#109— Biology and Culture

Making Sense with Sam Harris

Waking Up with Sam Harris

Samharris, Currentevents, Politics, Ethics, Religion, Neuroscience, Science, Society & Culture, Philosophy

4.6 • 29.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2017

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Harris speaks with Bret Weinstein about the moral panic at Evergreen State College, the concept of race, genetic differences between human populations, intersectionality, sex and gender, “metaphorical truth,” religion and “group selection,” equality, and other topics.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if you're
0:12.1	hearing this, you are not currently on our subscriber feed and will only be hearing
0:16.2	the first part of this conversation. In order to access full episodes of the Making Sense
0:20.7	Podcast, you'll need to subscribe at samharis.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed
0:26.1	to add to your favorite pod catcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads
0:31.2	on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.
0:35.8	So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one.
0:47.0	So today we have my first live podcast officially in Seattle with Brett Weinstein.
0:52.8	I introduced Brett on stage, but Brett is the biologist who is at the center of the Evergreen
0:58.9	scandal, which you may have heard about. We don't go into as much details we might have because
1:04.8	Evergreen is just an hour outside of Seattle, and many people in the audience were well aware of
1:11.3	what happened there. It did make national news, and it was the most visible apart from what happened
1:18.7	to Nicholas Christakis at Yale of these recent moral panics on college campuses. But briefly,
1:25.2	what happened there is they traditionally had what they called a day of absence, where people of
1:31.2	color would stay away from campus for a day to make their absence felt. And Brett, as an extremely
1:38.8	liberal and progressive member of the biology department, was always in support of that.
1:43.2	But last year they decided to flip the logic of this event, and rather than people of color deciding
1:50.3	to stay away, they decided to tell white people that they were not welcome on campus on that day.
1:58.3	Absence wasn't compulsory, but it was highly recommended. Now Brett noticed
2:05.2	immediately that this was not quite the same ethical and political message, and set as much in an
2:13.6	email to administrators and his colleagues. And then they which hunt began. So there's much
2:19.8	more about that online, and you can see Brett's other interviews on other podcasts, like the Joe
	...

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