It's Thursday, March 28th, 2019, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

Each week, we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

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Now, anyone who's been following science or the news knows that we are entering a time of potentially unprecedented change,

both in terms of our environment and in terms of our culture, as the digital revolution brings us leaps and bounds into the future.

So what is that future going to look like?

One key is to look, of course,

at the past. And a number of influential thinkers over the past few decades have suggested that

our history is shaped by what's called geographic determinism. That is, the geographic nature of where

a society or a civilization has evolved influences how successful that particular

group of people might be. But what if there's another way to look at the same facts and understand

something deeper about what it means to be human? That's where Jeremy Lent comes in. Lent

suggests that in fact we should be thinking about the worldview of a given

civilization, that is, the implicit beliefs and values that drive meaning in people's lives. In Lent's

opinion, this has been a significant driver of the historical path that each civilization has taken.

And in order to understand the directions

in which these civilizations went and where we might be going today, we actually have to take

a deeper look into our own cognitive history. He outlines this idea in his book, The Patterning

Instinct, a cultural history of humanity's search for meeting. And I had the pleasure of a conversation

...