Sam Harris
Author, The End of Faith
November 2, 2007Sam Harris has authored the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Letter to a Christian Nation. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience.
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Welcome by Roger Bingham
Director of The Science Network
October 31, 2007Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at...
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Darrin McMahon
Florida State University
October 31, 2007Darrin McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University. He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment...
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Margaret Jacob
UCLA
October 31, 2007Margaret Jacob, a professor of History at UCLA, is an authority on the scientific roots of the Enlightenment, the origins of Western...
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Edward Slingerland
University of British Columbia
October 31, 2007Edward Slingerland is Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. His research...
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Donald Rutherford
UC San Diego
October 31, 2007Donald Rutherford is a member of the UCSD Philosophy Department whose main research interests are in the history of modern philosophy. Much...
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Daniel Dennett
Tufts University
October 31, 2007Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell; Freedom Evolves; and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is University Professor...
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David Sloan Wilson
Binghamton University
October 31, 2007David Sloan Wilson, Professor in the Biology and Anthropology Departments at Binghamton University, is director of EvoS, a unique...
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Jonathan Haidt
University of Virginia
October 31, 2007Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, studies the emotional basis of moral judgment and...
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Michael Shermer
Publisher, Skeptic Magazine
October 31, 2007Michael Shermer, a former college professor, is the founding publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine. A monthly columnist...
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Panel
Daniel Dennett, David Sloan Wilson, Jonathan Haidt, Michael Shermer
October 31, 2007 -
Gregory Clark
UC Davis
October 31, 2007Gregory Clark chairs the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He is author of the recent book A Farewell to...
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Deirdre McCloskey
University of Illinois at Chicago
October 31, 2007Deirdre McCloskey teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written fourteen books on economic theory, history, philosophy,...
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Stuart Kauffman
University of Calgary
October 31, 2007Stuart Kauffman has had an unusually varied career in biological science, with forays into quantum gravity and economics. His interests are...
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Sean Carroll
California Institute of Technology
October 31, 2007Sean Carroll is a Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He previously worked at MIT, UC Santa...
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David Albert
Columbia University
October 31, 2007David Albert is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the M.A. Program in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia...
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Welcome by Roger Bingham
Director of The Science Network
November 1, 2007Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at...
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Peter Atkins
University of Oxford
November 1, 2007Peter Atkins is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, Fellow of Lincoln College. He is the author of nearly 60 books,...
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Harold Kroto
Nobel Laureate
November 1, 2007Sir Harold Kroto, Chairman of the Board of the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that produces science programs for television,...
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Scott Atran
National Center for Scientific Research, Paris, France
November 1, 2007Scott Atran, Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France, has experimented extensively on the ways...
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Lee Silver
Princeton University
November 1, 2007Lee Silver is Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Policy at Princeton University. He received a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard...
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Greg Epstein
Harvard University
November 1, 2007Greg M. Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University, and sits on the executive committee of the 38-member interfaith...
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Ronald de Sousa
University of Toronto
November 1, 2007Ronald de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was educated in Switzerland, Oxford, UK, and...
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Patricia Churchland
UC San Diego
November 1, 2007Patricia Churchland, who chairs the University of California, San Diego Philosophy Department, focuses also on neuroethics and attempts to...
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
Author, Betraying Spinoza
November 1, 2007Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. She is the author of eight books, including the novels The Mind-Body...
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John Allen Paulos
Temple University
November 1, 2007John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, Philadelphia, is an author, public speaker, and columnist for ABCNews and...
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V.S. Ramachandran
UC San Diego
November 1, 2007VS Ramachandran, Director for the Center of Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program...
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Adam Kolber
University of San Diego
November 1, 2007Adam Kolber is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a law professor at the University of San Diego. He...
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Jonathan Gottschall
Washington & Jefferson College
November 1, 2007Jonathan Gottschall teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. His work seeks to bridge the humanities-sciences...
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David Brin
Astronomer, science fiction author
November 1, 2007David Brin's bestselling novels, such as Earth and Kiln People, have been translated into more than 20 languages. The...
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Robert Winter
UCLA
November 1, 2007Robert Winter, scholar, pianist, and media author, holds the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at UCLA. His very non-linear...
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Welcome by Roger Bingham
Director of The Science Network
November 2, 2007Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at...
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Sam Harris
Author, The End of Faith
November 2, 2007Sam Harris has authored the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, which...
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Daniel Smail
Harvard University (with Patricia Churchland on Aristotle)
November 2, 2007Daniel Lord Smail has an abiding passion: to bring time depth back into the ways in which we teach and research history in this country. He...
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Jeff Hawkins
Numenta
November 2, 2007Jeff Hawkins is the founder of two computer companies, Palm and Handspring, and the designer of many computing products including the...
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PZ Myers (overview from audience)
University of Minnesota
November 2, 2007PZ Myers is a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris who focuses on the interplay of developmental and evolutionary...
BEYOND BELIEF DVDs are now available! Purchase them here.
The aim of Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 is to invite participants to undertake together an ongoing reconnaissance of Enlightenment ideas in the light of advances in primarily cognitive neurosciences, evolutionary biology, physics etc. though not by any means scanting history, philosophy, law. The word reconnaissance is used advisedly. Although reconnaissance now usually means a military information-gathering exercise, the preference is for original root - recognoscere - which roughly suggests 'to get to know again'. The hope is to explore our current sense of Reason, Truth, Belief, Human Nature, Progress, Virtue and the Good Life in this light. It could be argued that the Enlightenment was not quite the disaster that some critics have suggested, and that version 2.0, and subsequent releases, could conceivably be a dynamic improvement if we set our minds to it, guided by that eudaemonic impulse.
This is the sequel to Beyond Belief 1 - and the second in what we now are planning to be an annual series of conversations on this topic. There were over 3 million hits and over half a million downloads of some or all of the 15 hours of conversation, which is unedited, free of the tyranny of the soundbite; hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube and hundreds of blogs and e-mails. Beyond Belief: Enlightenment 2.0 will also be videotaped and subsequently webcast as part of TSN's educational mission - To Enlarge the Constituency of Reason. It will be highly interactive: the emphasis is less on formal presentation than on participation. Invitees play multiple roles - as presenters, panelists, and participating audience members. Above all, this is a conversation.
Clearly, the religion/faith/belief issue will come up again - as it has most recently concerning Islamic science in the pages of Nature (with thoughts of Ziauddin Sardar's Commentary on 12 July, and Sam Harris' letter on August 23). But we would also like to consider exploring what Ed Wilson (with a nod to Condorcet) would call a Consilience direction. So as well as many of the participants from last year an additional contingent has been invited from the humanities "tribe" to help us better understand, amongst other things, The Sea of Faith, the Sleep (or Dream) of Reason, the Perils of Scientism, the possibly premature reports of the Death of Utopia and the reason for the recurrent calls for Re-Enchantment.
We shall also re-visit some of last year's questions including: Can evolutionary biology, anthropology and neuroscience help us to better understand how we construct beliefs, and experience empathy, fear and awe? Can science help us create a new rational narrative as poetic and powerful as those that have traditionally sustained societies? If not God, then what? And we shall hopefully be weaving a rich tapestry including historical threads from sources including Spinoza, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Thomas Paine, William James, Beethoven, Bacon, Rawls and Alhazen.
We really do think of this as an ongoing project to foster and promote the use of reason in formulating social policy. It is interesting that both ends of the political spectrum are currently gnashing teeth and blaming the others for either a "Retreat from Reason" or an "Assault on Reason". It would be refreshing to have a rational discussion about this!
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David Albert is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the M.A. Program in the Philosophical Foundations of Physics at Columbia University. He studies in particular the quantum mechanical measurement problem and the problem of the direction of time. Dr. Albert has published two books, Quantum Mechanics and Experience and Time and Chance, and numerous articles on quantum mechanics. |
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Peter Atkins is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford, Fellow of Lincoln College. He is the author of nearly 60 books, including Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science; Four Laws that Drive the Universe; and the world-renowned textbook Physical Chemistry. He has been a visiting professor in France, Israel, New Zealand, China, and Japan, and continues to lecture widely throughout the world. |
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Scott Atran, Research Director at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France, has experimented extensively on the ways scientists and ordinary people categorize and reason about nature. He currently is an organizer of a NATO working group on suicide terrorism. His publications include In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion and The Native Mind: Cognition and Culture in Human Knowledge of Nature (co-authored with Douglas Medin and forthcoming from Oxford University Press). |
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David Brin's bestselling novels, such as Earth and Kiln People, have been translated into more than 20 languages. The Postman was loosely Kevin Costnerized in 1998. A scientist and futurist, Brin speaks and consults widely about over-the-horizon social and technological trends. The Transparent Society won the nonfiction Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association. |
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Sean Carroll is a Senior Research Associate in Physics at the California Institute of Technology. He previously worked at MIT, UC Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago. He studies topics in theoretical physics, focusing on cosmology, field theory, particle physics, and gravitation. He is currently studying the nature of dark matter and dark energy, connections between cosmology, quantum gravity, and statistical mechanics, and scenarios for the beginning of the universe. He is a contributor to the blog "Cosmic Variance". |
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Patricia Churchland, who chairs the University of California, San Diego Philosophy Department, focuses also on neuroethics and attempts to understand choice, responsibility and the basis of moral norms in terms of brain function, evolution and brain-culture interactions. Her books include Brain-Wise, Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain and On the Contrary, with Paul M. Churchland. |
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Paul Churchland is professor of philosophy at University of California, San Diego. With his wife and philosophical partner, Patricia, he has been an advocate of "eliminative materialism", which claims that scientific theories about the brain do not square well with our traditional commonsense beliefs about the mind. Among his books are Matter and Consciousness, A Neurocomputational Perspective, and The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul. |
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Gregory Clark chairs the Department of Economics at the University of California, Davis. He is author of the recent book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, which in part details how the economic systems of the long pre-industrial era helped shape modern cultures, and perhaps even modern human preferences at the genetic level. |
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Ronald de Sousa is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He was educated in Switzerland, Oxford, UK, and Princeton, USA. He is the author of The Rationality of Emotion and of Why Think?: Evolution and the Rational Mind. His current research interests focus on emotions, evolutionary theory, cognitive science, sex, and the puzzle of religious belief. |
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Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Breaking the Spell; Freedom Evolves; and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He was the Co-founder (in 1985) and Co-director of the Curricular Software Studio at Tufts, and has helped to design museum exhibits on computers for the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Computer Museum in Boston. |
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Greg M. Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University, and sits on the executive committee of the 38-member interfaith corps of Harvard Chaplains. Ordained as a Humanist rabbi, Epstein holds graduate degrees from the University of Michigan and Harvard Divinity School. He was lead organizer of The New Humanism, an international conference held at Harvard University in April 2007, and blogs for the Washington Post/Newsweek magazine project, "On Faith." |
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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher and novelist. She is the author of eight books, including the novels The Mind-Body Problem and Properties of Light: A Novel of Love, Betrayal and Quantum Physics. Her last two books were non-fiction: Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel and Betraying Spinoza. She has received many awards for her fiction and scholarship, including a MacArthur, and is currently at work on a novel. |
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Jonathan Gottschall teaches English at Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, PA. His work seeks to bridge the humanities-sciences divide. He is co-editor of The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, and the author of The Rape of Troy: Evolution, Violence, and the World of Homer. His next book will be Literature, Science, and a New Humanities. |
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Jonathan Haidt, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, studies the emotional basis of moral judgment and political ideology. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research in cultural psychology at the University of Chicago. He was awarded the Templeton Prize in Positive Psychology in 2001 and is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom. |
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Sam Harris has authored the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, which won the 2005 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, and Letter to a Christian Nation. His essays have appeared in Newsweek, The Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, The Boston Globe and elsewhere. He is currently researching the neural basis of religious belief while completing a doctorate in neuroscience. |
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Jeff Hawkins is the founder of two computer companies, Palm and Handspring, and the designer of many computing products including the PalmPilot and Treo Smartphone. He also founded and ran the nonprofit Redwood Neuroscience Institute (now part of UC Berkeley) and founded the for-profit Numenta, which is developing a new technology, Hierarchical Temporal Memory, based on neocortical memory architecture. Hawkins has a BSEE from Cornell University. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineers in 2003. |
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Margaret Jacob, a professor of History at UCLA, is an authority on the scientific roots of the Enlightenment, the origins of Western cosmopolitanism, and the freemasons, freethinkers and other radicals and revolutionaries of the 18th century. Her books include Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe; The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Documents; and (with Larry Stewart) Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851. |
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Stuart Kauffman has had an unusually varied career in biological science, with forays into quantum gravity and economics. His interests are theoretical biology, origin of life, origin of agency, developmental genetics, and evolution. He has published four books: Origins of Order; At Home in the Universe; Investigations; and Reinventing the Sacred (due April 2008). |
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Adam Kolber is a visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and a law professor at the University of San Diego. He writes about the legal and ethical implications of emerging neurotechnologies, including drugs to dampen traumatic memories and brain imaging techniques to assess subjective experiences. He runs the "Neuroethics & Law Blog" and is an associate editor of the journal Neuroethics. |
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Sir Harold Kroto, Chairman of the Board of the Vega Science Trust, a UK educational charity that produces science programs for television, in 1996 shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry with Robert Curl and Richard Smalley for the discovery of a new form of carbon, the C60 Buckminsterfullerene. He has received the Royal Society's prestigious Michael Faraday Award, given annually to a scientist who has done the most to further public communication of science, engineering or technology in the United Kingdom. |
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Deirdre McCloskey teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has written fourteen books on economic theory, history, philosophy, rhetoric, and ethics. She taught for twelve years in economics at the University of Chicago, and describes herself as a "postmodern freemarket quantitative Episcopalian feminist Aristotelian." Her latest books are The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Capitalism and (with Stephen Ziliak) The Cult of Statistical Significances. |
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Darrin McMahon is the Ben Weider Professor of History at Florida State University. He is the author of Enemies of the Enlightenment and Happiness: A History, which was awarded Best Books of the Year honors for 2006 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate Magazine, and the Library Journal. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Daedalus, and The New Republic's "Open University." |
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PZ Myers is a developmental biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris who focuses on the interplay of developmental and evolutionary processes. He is a columnist for Seed magazine and maintains a somewhat popular weblog, "Pharyngula", which takes a ruthlessly godless view of biology, evolution and the culture wars. |
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John Allen Paulos, professor of mathematics at Temple University, Philadelphia, is an author, public speaker, and columnist for ABCNews and the Guardian. His writings include Innumeracy, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Once Upon a Number, A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and scholarly papers on probability, logic, and the philosophy of science as well as OpEds, book reviews, and articles in publications from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, Discover, The American Scholar, and the London Review of Books. |
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VS Ramachandran, Director for the Center of Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, co-authored Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind, with Sandra Blakeslee, and is the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness. |
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Donald Rutherford is a member of the UCSD Philosophy Department whose main research interests are in the history of modern philosophy. Much of his work has dealt with the philosophy of Leibniz, leading to a book, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature, and to a critical edition and translation (with Brandon Look) of the Leibniz-Des Bosses correspondence. His current research focuses on the role of eudaimonistic ethical theory in the seventeenth century. |
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Terrence Sejnowski is an HHMI investigator, the Francis Crick Professor and Director of the Crick-Jacobs Center for Theoretical and Computational Biology at the Salk Institute. He is the author of several books including The Computational Brain and Liars, Lovers, and Heroes: What the New Brain Science Reveals About How We Become Who We Are. |
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Michael Shermer, a former college professor, is the founding publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Skeptic magazine. A monthly columnist for Scientific American, he is the author of The Science of Good and Evil. His most recent book is Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design, a discussion of the boundary between religion and science. |
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Lee Silver is Professor of Molecular Biology and Public Policy at Princeton University. He received a doctorate in biophysics from Harvard University and trained at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He is the author of Challenging Nature: The Clash Between Biotechnology and Spirituality; Remaking Eden; and Mouse Genetics, and co-author of an undergraduate genetics textbook. He has published 180 articles in the fields of genetics, evolution, embryology and behavioral genetics. |
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Edward Slingerland is Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied Cognition at the University of British Columbia. His research includes Warring States Chinese thought, cognitive linguistics, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, methodologies for comparative religion, virtue ethics and the classical Chinese language. His forthcoming book, What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body & Culture, argues for the relevance of the natural sciences to the humanities, and outlines an integrated, embodied approach to the study of culture. |
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Daniel Lord Smail has an abiding passion: to bring time depth back into the ways in which we teach and research history in this country. He is a history professor at Harvard University. In his book, On Deep History and the Brain, he joins other historians who seek to transcend the legacy of Judeo-Christian sacred chronology. When not otherwise pursuing a history that begins in Africa, he is a European historian who works on law and justice in late medieval Mediterranean cities. |
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David Sloan Wilson, Professor in the Biology and Anthropology Departments at Binghamton University, is director of EvoS, a unique campus-wide evolutionary studies program. He is known for championing the theory of multilevel selection, which has implications ranging from the origin of life to the nature of religion. His most recent book is Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives. |
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Robert Winter, scholar, pianist, and media author, holds the Presidential Chair in Music and Interactive Arts at UCLA. His very non-linear career has encompassed Beethoven scholarship, the evolution of the piano, several public radio series, popular culture, the history of technology, seven new media projects (starting with Beethoven's 9th) hailed as milestones in multimedia publishing, and countless appearances as an advocate for the arts in a No-Child-Left-Behind world. |
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Roger Bingham is a scientist in the Computational Neurobiology Laboratory at the Salk Institute, and a member of the research faculty at the Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego. He is the co-author of The Origin of Minds: Evolution, Uniqueness, and the New Science of the Self, and the creator and host of Emmy award-winning PBS science programs on evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, including the critically acclaimed series "The Human Quest". He is co-founder and Director of The Science Network. |
God's place in a rational world
Download PDF
New Scientist, November 10-16, 2007
Michael Riley
If humanity has evolved to embrace faith and religion, then even atheists cannot ignore them.
Read the article "Does God have a place in a rational world?" online
Commentary by John Allen Paulos
God, Science and an Unbeliever's Utopia: Stellar Group of Scientists Gathers to Mull Science, Atheism and Much Else
From ABCNews.com
Commentary by David Brin
An early draft of a growing article about "The Enlightenment and Its Enemies"
Commentary by Adam Kolber
Commentary by PZ Myers
Wish you were here!
Beyond Belief II, A Summary
Commentary by Sean Carroll
Commentary by Jonathan Haidt
David Albert
Peter Atkins
Scott Atran
David Brin
Patricia Churchland
Paul Churchland
Gregory Clark
Ronald de Sousa
Daniel Dennett
Rebecca Goldstein
Jonathan Gottschall
Jonathan Haidt
Sam Harris
Jeff Hawkins
Margaret Jacob
Stuart Kauffman
Harold Kroto
Deirdre McCloskey
Darrin McMahon
John Allen Paulos
V.S. Ramachandran
Michael Shermer
Lee Silver
Edward Slingerland
Daniel Lord Smail
David Sloan Wilson
Robert Winter
New Series
October 6, 2008
A sparkling and - on occasion - controversial discussion about the science behind the headlines.
