All Episodes

#824 Valerie Fridland - Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English

Aug 21, 2023

Dr. Valerie Fridland is Professor and former Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Nevada in Reno. She is an expert on the relationship between language and society. Dr. Fridland also speaks and writes widely for a popular audience. Her language blog, Language in the Wild, appears in Psychology Today and her lecture series, Language and Society, is featured with The Great Courses. She is the author of several books, including Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. More»
#823 Owen Flanagan: Against Happiness

Aug 18, 2023

Dr. Owen Flanagan is James B. Duke Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Duke University. His work is in philosophy of mind and psychiatry, ethics, moral psychology, and cross-cultural philosophy. He is co-author of Against Happiness. More»
#822 Christian Miller: The Virtues of Generosity and Patience

Aug 17, 2023

Dr. Christian B. Miller is the A. C. Reid Professor of Philosophy at Wake Forest University. His research is primarily in contemporary ethics and philosophy of religion. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, Dallas Morning News, Slate, Prospect Magazine, Relevant Magazine, Michael Hyatt Magazine, The Conversation, Newsweek, Aeon, Greater Good Magazine, Nautilus Magazine, Fathom Magazine, Institute of Art and Ideas, and Christianity Today. He’s the author of several books, the most recent one being Honesty: The Philosophy and Psychology of a Neglected Virtue. More»
#821 Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters: Who Accepts Rape Myths, and Why?

Aug 14, 2023

Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters is a PhD student studying human behavior from an adaptationist perspective in the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at the University of Texas at Austin with Dr. David Buss. She joined the Buss Lab after finishing her MA Degree at California State University, Fullerton in Spring 2021. In her Master's thesis, she sought to understand individual differences in rape myth acceptance. She is currently interested in sexual conflict and women's psychological adaptations against sexual exploitation. More»
#820 Joseph Errington: The History of Linguistics, Colonialism, and Language Ideologies

Aug 11, 2023

Dr. Joseph Errington is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. He studies language change as a source of insight into the ways languages constitute intimate parts of our everyday lives, and at the same time are foundational for large-scale institutions, social groups, and social dynamics. He has worked mostly in Indonesia, studying Javanese (90 million speakers), Indonesian (250 million speakers) and a range of Malay dialects. He has also worked on questions of language ideology and practice: how conceptions of language can shape and reflect social interests, naturalize images of social groups, and shape everyday ways of talking. He is the author of books like Language and Social Change in Java, Shifting Languages, and Linguistics in a Colonial World. More»
#819 Geoffrey West - Scale; Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies

Aug 10, 2023

Dr. Geoffrey West is Shannan Distinguished Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics, especially those concerning the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications. His long-term fascination in general scaling phenomena evolved into a highly productive collaboration on the origin of universal scaling laws that pervade biology from the molecular genomic scale up through mitochondria and cells to whole organisms and ecosystems. He is the author of several books, including Scale: The Universal Laws of Life, Growth, and Death in Organisms, Cities, and Companies. More»
#818 Tibor Rutar: The Rise, Benefits, and Challenges of Liberal Democracies

Aug 7, 2023

Dr. Tibor Rutar is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maribor, Slovenia, Researcher at the Center for the Study of Post-Socialist Societies in Maribor, and Researcher at the Research Center for Strategy and Governance at the University of Ljubljana. His last two books are Rational Choice and Democratic Government: A Sociological Approach (Routledge, 2021) and Capitalism for Realists: Virtues and Vices of the Modern Economy (Routledge, 2022). More»
#817 Raymond Hames: Hunting, Mating Systems, Warfare, and Evolutionary Anthropology

Aug 4, 2023

Dr. Raymond Hames is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His research interests are in behavioral ecology, food and labor exchange, human ecology, marriage, and kin and parental investment. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (anthropology section), past-president of the Evolutionary Anthropology Society of the American Anthropological Association, consulting editor for Human Nature, and for ten years he served as treasurer of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. More»
#816 Gareth Leng - The Matter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evidence in Science

Aug 3, 2023

Dr. Gareth Leng was one of the founders in 1983 of the British Society for Neuroendocrinology. He was appointed as the Chair of Experimental Physiology at the University of Edinburgh in 1994, after 17 years at what is now the Babraham Institute, Cambridge. He is a former Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuroendocrinology, and a former President of the International Neuroendocrine Federation. He is the author of The Matter of Facts: Skepticism, Persuasion, and Evidence in Science. More»
#815 Rebecca Sear: Demography, Family Structures, National IQs, and the Evolutionary Social Sciences

Jul 31, 2023

Dr. Rebecca Sear is a demographer and anthropologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), teaching demography and researching human reproductive behavior from an evolutionary perspective. She is particularly interested in taking a comparative perspective to understanding human reproductive behavior, and exploring why such behavior varies between, as well as within, populations. More»