44. Dr. David P. Barash — Human Nature Through a Glass Brightly

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2018

⏱️ 93 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Humans have long seen ourselves as the center of the universe, the apple of God’s eye, specially-created creatures who are somehow above and beyond the natural world. This viewpoint — a persistent paradigm of our own unique self-importance — is as dangerous as it is false. In this conversation with Michael Shermer based on his new book Through a Glass Brightly, noted biologist and evolutionary psychologist David Barash explores the process by which science has, throughout time, cut humanity “down to size,” and how humanity has responded. Shermer and Barash also explore how evolutionary psychology became politicized, with the Right embracing it and the Left looking askance at it, based on a deeper commitment to human nature as grounded deeply in our biology and genetics vs. human nature as malleable and shaped primarily by culture. A lifelong liberal and social activist, Dr. Barash nevertheless accepts the science wherever it leads, regardless of ideology. From there Barash and Shermer discuss human aggression and violence, whether or not war is part of our nature, game theory and nuclear deterrence and why Barash thinks MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) is a dangerous and fraudulent game to play with extinction on the line, how we can get to Nuclear Zero, and whether we should be optimistic or pessimistic for our species’ future.

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This Science Salon was recorded in audio format only on October 19, 2018.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science A Lot, a series of conversations
0:10.4	with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.
0:17.0	When you were hired, there was no evolutionary psychology there was barely even
0:24.0	sociobiology I guess or maybe not even that yet. Right not even that actually
0:29.3	Ed Wilson's book sociobiology didn't come out until 75, and I was hired at the University of Washington
0:34.8	73.
0:35.8	Ed's book very much reflected my perspective, and he was one of my mentors in graduate school
0:42.4	as well.
0:44.0	Though I guess the earliest precursors to that would be Conrad Lorenz and Nico Tinbergen
0:51.0	in the field of Ethology, that name is almost never used anymore.
0:56.0	When I was in college that was what we studied when we took a course in animal
0:59.7	behavior was ethology. Now it just seems to be subsumed under the larger category of
1:04.4	evolutionary psychology or or sociobiology or something like that.
1:08.3	Yeah and for those of us working on animals specifically often behavioral ecology would be another one.
1:15.0	Oh right, yeah. Yeah, right. So, but just to remind our readers who've probably come across many of your books and are not thinking about that right now.
1:23.7	Here's just a short list out of Eden, the surprising consequences of polygamy.
1:28.6	Buddhist biology, which is a hot topic now.
1:32.6	Homo mysterious, the evolutionary puzzles of human nature.
1:37.1	With your wife, Judith, Eve Lipton, you wrote,
1:39.5	Payback, why we retaliate, redirect aggression aggression and seek revenge and strange
1:45.4	bedfellows the surprising connection between sex evolution and
1:48.8	monogamy how women got their curves and other just those stories.
	...

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