Rationally Speaking #9 - When Smart People Endorse Pseudoscience

Rationally Speaking Podcast

New York City Skeptics

Philosophy, Society & Culture, Science

4.6 • 787 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2010

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s very easy to make fun of not-so-educated people who reject evolution, but what happens when one of the most prominent contemporary philosophers, Jerry Fodor, writes a book about “What Darwin Got Wrong”? Similarly, we can dismiss extreme right wing politician like Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who thinks global warming is a worldwide conspiracy of crazy scientists bent on destroying the American way of life. But what happens when two icons of the skeptic movement, Penn & Teller, do a whole show in which they completely deny all the well established evidence of anthropogenic climate change. And of course it is easy to laugh at Jenny McCarthy, the kook who claims (with Oprah Winfrey’s support) that she “just knows” that vaccines cause autism. But, what happens when a politically savvy atheist like Bill Maher says that people who get flu shots are “idiots?"

Transcript

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0:00.0	Rationally speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.
0:22.6	For more information, please visit us at NYCCEceptics.org.
0:35.8	Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and nonsense.
0:42.1	I am your host, Massimo Pilucci.
0:44.2	And with me, as always, is my co-host, Julia Galev.
0:47.8	Julia, what are we going to talk about today?
0:50.3	Massimo, today we're going to start out by talking about a recently published book that made a big splash called What Darwin Got Wrong by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Pietelli Pomerini.
1:01.5	And we're going to talk about the thesis of that book and where it goes wrong.
1:05.4	And then we're going to talk about that thesis in the context of a couple of other cases of smart people who deny the
1:14.4	overwhelmingly accepted scientific consensus on an issue. And those cases are Bill Maher denying
1:21.7	the effectiveness of vaccines and Penn and Teller denying the reality of global warming.
1:28.6	Right.
1:28.8	So those, what, what the commonality among those three cases, I think it's interesting.
1:35.0	Because as you said, those are instances where there is a scientific consensus.
1:39.3	Now, of course, before our, our listeners starts flooding us with complaining emails, we're not arguing
1:49.2	that any of those three, that you have evolution, the human-made, human cause, climate change,
1:56.6	and the way in which vaccines work.
1:59.8	We don't claim that science has absolute and definitive knowledge about those things,
2:05.4	because science doesn't have absolute and definitive knowledge pretty much about anything.
2:09.6	But we're claiming that those are three scientific notions that are as well established
2:13.6	about which there is as much of a consensus within the community of scientific experts
2:18.9	as for anything else. Right. Well, so I guess the relevant question is, for these people,
	...

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