The term “witch-hunt” is used today to describe everything from political scandals to school board shake-ups. Long before the Salem witch trials, women and men were rounded up by neighbors, accused of committing horrific crimes using supernatural powers, scrutinized by priests and juries, and promptly executed. The belief in witchcraft — and the deep fear of evil it instilled in communities — led to a cycle of accusation, anger, and purging that has occurred repeatedly in the West for centuries. (more…)
The twelfth century birthed a new brand of sanctioned terror, an international network of secret police and courts, an army of inquisitors whose sworn duty was to seek out anyone regarded as an enemy, and a casualty list numbering in the tens of thousands. The original agents of the Inquisition — priests and monks, scribes and notaries, attorneys and accountants, torturers and executioners — were deputized by the Church and their worst excesses were excused as the pardonable sins of soldiers engaged in a holy war against heresy.
In this lecture based on his new book, Jonathan Kirsch delivers a sweeping and provocative history that explores how the Inquisition was honed to perfection and brought to bear on an ever-widening circle of victims by authoritarians in both church and state for over 600 years. Ranging from the Knights Templar to the first Protestants, from Joan of Arc to Galileo; from the torture and murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent women during the Witch Craze to its greatest power in Spain after 1492, when the secret tribunals were directed for the first time against Jews and Muslims to the modern war on terror — Kirsch shows us how the Inquisition stands as a universal and ineradicable symbol of the terror that results when absolute power corrupts.
Jonathan Kirsch is the author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed The Harlot by the Side of the Road, Moses, The Woman Who Laughed at God, and A History of the End of the World. Kirsch is also a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times, an attorney, and a guest host and commentator on NPR.
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In this controversial lecture based on his new book, the world-renowned complexity theorist Dr. Stuart Kauffman argues that people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality, and that those who do believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. Kauffman believes that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond both reductionist science and dogmatic theology to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine that will change the way we think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason. (more…)
Speakers: Dr. Greg Benford, Dr. Elisabeth Malartre
Concepts once purely fiction — robots, cyborg parts, artificial intelligence — are becoming part of everyday reality. Soon robots will be everywhere, performing surgery, exploring hazardous places, making rescues, fighting fires, and handling heavy goods. After a decade or two, they will be as unremarkable as computer screens are now in our offices, airports, and restaurants. Cyborgs will be less obvious. These additions to the human body — rebuilt joints, elbows, and hearts — are mostly inferior now. Soon we will cross the line between repair and augmentation, probably first in sports medicine and cosmetic alterations, then for anyone who wants to make a body perform better and last longer than it ordinarily could. Controversy will arise, but it will not stop our desire to live longer and be stronger than we are. Benford and Malartre are not afraid to speculate or to focus closely on surprising things already possible and being done. (more…)
Apes and dolphins: primates and cetaceans. Could any creatures appear to be more different? Yet both are large-brained intelligent mammals with complex communication and social interaction. In the first book to study apes and dolphins side by side, Maddalena Bearzi and Craig B. Stanford, a dolphin biologist and a primatologist who have spent their careers studying these animals in the wild, combine their insights with compelling results that teaches us about another large-brained mammal: Homo sapiens. Noting that apes and dolphins have had no common ancestor in nearly 100 million years, Bearzi and Stanford describe the parallel evolution that gave rise to their intelligence. They detail their subjects’ ability to develop family bonds, form alliances, and care for their young. They offer an understanding of their culture, politics, social structure, personality, and capacity for emotion. The resulting dual portrait — with striking overlaps in behavior — is key to understanding the nature of “beautiful minds.” (more…)
One hundred years ago, scientists would have said that lasers, televisions, and the atomic bomb were beyond the realm of physical possibility. In his new book, Physics of the Impossible, the renowned physicist Michio Kaku explores to what extent technologies and devices deemed equally impossible today might become commonplace in the future. From teleportation to the routine use of force fields, Kaku uses the world of science fiction to explore the fundamentals — and the limits — of the laws of physics as we know them today. He explains how: The science of optics, electromagnetism, and light may be able to be used to simulate invisibility; Enhancing the sensitivity of MRI devices may someday allow us to read minds; Magnetic fields, superconductors, and nanotechnologies may eventually enable scientists to levitate an elevator in outer space. (more…)
In this unusual tag-team lecture Zak and Shermer debunk two myths: (1) Homo economicus: that “economic man” is rational, free and selfish and (2) that evolution and economics are based almost entirely on cutthroat competition and self-maximizing greed. In Zak’s Moral Markets and Shermer’s The Mind of the Market, the authors demonstrate that people are as irrational with money as they are in all other aspects of life, and that Alfred Tennyson’s characterization of competition in nature — “red in tooth and claw”— and the Gordon Gekko “greed is good” characterization of capitalism are woefully incomplete in understanding how evolution and economics works. (more…)
In this debate on what are arguably two of the most important questions in the culture wars today — Is Religion a Force for Good or Evil? and Can you be Good without God? — the conservative Christian author and cultural scholar Dinesh D’Souza and the libertarian skeptic writer and social scientist Michael Shermer, square off to resolve these and related issues, such as the relationship between science and religion and the nature and existence of God. This event promises to be one of the liveliest ever hosted by the Skeptics Society at Caltech, mixing science, religion, politics, and culture. (more…)
Have you ever had to deal with a Creationist who takes the Genesis accounts literally, and who insists that the biblical story of Noah’s flood can account for all the geologic features of the earth, as well as all the creatures that survived on the ark? In this lecture, Dr. Prothero will not only discuss the biblical and logistical problems with “flood geology,” but also show how creationists’ conception of the geologic record would mean that we would never find coal, oil, gas or other natural resources that our society needs. (more…)
The author of the highly acclaimed and controversial book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It, investigative journalist Jon Entine, in his new book Abraham’s Children, attempts to answer new taboo topics, such as: Did Moses really live? What was the real fate of the Lost Tribes?
How did the advent of Christianity change the DNA of humanity, and why Jews — the tiniest fraction of the world’s population — score highest on intelligence tests and hold so many Nobel Prizes, why there are disproportionately so many more Jewish lawyers and doctors, and what the answers to such questions tell us about human nature and nurture. Entine vividly brings to life the profound human implications of the Age of Genetics, retelling the story of the Bible through the prism of DNA, while illuminating one of today’s most controversial topics: the connection between genetics and identity. The focus of genome research has shifted from our shared humanity to human differences, and we are now confronted with questions once considered taboo.
One of the most influential thinkers of our time, Dr. Steven Pinker marries two of the subjects he knows best — language and human nature — into his new book on how words can help explain our nature (for example, what swearing reveals about our emotions or what innuendo discloses about relationships). The author of the bestselling books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and Blank Slate, Pinker reveals how our use of prepositions and tenses taps into peculiarly human concepts of space and time, and how our nouns and verbs speak to our notions of matter. Even the name we give our babies have important things to say about our relations to our children and society. Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. In 2006, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most important people in the world. He conducts research on language and cognition, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time, and Slate, and is the author of numerous scientific papers and six books.
Why do people dodge responsibility when things fall apart? Why the parade of public figures unable to own up when they screw up? Why the endless marital quarrels over who is right? Why can we see hypocrisy in others but not in ourselves? Are we all liars? Or do we really believe the stories we tell? Renowned social psychologist Dr. Carol Tavris takes a compelling look into how the brain is wired for self-justification. When we make mistakes, we must calm the cognitive dissonance that jars our feelings of self-worth. And so we create fictions that absolve us of responsibility, restoring our belief that we are smart, moral, and right — a belief that often keeps us on a course that is dumb, immoral, and wrong.
Dr. Tavris is a social psychologist and author of Anger and The Mismeasure of Woman. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Scientific American, and many other publications. This lecture is based on her book, co-authored with Dr. Elliot Aronson.
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How is it possible for ordinary, average, even good people to become perpetrators of evil? Dr. Zimbardo, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, ran the famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” in the late 1960s that randomly assigned healthy, normal intelligent college students to play the roles of prisoner or guard in a projected 2 week-long study that he was forced to terminate after only 6 days because it went out of control, with pacifists becoming sadistic guards, and normal kids breaking down emotionally. Dr. Zimbardo applies his theories to understanding torture in the Inquisition, the massacre in Rwanda, the rape of Nanking, and the abuse and torture in Iraq’s infamous Abu Ghraib prison.
Dr. Zimbardo reviews the research findings from conformity, obedience to authority, role-playing, dehumanization, deindividuation and moral disengagement, that validate the assertion that situational power is stronger than we appreciate, and may come to dominate individual dispositions. He introduces the “evil of inaction” as a new form of evil that supports those who are the perpetrators of evil, by knowing but not acting to challenge them. Finally, after considering “The banality of evil” as everyman and every woman’s potential for engaging in evil deeds despite their generally moral upbringing and pro-social life style, Dr. Zimbardo introduces the new concept of “The Banality of Heroism” by those who defied the Lucifer Effect.
In the tradition of the bestselling The Physics of Star Trek, acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ouellette explains fundamental concepts in the physical sciences through examples culled from the hit TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off, Angel. The weird and wonderful world of the Buffyverse —where the melding of magic and science is an everyday occurrence — provides a fantastical jumping-off point for looking at complex theories of biology, chemistry, and theoretical physics.
From surreal vampires, demons, and interdimensional portals to energy conservation, black holes, and string theory, The Physics of the Buffyverse is serious science for the rest of us.
Jennifer Ouellette writes the column This Month in Physics History for APS News, the monthly publication of the American Physical Society. Her articles have appeared in publications from Discover to Salon.
Before the sacred authors were declared sacred, they were fair game for attack or revision. If you open up the Bible and read it straight through, you will notice two things that should not be true if it had been written as a coherent whole and with a single purpose. First, the Bible is quite repetitious; second, the Bible frequently seems to contradict itself. Readers have often ignored these contradictions, apologists have long tried to reconcile them, and critics revel in them. Randel Helms chooses another course — to understand the contradictions by looking at the cultural and historical factors that produced them. Bible book authors were often motivated to write because they wanted to challenge or correct those who had written before them. Helms respectfully navigates a thoughtful passage through the books of the Bible to explain how and why they were written, and to reveal who the authors of the Bible were writing for or against.
Dr. Randel Helms is a Bible scholar and professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. He is the author of Gospel Fictions and Who Wrote the Gospels?
In his latest debunking project (after The Culture of Fear), sociologist Glassner argues that frequent sensational headlines and scientific controversies about obesity, fast food, and food safety have left many Americans bewildered about what to eat. Glassner’s well-researched and wide-ranging commentary on American eating habits and food-related beliefs offers a welcome antidote to such confusion by examining the veracity of numerous food myths. Casting his clear-eyed, critical gaze on nutrition researchers and reformers, food writers, and corporate food marketers, Glassner succeeds in making a persuasive case that Americans take their concern over healthy eating to unnecessarily extreme levels.
Dr. Barry Glassner is the author of the new book, The Gospel of Food. He is also the author of the highly acclaimed and bestseller The Culture of Fear, named a “Best Book of the Year” by the Los Angeles Times. A Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California (and a former journalist and editor for ABC radio news), Glassner has appeared on Oprah, Today, Hardball, Nightline, The O’Reilly Factor, and was featured in Michael Moore’s Academy Award winning film, Bowling for Columbine.
Jonathan Kirsch is the author of God Against the Gods, The Woman Who Laughed at God, King David, Moses, and The Harlot by the Side of the Road.
The question of how and when the world will end has captivated thinkers for centuries. Wars, natural disasters, social upheaval and personal suffering often send believers back to the writings of their prophets and seers, whose gift is to bring satisfying answers to such questions. The book most studied in the Western tradition is Revelation, the last entry in the Christian canon. Kirsch, a book columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of numerous bestsellers about the Bible, takes the reader on a delightful 2,000-year journey and shows how churches, philosophers, clergy and armchair interpreters have promoted their political, social and religious agendas based on their belief that the end was imminent. Some of this history can be quite sobering, as the powerful have waged wars and built societies based on their varying perceptions of Revelation’s message. However, consistent with Kirsch’s earlier literary efforts, in particular The Harlot by the Side of the Road, the author exercises great care while treating his material with both sobriety and a healthy sense of the ironic.
Dr. Bart Kosko is Professor of Electrical Engineering, USC, and author of Fuzzy Thinking, Heaven in a Chip, The Fuzzy Future, and Noise
A celebrated maverick in the world of science, Bark Kosko introduced the revolutionary concept of fuzzy logic. In his latest book, upon which this lecture is based, he provides the first scientific history of noise. Noise occurs at every level of the physical universe, from the big bang to blaring car alarms. Today, noise is considered the curse of the information age, but, in fact, not all noise is bad. Debunking this and many other commonly held beliefs about noise, Kosko gives readers a vivid sense of how deeply noise permeates both the world around us and within us, and considers noise’s possible role in the ice ages to noise pollution laws, the use of noise to generate synthetic speech, and Hedy Lamarr’s contribution to noisy wireless communication.
Dr. Richard Dawkins is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Ancestors’ Tale, and The God Delusion
The God Delusion, by the Oxford University evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, is based on his controversial BBC documentary, The Root of All Evil? Dawkins presents his view of religion as a cultural virus that, like a computer virus, once downloaded into the software of society corrupts almost all programs it encounters. It isn’t hard to find examples to fit this view; one has only to read the dailies coming out of the Middle East to see its nefarious effects. And Dawkins is so compelling in his narrative — both on-camera in his cultured British accent, and in print through a literary style unmatched by any living science writer — that when you reach the end you are convinced that the answer to the rhetorical question posed in the documentary’s title is a resounding YES! Of course, religion is so pervasive around the world and throughout history that it is a two-edged sword that cuts both ways — a force for unspeakable evil as well as unmitigated good. It is Dawkins’ belief that the former outweighs the latter and that it is time for humanity to grow beyond it.
The following items featuring Richard Dawkins are available:
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