All Episodes

#485 Joshua Glasgow - The Solace: Finding Value in Death through Gratitude for Life

Jun 21, 2021

Dr. Joshua Glasgow is Associate Professor in (and Chair of) the Philosophy Department at Sonoma State University. Dr. Glasgow works on a variety of topics in moral, political, and legal philosophy. His publications have covered a variety of issues concerning ethics, the good life, race and racism, language, law, mind, and more. He’s the author of The Solace: Finding Value in Death Through Gratitude for Life. More»
#484 David Bjorklund - How Children Invented Humanity: The Role of Development in Human Evolution

Jun 18, 2021

Dr. David F. Bjorklund is a Professor of Psychology at Florida Atlantic University where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in developmental and evolutionary psychology. His books include The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology (with Anthony Pellegrini), Origins of the Social Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and Child Development (edited with Bruce Ellis), Why Youth is Not Wasted on the Young: Immaturity in Human Development, Child and Adolescent Development: An Integrative Approach (with Carlos Hernández Blasi), and Children's Thinking: Cognitive Development and Individual Differences, now in its fifth edition. His new book is How Children Invented Humanity: The Role of Development in Human Evolution. More»
#483 Lauren Brent: The Evolution of Sociality, and Primate Societies

Jun 17, 2021

Dr. Lauren Brent is Associate Professor in the Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour at the University of Exeter. She is a biologist interested in the evolution of sociality. Her research asks why social relationships are formed and how they are maintained. Her work focuses on highly gregarious, group-living animals. She works mostly with data collected from wild or free-ranging groups, and specialize on study systems with uniquely long-term datasets. She uses a diverse set of methods, including techniques from ethology, evolutionary biology, quantitative and functional genetics, life-history evolution, endocrinology, comparative psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. More»
#482 David Pearce: Transhumanism, The Hedonistic Imperative, and Abolishing Suffering

Jun 14, 2021

David Pearce is a prominent figure within the transhumanism movement and one of the co-founders of the World Transhumanist Association, currently rebranded and incorporated as Humanity+. He approaches ethical issues from a lexical negative utilitarian perspective. Pearce maintains a series of websites devoted to transhumanist topics and what he calls the "hedonistic imperative", a moral obligation to work towards the abolition of suffering in all sentient life. His self-published internet manifesto, The Hedonistic Imperative (1995), outlines how pharmacology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and neurosurgery could converge to eliminate all forms of unpleasant experience from human and non-human life, replacing suffering with "gradients of bliss". Pearce calls this the "abolitionist project". More»
#481 Saul Smilansky: 10 Moral Paradoxes

Jun 11, 2021

Dr. Saul Smilansky is a Professor at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Haifa, Israel. He works primarily on normative and applied ethics, the free will problem, and the meaning of life. He is the author of Free Will and Illusion (Oxford University Press 2000), and 10 Moral Paradoxes (Blackwell 2007). More»
#480 Vibeke Ottesen: The Evolution of Homicide, Filicide, and Neonaticide

Jun 10, 2021

Dr. Vibeke Ottesen is a Norwegian criminologist with an interest in how nature and nurture combined create human behavior. She has a popular science blog – Biosocial - where she comments on news, scientific findings and literature relevant to her subject – more often than not with an evolutionary informed approach to understanding the subject matter. She has held numerous lectures on the benefits of an evolutionary informed approach to understanding the cross-cultural sex and age differences in anti-social and criminal behavior. More»
#479 James Cortada - Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America

Jun 7, 2021

Dr. James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota. He worked at IBM for thirty-eight years in sales, consulting, managerial, and research positions. He is the author of books like Information and the Modern Corporation, and Fake News Nation: The Long History of Lies and Misinterpretations in America. More»
#478 Cari Goetz: Mate Preferences, Mate Value, the EEA, and Evolutionary Mismatch

Jun 4, 2021

Dr. Cari D. Goetz is Associate Professor of Psychology at California State University, San Bernardino. She does research in Evolutionary Psychology, specifically human mating strategies and mating-related psychology. More»
#477 Ilana Redstone - Unassailable Ideas, Social Media, and Discourse in American Higher Education

Jun 3, 2021

Dr. Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Redstone's work has focused on legal permanent residents to the United States. Using a quantitative analytic approach, she has addressed questions surrounding a variety of dimensions of immigrant adaptation to the U.S. She has also written on the discipline of Sociology and the divisions therein. Dr. Redstone's current work focuses on campus climate and viewpoint diversity. She is the author of Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education. More»
#476 Edward Slingerland - Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization

May 31, 2021

Dr. Edward Slingerland is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He’s the Director of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC), the Director of the Database of Religious History (DRH), and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Evolution, Cognition and Culture (HECC). His most recent book is Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. More»