographing involves capturing real, candid, authentic moments of you and your loved ones. Mary Craven docu­ments the beauty in our everyday life and the people we cherish the most. Her goal is to capture those present fleeting moments and get them on film. These images are not just for her clients but they are for future generations to treasure and remember, just the way it happened. She seeks to always capture those special moments for her clients so they have them forever.  Listeners will love getting to know Mary Craven in today's episode and hearing more about her journey to becoming a photographer. We hope you enjoy listening as we reminisce on all things summer! --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/howdshedothat/support

In this episode of Sports the NEMO way we bring the Philadelphia Eagles to the table for discussion.

Entrepreneur, the Creative Services Director of The BS3 Network, co-host of The Fourcast and host/moderator of Queen3 and King Podcast, Ivan Dawkins, reveals himself! In OPEN THE WAY, he mentions:how East Garland, TX is still in his life's fabricthe fact he lived with three sisters and a single motherIn BRIDGE TO PROSPERITY, Ivan muses on:how he became a Cowboys fanwhen he became a teenage fatherIn BEHIND THE PURPOSE, he talks about:using the power of humor and laughter being a medicinehow his journey to entrepreneurship startedIn BRING TO LIGHT, he hammers home:the importance of being relationalbeing a part of The Fourcast and Queen3 and King podcastthe origins of being affiliated with the BS3 Network ... and much more! ---------------------------------------Timestamp-- Show Intro - 0:00-- Guest Introduction (Ivan Dawkins) - 0:59-- Open The Way (His mother's large impact) - 4:26-- Bridge To Prosperity (The camaraderie/resilience of Black culture) - 14:43-- Behind The Purpose (Success as a giver ... and a forgiver) - 26:39-- Bring To Light (Queen3 and King Podcast and The Fourcast) - 41:35-- Plug Tunin' - 53:44-- Words Of Wisdom - 56:33-- Show Outro - 57:48--------------------------------------- Catch Ivan on YouTube: Queen3 and King Podcast - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZ4M5LaGWGY0cvvBO_OiJZQBS3 Network - https://www.youtube.com/c/BS3Network Follow Ivan on these social media platforms:Twitterhttps://twitter.com/ikingdawkhttps://twitter.com/queen3andkinghttps://twitter.com/Bs3NetworkFacebookhttps://www.facebook.com/bs3networkInstagramhttps://www.instagram.com/ikingdawk/https://www.instagram.com/queen_3_and_king_podcast/https://www.instagram.com/bs3network/TikTokhttps://www.tiktok.com/@ikingdawkRevelations via social media - https://www.flowcode.com/page/revelationsRevelations on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucakkm9v_pwdm2wqmnonyxvwRevelations on Roku TV/BS3 Network (Friday - 3:00pm ET/2:00pm CT) - https://bs3tvlive.com/ To reach Cole via social media - https://www.flowcode.com/page/hostcolejohnson Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Matt Parrino & Ryan Talbot break down everything that happened in Thursday's final training camp practice for the Bills. Then the guys go into a stock up/stock down report from camp. Then they finish up with a quick look at 6 players they're watching closely on Saturday in the preseason opener against the Indianapolis Colts. Sign up for the NYUP Bills newsletter! Don't miss all the Bills coverage. Head over to www.Syracuse.com/newsletters to start getting your Bills stories and the podcast delivered right to your inbox. SHOUT!" Buffalo Bills football podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow @MattParrino (https://twitter.com/MattParrino) and @RyanTalbotBills (https://twitter.com/RyanTalbotBills) on Twitter Find our Bills coverage wherever you like to consume social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buffalobill... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buffalobills... Twitter: https://twitter.com/billsupdate For all your Bills coverage head to https://www.newyorkupstate.com/buffal... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Matt Parrino and Ryan Talbot are back at it to bring you all the latest developments out at St. John Fisher University. The guys discuss which offensive lineman went down in practice, more camp fights, Elam flashing playmaking ability, Dawkins' return, and the scary firepower in Bills offense. Sign up for the NYUP Bills newsletter! Don't miss all the Bills coverage. Head over to www.Syracuse.com/newsletters to start getting your Bills stories and the podcast delivered right to your inbox SHOUT!" Buffalo Bills football podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, Google, Stitcher, and wherever you listen to podcasts Follow @MattParrino (https://twitter.com/MattParrino) and @RyanTalbotBills (https://twitter.com/RyanTalbotBills) on Twitter Find our Bills coverage wherever you like to consume social media: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/buffalobill... Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/buffalobills... Twitter: https://twitter.com/billsupdate For all your Bills coverage head to https://www.newyorkupstate.com/buffal... Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The HBS hosts try to go viral with Andrew Baron, creator of KnowYourMeme. Memes: if you get them, you get them... and if you don't, you don't. But how is a meme created? How does it spread? And how does it die? In this episode, we dig into the complex dynamics of memes-- on Dawkins' account, the most rudimentary units of social information-- to see how they do (and don't) imitate so-called "natural" processes in their generation, mutation, adaptation, and replication. With our special guest, Andrew Baron (creator of Rocketboom and KnowYourMeme), we also investigate what, if anything, distinguishes an "internet meme" from other kinds of memes, and how internet memes may provide a unique insight into social operations and cultural formations.Full episode notes at this link:http://hotelbarpodcast.com/podcast/episode-64-memes------------------If you enjoy Hotel Bar Sessions podcast, please be sure to subscribe, submit a rating/review, and follow us on Twitter @hotelbarpodcast. You can also help keep this podcast ad-free by supporting us financially at patreon.com/hotelbarsessions. 

Hour 1: Chris Brown and Steve Tasker go over the first few days of camp and also play Dion Dawkins interview from yesterday with the media.

(8:45) Julio Jones: Where will he finish on the Bucs in receiving yards?(14:20) Kyler Murray: Are people overblowing his homework clause?(22:25) Lamar Jackson: He was asked about Simms in his press conference, and we hear the response.(27:40) Russell Wilson: Will he keep avoiding the middle of the field with the Broncos?(30:30) Seahawks: What would have to happen for them to make the playoffs?(32:50) Zach Wilson: Do his off-field exploits move him up the Simms Top 40?(36:40) Top 5 WR reax: Super-homie Tomas nailed Chris' list, and Simms explains more about his Davante Adams opinion.(41:20) Top 6 RBs: Both Chris and Ahmed give the best backs in the NFL right now.(1:09:00) GUEST - WWE Superstar Angelo Dawkins: The tag team contender joins us to give us his expert analysis of Ahmed's Super Brawl.

Former South Carolina wide receiver Chavis Dawkins joins the show to share some insightful stories and interesting life experiences. Chavis brings us through his journey during his time at South Carolina and updates us on his newest life venture. Leave it to Alyssa to ask the dreaded over/under question about Gamecock Football. Does Chavis think South Carolina will take home over or under 6.5 wins this season? New Episodes of Opinions On Pickens premiere every Wednesday. FOLLOW OPINIONS ON PICKENS |https://linktr.ee/opinionsonpickens?fbclid=IwAR3P6Ys3C0fn9U8iVZh9PLpwKKwqnfiFx2eh8cF95Z8WslT67m-cUBhmWUA

Fresh off an instant classic at WWE Money in the Bank, Angelo Dawkins of The Street Profits returns to the podcast to chat about the rivalry with The Usos, gambling luck and proving the haters wrong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode, we welcome Justin Brierley back to the show. He's the host of the Unbelievable? radio show and podcast on Premier Christian Radio in the UK. He's also the author of Unbelievable? Why after ten years of talking with atheists, I'm still a Christian. In this interview, we dig into the debate he just hosted between Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, how Dawkins opened the door to a potential belief in God, his forthcoming book about the meaning crisis in society, why he decided to use the pronouns that did not align with one of his guest's biological sex, why the writings of C.S. Lewis are so important to him, and much more. Let's get into it…  Episode notes and links HERE Donate to support our mission of equipping men to push back darkness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From May 2012, Mike Lee aka "The Religious Antagonist" was a US atheist who made YouTube videos mocking Christianity.  His videos were popular but his approach earned him both praise and criticism from fellow atheists. David Robertson often interacts with atheists online and has earned himself the title "the wee flea" for his provocative interactions on the Dawkins website. They debated whether Mike's approach is a helpful one.  David accused Mike of emotional atheism and an incoherent view of Christianity. Mike said mocking Christianity was the best way of policing its power in the US. • More shows, free eBook & newsletter: https://premierunbelievable.com • For live events: http://www.unbelievable.live • For online learning: https://www.premierunbelievable.com/training-and-events • Support us in the USA: http://www.premierinsight.org/unbelievableshow • Support us in the rest of the world: https://www.premierunbelievable.com/donate

Dr. Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, theorist, and one of the world's foremost atheists. In this episode, Dr. Dawkins and I discuss religion, psychedelics, consciousness, symbolism, postmodernism, and the importance of objective truth. Links: To follow Dawkins on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins Website: https://richarddawkins.com/ Read Dawkins' articles: https://richarddawkins.com/articles To donate to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science: https://richarddawkins.net/donate/ Show Notes: [0:00] Intro [1:30] Jordan's rise to fame, Bill C-16, and Free Speech [5:30] Intimidation and fear of speaking out against the far left [9:10] Micro retreats [11:40] Dawkins' paper about the organism as a model [18:30] Female sexual selection [21:10] Differences between Jordan and Dr. Dawkins' thinking [24:00] Jeffrey Gray, his work on modeling, Psychedelics, and Anxiety [30:00] Psychedelics, Symbolism, and Consciousness [41:00] Jordan's experiences with psilocybin and yoga [45:40] Postmodernism, Lacan, Foucault, and Mikhaila's Oxford Union debate [52:30] Jordan addresses Dawkins' assertion that despite being against postmodernist thinking he at times utilizes symbolism to speculate in a way which is similar to them. [53:50] Finding commonality between myths and symbols across cultures [55:50] False pattern recognition and revelatory thoughts [59:20] Objective truth and the scientific process [1:07:10] Unpleasant or dangerous truths [1:08:10] The metaphysical vision of the redeeming power of truth [1:10:10] Jordan and Dawkins discuss the idea that a narrative drives the process of inquiry, even in regards to objective truth [1:12:50] Humans' ability to understand difficult concepts on a biological level [1:16:10] Question: Do you identify the religious impulse or even the religious phenomenon with the totalitarian proclivity for dogmatic certainty and the potential acceleration of aggression and atrocity as a consequence? [1:20:10] Question: To what degree do you think that consciousness operates as a fundamental mechanism of selection and shaping? [1:23:00] Artificial intelligence and the metaphysical significance of consciousness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dr. Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist, theorist, and one of the world's foremost atheists.In this episode, Dr. Dawkins and I discuss religion, psychedelics, consciousness, symbolism, postmodernism, and the importance of objective truth.Links:To follow Dawkins on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RichardDawkinsWebsite: https://richarddawkins.com/Read Dawkins' articles: https://richarddawkins.com/articlesTo donate to the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science: https://richarddawkins.net/donate/Show Notes:[0:00] Intro[1:30] Jordan's rise to fame, Bill C-16, and Free Speech[5:30] Intimidation and fear of speaking out against the far left[9:10] Micro retreats[11:40] Dawkins' paper about the organism as a model[18:30] Female sexual selection[21:10] Differences between Jordan and Dr. Dawkins' thinking[24:00] Jeffrey Gray, his work on modeling, Psychedelics, and Anxiety[30:00] Psychedelics, Symbolism, and Consciousness[41:00] Jordan's experiences with psilocybin and yoga[45:40] Postmodernism, Lacan, Foucault, and Mikhaila's Oxford Union debate[52:30] Jordan addresses Dawkins' assertion that despite being against postmodernist thinking he at times utilizes symbolism to speculate in a way which is similar to them.[53:50] Finding commonality between myths and symbols across cultures[55:50] False pattern recognition and revelatory thoughts[59:20] Objective truth and the scientific process[1:07:10] Unpleasant or dangerous truths[1:08:10] The metaphysical vision of the redeeming power of truth[1:10:10] Jordan and Dawkins discuss the idea that a narrative drives the process of inquiry, even in regards to objective truth[1:12:50] Humans' ability to understand difficult concepts on a biological level[1:16:10] Question: Do you identify the religious impulse or even the religious phenomenon with the totalitarian proclivity for dogmatic certainty and the potential acceleration of aggression and atrocity as a consequence?[1:20:10] Question: To what degree do you think that consciousness operates as a fundamental mechanism of selection and shaping?[1:23:00] Artificial intelligence and the metaphysical significance of consciousness Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices