Paul Ehrlich on The Population Bomb, Climate Change, and the Ethics of Extinction

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

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

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 26 November 2024

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Paul Ehrlich reflects on his extensive career, including what he got wrong in The Population Bomb, the challenges of population growth, and the critical issue of biodiversity loss. He also discusses the importance of education and wealth in promoting environmental stewardship, the role of nuclear power, and the ethical dilemmas of cloning extinct species.

Paul Ehrlich is Professor Emeritus of Population Studies in the Department of Biology and the president of the Center for Conservation Biology at Stanford University. He is the author of The Population Bomb. His new book is Before They Vanish: Saving Nature’s Populations—and Ourselves.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show. Well, Paul, you just turned 92 years old.
0:27.8	I don't get a chance to talk to people who have had so much life experience as you.
0:32.0	So before we delve into extinctions in your new book, just give us a sense of you know what you've lived through
0:38.3	and if you are feeling optimistic or still pessimistic or maybe neutral or
0:44.1	waiting to see what is your sense of how things are going to think of myself as
0:48.6	I like to think of myself as as objective as, knowing full well and I've actually worked in
0:58.0	some of these areas that scientists always bring to their work, their personalities, their
1:05.1	background, their prejudices, the prejudices of their society, and so on.
1:11.0	I think the main thing that separates scientists from most other scholars is that they
1:19.0	always insist on their work being reviewed by other scientists, and we set up the system
1:24.6	pretty much so other scientists can make points by showing other scientists are wrong.
1:31.5	The guy who got the Nobel Prize for finding out how your semicircular canals, as I recall, helped your balance.
1:41.9	Another guy got a Nobel Prize for showing that he didn't have the system
1:46.2	right.
1:47.5	So we're always,
1:50.0	we're used to being reviewed
1:52.2	heavily and you get used
1:54.1	to it, but never totally. I mean,
1:56.2	when my mistakes are
1:58.0	pointed out to me, I don't
2:00.0	thrill at it, but I do try and learn from it.
2:02.7	Let's put it that way.
	...

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