Should Creationism Be Taught Alongside Evolution? [Ep. 496]

In a world increasingly shaped by science and technology, how do we determine what constitutes truth? What role does society play in shaping scientific knowledge consensus? And what are the implications for the future of research and innovation? In this episode, I sit down with Steve Fuller, a renowned sociologist of science from the University of Warwick in the UK, for a thought-provoking conversation. Steve and I explore the deep connections between science and sociology, discussing how science can learn from sociology and vice versa. Steve challenges conventional wisdom and invites us to critically examine the complex interplay between science, society, and the pursuit of knowledge. With a passion for exploring the philosophical underpinnings of science, he shares his insights on social epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the evolving role science should play in society, especially in an increasingly polarized world. — 🔒 Remove your personal information from the web at https://JoinDeleteMe.com/KEATING and use code KEATING for 20% off 🙌 DeleteMe international Plans: https://international.joindeleteme.com Please join my mailing list here 👉 https://briankeating.com/list to win a meteorite 💥 — Key Takeaways: 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:33 Steve’s origin story 00:04:14 Philosophy of science 00:08:47 Thomas Kuhn and the nature of scientific revolutions 00:17:23 DeleteMe 00:18:59 The Science Wars Conference and the role of social agendas 00:28:20 The Kitzmiller vs. Dover case 00:39:44 Intelligent design and peer review 00:51:55 The future of higher education 00:57:41 Scientific iconoclasm vs. conspiracy thinking 01:00:56 Outro — Additional resources: ➡️ Learn more about Steve Fuller: ✖️ Twitter: https://x.com/ProfSteveFuller/ 💻 Website: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/sfuller/ ➡️ Follow me on your fav platforms: ✖️ Twitter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 🔔 YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/DrBrianKeating?sub_confirmation=1⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 📝 Join my mailing list:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/list⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ✍️ Check out my blog:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/cosmic-musings/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 🎙️ Follow my podcast:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://briankeating.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ — Into the Impossible with Brian Keating is a podcast dedicated to all those who want to explore the universe within and beyond the known. Make sure to follow so you never miss an episode! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:27Speaker 01

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• 0:42Speaker 02

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• 0:44Speaker 03

  Those sorts of assumptions that we make about the pursuit of science, certainly in the physical sciences, comes from this idea of getting into the mind of God.

• 0:53Brian Keating?

  In a world that's increasingly shaped by science and technology, how do we actually determine what constitutes truth? In this episode with our renowned colleague and friend, Steve Fuller, we're going to engage in a thought provoking conversation. He's a sociologist of science who challenges conventional wisdom, who invites us to critically examine the complex interplay between science, society, and the pursuit of knowledge. And he's fearless. Steve, how are you, my friend?

• 1:16Speaker 03

  I'm doing fine, Brian. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:19Brian Keating?

  So today we're going to talk about a lot of things, but you know, I think more than anything, my audience will probably be unfamiliar with your research. So I would say first, what you should do is what we usually, you know, judge books by their covers. You've written books, but we're not going to discuss them necessarily in great detail today. But we are going to talk about the kind of connections that you've had in science policy and social and legal policy. And I wonder if you could just give us your origin story, you know, as a cosmologist, I'm always fascinated by origin stories. So start with that. What is your origin story? How'd you get to where you are? Cause you don't have a British accent and, and yet you've been ensconced in British luxury for years now. So take it away, Steve. Introduce yourself to the audience of the Into the Impossible podcast.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, first of all, my name is Steve Fuller. I was born in New York City and I went to this Jesuit high school, which in a way kind of, in a sense, set me on the path that I'm in because I realized that having access to the best minds is actually the most important way to exercise power in society. And so that set me on the track to be an academic. And one of the things that's kind of interesting is the commencement speaker of my high school graduating class was none other than Anthony Fauci, who's also a graduate of my high school.

• 2:28Brian Keating?

  Wow.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is like nineteen seventy six. He was already chief medical examiner in New York. But in any case, I went to Columbia University on a scholarship one year early. And I graduated one year early and I got a fellowship to go to Cambridge, which is where I did my master's degree. My undergraduate degree was in history and sociology. My master's degree and my PhD are both in history and philosophy of science. After Cambridge, I came back to America, did my PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, which is probably the leading place in the history and philosophy of science in the United States. And then I started on this academic career that I'm on. In nineteen ninety four, I was offered a chair in sociology at the University of Durham in the UK. And that's when I moved to the UK, what turned out to be permanently.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  It wasn't intended to be that way, but that's how it's turned out to be over the last thirty so years. So that that and what I'm known for, I'm known for lots of things, often notorious for a lot of things. And I'm sure some of this is going to come up in the conversation. But the thing that I guess I'm most known for is is this idea of social epistemology. And I wrote the first book and I founded the journal by that name in nineteen eighty seven. So and it's still in existence today. And social epistemology is simply the study of the social foundations of knowledge, which sounds like a pretty straightforward thing, but it it has at least two aspects to it. One of them has to do with how knowledge is actually produced in a social setting. Because the kind, you know, the kind of knowledge that that we generally consider the most important,

• 3:53Speaker 03

  the one that authorizes things in society is socially created. And we think about science and the academic disciplines as being the primary sites in which social knowledge in that sense is created. And that's kind of where my own interest comes comes from and why I've been so active in various debates, having to do with the nature of science and society. And epistemology is the theory of knowledge generally. And the theory of knowledge, however, isn't just about how science is actually produced or how knowledge is actually produced, but it's also about how knowledge ought to be produced. And of course, as the demands and the constituents of society change, the nature of knowledge itself changes. And and and that is a, you know, a very interesting and controversial sort of topic.

• 4:34Speaker 03

  But it's one that I think is quite familiar to anyone who's been involved in science policy or education policy or anything of that kind. And social epistemology is very much, you might say, the meta theory of all of that stuff. And and so in a nutshell, that's kind of. My starting point. So it's history, philosophy, sociology of science, leading to this field of social epistemology, which is what I consider myself practicing these days.

• 4:59Brian Keating?

  You know, to the extent that my audience cares about philosophy, sometimes it's with derision. There's been a deep distrust of of what philosophy can actually contribute in a practical level to science since the times of Galileo and others who used to mock what he called, you know, philosophers, but really he meant true philosophers. He considered himself a natural philosopher, which meant a physicist, basically. But by philosopher, he used to say things like, you know, by the observations of the Pleiades and the nebula that surrounded them, he put to rest the questions of the nature of the Milky Way, which had so, for so long, vexed you philosophers. And basically with derision, and we see this up into the modern day with our friend Lawrence Krauss, many time guest on the podcast and other people.

• 5:42Brian Keating?

  Talk about what can philosophy actually provide to a physicist like me, an experimental cosmologist? Or is it just that a well-rounded scientist, just like my doctor has to take physics one because we want to know that she's, you know, capable of not dropping the scalpel in when she does my next knee surgery, unlike my first, no, I'm just kidding. But we kind of think, oh, a Renaissance person should know everything. Is there anything practical that my fellow experimental cosmologist or graduate student starting off in physics, what can they get practically from your discipline or from the discipline of philosophy of science?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  To go to the kinds of objections that the scientists have, and starting with Galileo to philosophers, I think very often, if you had to give a general characterization of those objections, they're to the idea that, which philosophers, certain philosophers have been guilty of, no doubt about it, right? So I have no doubt that the kinds of things that everybody from Galileo to Lawrence Krauss is complaining about has precedent within philosophy. And that's when philosophers want to, as it were, delimit science, right? That is to say, to say what is possible within science in some a priori way, right? When philosophers have been in the business of limiting the possibilities of knowledge, I think scientists get skeptical and justifiably so. But of course, when philosophy is at its best, what it tries to do is to expand the sphere of possibility, right?

• 6:56Speaker 03

  Open up the space, right, for thinking about things in different ways. And I think one of the best ways in which philosophy does this, you might say, is through history, in a sense. Because philosophers of science in particular are very much influenced by the history of science. And the thing that you discover about the history of science very quickly is that it isn't a linear path. There have been many alternative ways of looking at things, and at various points, they sort of get shut down. Now, you know, it's convenient to say, "Well, they got shut down because the evidence wasn't going the right way for these guys." But usually, there's also some institutional issues that are involved as well, so things can get, as it were, prematurely shut down, you might say. And the history of science is just full of this kind of stuff. And so, very often, what philosophers do is they

• 7:40Speaker 03

  sort of, as it were, turn, you know, they sort of rewind the tape, as it were, and go back and to say, "Well, let's say that this other side had certain things available to them which they didn't have. Then wouldn't it be a kind of fair fight, as it were, between two opposing positions?" And so, in that, and so, in that way, philosophers have actually been quite useful in opening up the scientific imagination. And I'll give you one example, because this is a guy who was trained as a physicist, but nowadays is primarily known as a philosopher of science, and that's Ernst Mach. You probably have heard of him, right? Of course. Right? Ernst Mach, who was very influential on Einstein and the early quantum mechanics people. And he wrote this book in the 1880s called The Science of Mechanics, okay? Now,

• 8:24Speaker 03

  the science of this book is actually a kind of critical history of physics from the time that Newton sort of sealed the deal with Newtonian mechanics as the dominant paradigm in physics. So, it's from the late 17th century to the late 19th century, and he wrote it in such a way that he kept alive a lot of the fundamental objections, conceptual objections about absolute space and time and causation and all this, that people like Leibniz and Berkeley and all these guys were, you know, were putting forward, but in a sense, didn't get any traction, you know, for various kinds of reasons. But nevertheless, the objections remain. And so, in fact, people like Einstein and the early quantum guys read this stuff as students, right? And this gave them some ideas, right, that if they could come up

• 9:09Speaker 03

  with some experimentally tractable way of dealing with these conceptual objections, then they would make a genuine empirical breakthrough that would revolutionize physics, which was granted by the late 19th century to be in a kind of, you know, stalled position intellectually. And so, this is a great example, right, of a guy who made the transition from physics to philosophy and really served to open up the revolution in physics in the 20th century.

• 9:33Speaker 00

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• 10:02Brian Keating?

  And I think, you know, we do it a disservice to our students. You know, I taught a class with a Pulitzer Prize winning poet named Ray Arman Trout, and it was called, you know, it was called Poetry for Physicists, in contrast to who is normally talked about. And I think we almost have no time to teach the things that they need to know about quantum mechanics and perturbation theory that I'm teaching in the fall, you know, to then get into the theory of interpretations, or even some of the most interesting things that drove these pioneers that you just mentioned. But I think, you know, to the extent that a popular, you know, that a young undergraduate or a bright graduate student might have exposure to philosophy of science, it would be in the works of Kuhn and the account of paradigms and paradigm shifts. And I wonder if you could talk about the things that you're known for, you know, sustaining

• 10:47Brian Keating?

  strength and ultimate weakness and academic path dependencies in science that you've talked about. So I wonder if you could, you know, if you could maybe just give a brief review of what is the modern perspective on Thomas Kuhn and his work? And how that could be elaborated upon to today's science, you know, where cosmologists do have to work with other disciplines, but those are often, you know, we can't, a data management or an artificial intelligence as another discipline. We're not talking about poets and so forth. So how do we balance, you know, sustaining strength and the inevitable revolution? And what is the modern philosophy of science perspective on Kuhn?

• 11:21Speaker 03

  Your listeners may not know that, I guess, 25 years ago now, I published a very large book called Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times with University of Chicago Press. 500 footnotes, 350 pages, you know, that kind of thing. And the reason why I wrote the book is because I'm, Thomas Kuhn is by far the most influential philosopher of science, at least in the second half of the 20th century, and his influence continues into this century. You know, when people have any kind of understanding of the philosophy of science, very often, it's kind of a secondhand version of Kuhn. And so it's important to know what this man was saying and why it was so influential. And my point in the book, and I think this is kind of the point about Kuhn, is that Kuhn actually gives a pretty decent account of establishment science. You know, in a sense, both its strengths and its weaknesses.

• 12:05Speaker 03

  And I think this is, you know, and in that regard, given the kind of circumstances that science finds itself today, where it's, you know, increasingly the subject of controversy and scrutiny and even skepticism by the general public. I think it's kind of important to kind of look at Kuhn's view as giving a kind of the best, maybe even airbrushed version of what the establishment science is about. And so you mentioned the word paradigm, and that's kind of where the story begins. Because for Kuhn, the first thing about science that makes it very distinctive from other forms of knowledge production is that there is agreement at many different levels about how you go about doing inquiry in a given field. And so there's agreement at the level of theory, you might say. So there's a common theory like Newtonian mechanics.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Newtonian mechanics, in that period we were just talking about from the late 17th to the late 19th century, is actually Kuhn's paradigm case of a paradigm, is that, okay? There, what you find is 200 years where people doing physics are basically taking Newton's worldview as given, and then they're working within it, right? And so, but it's not just the theory that everybody believes, but there's also methods. And the methods are very important because they're the thing to tell you how you validate hypotheses in the new stuff you're going to be looking at under the paradigm, right? So it's not just that you believe stuff, but you have ways of testing stuff. And everybody, and the ways of testing are agreed upon so that when somebody does an experiment or an observation, there can be agreement among those people working

• 13:34Speaker 03

  in the field about, you know, what it says, right? What the significance is. Again, very important kind of thing. The other thing that's also agreed upon in a paradigm is what counts as an important problem. And the important problems are usually defined in terms of pieces of the general worldview, the general theory, that haven't yet been solved, right? So Newton did not solve the problem of light, for example, okay? And so like- Becomes a big deal, right? In in the 200 years from the end of the 17th century to the end of the 19th century. It almost drives physics because that's the key thing Newton could not do. And so this is how a paradigm works. And everybody basically sticks along with this process. And if you don't, you're not a physicist.

• 14:16Speaker 03

  And by the time we get into the mid 19th century, certainly, because we we start to get, you know, what we would now call physics programs, where you can train people in this stuff, right? You actually have a very systematic way of manufacturing people who think the same way in a way you really did not have before the middle of the 19th century. Because it's really only in the mid 19th century that you start regularly to get what we would call natural science faculties that actually basically indoctrinate people in the paradigm. And to a large extent, Kuhn, you might say, somewhat anachronistically, projects this, right? He's writing in 1960s, right? He projects this back into the history of science. But in fact, until the middle of the 19th century, you don't actually have this systematic indoctrination kind of thing going on.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  But once you do, of course, then it becomes very easy to say who is in the paradigm and who's not in the paradigm by, you know, whether they have a PhD, whether they're publishing in the right journals, all this stuff that we're very familiar with. And for Kuhn, this is what keeps the discipline going, in a sense. And it keeps it going in spite of all of the unsolved problems that the paradigm accumulates over the course of its history. So Newtonian mechanics generates more and more problems. Issues about light get more and more complicated, right? But people stick with it, right? They stick with it until they just can't go any further. And at that point, the paradigm reaches what Kuhn calls a crisis. And that opens the door to what he calls a revolution. But it's a very, you know, it's a very small window of opportunity, you might say.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  And in fact, this is what happened at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. And people like Einstein and these younger, you know, Einstein and other younger generation people, like the quantum mechanics people, kind of got in there, right? And what they did was, as I was mentioning earlier, is they sort of reconfigured a lot of the sustaining conceptual objections that Newtonian mechanics had, and then turned it into something experimentally solid that even the people who still stuck with Newtonian mechanics were forced to contend with. They had to deal with it, right? And of course, it was very important in this transition period, especially for Einstein, but also to quantum guys, that there were these establishment figures who were very open-minded. And so Max Planck, right, is the signature figure, I would say, you know,

• 16:29Speaker 03

  between the old establishment physics and this revolutionary physics, as editor of the main journal in Germany, right, that was publishing stuff, right, he was able to usher in a lot of this stuff, often by correcting mathematics and doing a lot of other stylistic things that made it easier for the establishment scientists to assimilate what was being said, okay. But that window of opportunity then closes very quickly, and then you get the new paradigm. And then the new paradigm starts reproducing itself, right. And that's kind of Kuhn's view. And the point is for Kuhn, and this is how Kuhn tells the difference between what's a science and not a science, a science at any given time has only one paradigm, right. It is an authoritarian structure. So in other

• 17:13Speaker 03

  words, right, a real science knows who's in and knows who's out. And in a sense, that's one of the ways in which it kind of displays to the world that it's a science, is by this very clear sense of what's in and what's out. Because as soon as you start to get vague about these things, then in a sense, you're opening a door to lots of, you know, lots of people beginning to make various kinds of claims that then become increasingly hard to adjudicate by the established methods and standards of the field, right. And in a sense, this is why Kuhn never thought that social sciences were sciences, because in a sense, they were too permeable to the social conditions in which they operated, right. So it wasn't just, you know, as it were economists or sociologists determining

• 17:54Speaker 03

  what economics and sociology is, but it's also policymakers, right, and sometimes even the general public determining what these fields are. And Kuhn even had a similar kind of view with regard to biology, especially if you think about the way in which, let's say, pharmaceutical industry, right, and various kinds of commercial factors actually have directed in various ways the development of biology, certainly in the 20th century. So Kuhn did not think biology was a science. He had a very restricted view, but it's one that in a sense is quite, is very recognizable, and in a way, it's the one that's being challenged today, in terms of the issues you were flagging in the introduction about science being in this increasingly kind of controversial condition. It's Kuhn's view that is the one that's being challenged today.

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• 19:21Brian Keating?

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• 20:06Brian Keating?

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• 20:14Brian Keating?

  Yes, and there's a different type of battle that's waged, maybe not so much in the battle between philosophers and scientists, and it's very reminiscent of what you did back in the 90s. It's hard to believe it's over 30 years ago, which was called the Science Wars Conference. Now, you did that, I believe, in 1984, and you debated- 94, 94. 94, sorry, yeah. Debated Alan SoCal, and those intellectual battles, in many ways, in my mind, presage some of today's conflicts. And I want to bring to your attention, in case you haven't seen it, but there's a professor- Professor of Physics and Gender Studies, who has argued that white empiricism undermines Einstein's theory of general relativity. Her name is Chanda Prescott Weinstein. I actually know her.

• 20:57Brian Keating?

  I've hosted her, almost ashamed to say now, because her execrable views on especially the state of Israel, which she's accused of genocide despite claiming that she has these deep Jewish roots. She's defended the actions of the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza, almost all of whom, you know, 70% margin or so support Hamas. All of them were raised and educated in Hamas-run schools via the United Nations UNRWA facility, which thankfully is being shut down. And she's been appointed to the Biden, by the Biden administration last year, and late last year, one of the last things he did is to help destroy the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel, which oversees Energy Department research and funding priorities, including nuclear weapons and, and energy research in the early universe.

• 21:40Brian Keating?

  She wrote in 2020 that black feminist intersectionality should change physics. She's, you know, black, Jewish, trans, a non-binary queer. She identifies as almost everything. So there was an article written in the Free Beacon this past week disqualifying her, and actually, many members of people of that panel have resigned in protest, including African-American scientists of far greater renown than she would ever portend to. What do you make of this? Is this, you know, I mean, could you have seen, foreseen back in the 90s, or maybe, do you, do you, have you changed your opinion on what Sokol did, you know, with regard to now seeing the rise of these incredulous, you know, sort of execrable opinions that masquerade as science, you know, come gender studies and sociology of science? What do you make of this?

• 22:23Speaker 03

  It's a difficult issue. First of all, where I will agree with you 100% is I think if you want to understand the situation that we're in now with regard to the post-truth and all the stuff that people are talking about, you go back to the science wars of the 1990s and you already see the tropes forming there. Okay? The interesting thing about that is that back then, that was seen as a kind of an internal dispute in the left. Right, and the conservatives in a way you might say are the the tertius gaudens, right, the people who benefit from other people's misery. If you go back to the 90s, because there were very, very few people who self identify as conservatives were actually in this. But there were people of the left, you know, kind of center liberal left versus more socialist identity politics left that were fighting out the science wars. I think there were, there were a couple of issues involved in the science wars that

• 23:08Speaker 03

  often got mixed together, but, but, but, but both of them are worth thinking about and, and they're around now. First of all, the extent to which the science agenda or the scientific way of thinking can be influenced by larger social concerns. Okay. Because clearly this person that you're talking about believes very strongly in that idea and, and she's kind of trying to force certain kinds of social agendas onto science. Now, the point I would make about that is that historically, social agendas have indeed made their way into scientific thinking, usually in much subtler kinds of ways than what you've been describing. But nevertheless, there has been a lot of transit, much more transit back and forth

• 23:50Speaker 03

  between social ideas and scientific ideas than I think a lot of scientists certainly would be willing to grant. And in a sense, part of what the original science wars was about was in a sense to acquaint scientists with this fact, right? That, that there's nothing wrong, as it were, with scientists taking on board certain kinds of social views in terms of shaping their agendas. In principle, there's nothing wrong with that, and historically, it's happened. Now, of course, you may, you know, you may have certain views about which social agendas are worth taking on board and which ones are not. Fair enough, and that, and there's actually, you know, and we could talk about all kinds of stuff that one might want to include and exclude there. But the point is, the transit has always been there.

• 24:34Speaker 03

  However, because of the conventions of scientific writing, you know, especially in the journal articles and so forth, you can't really talk about this stuff. You can't talk about the social stuff, right? So there's a sense in which the social stuff gets kind of laundered out in the writing of the scientific articles. And so, and, and that's just a, in a way, that goes back. Back to kind of the Charter of the Royal Society in the mid seventeenth century. Because the idea was you just wanted to, you wanted to publish stuff that was measurable, calculable. Right? That was the kind of thing you wanted to do and you didn't want to bring in politics, religion, rhetoric. Or any of that controversial stuff, right? You wanted to, as it were, focus on the stuff that you could get agreement on, you know, without bringing in all the extra stuff. Because the extra stuff will just lead to unresolvable disputes.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  And in a sense, one of the ways in which you might say modern science established itself as something as a distinctive form of knowledge. Was by institutionally being able to carve off. The politics and the religion and so forth, at least in the formal way in which it, it, it presents its work to the world. Okay? And the science wars in a sense was kind of blasting that open. Right? That, you know, it was kind of like deconstructing scientific journal articles. And saying, look, there are really social agendas here that aren't being mentioned and. And, and you know, and you could do history to show what these agendas are. And how they serve to exclude other things and you could do all that, right? And, and I think the scientists themselves found that very disturbing in itself because it sort of went.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  You might say to the content of science, which the scientists themselves thought they had absolute sovereignty over. And, and, and, and so it was being challenged at that level. The other level at which it was being challenged is another level, which I think is worth talking about. And that is the extent to which science needs to be accountable to society in a straightforward way. Right? The extent to which, you know, society ought to know what scientists are doing. And in some sense, ought to have a say on what scientists are doing, at least from the funding standpoint. Or, or, or even in terms of what the assessment of science is, there's that issue too. And that issue, of course, scientists have always been aware of, you know, especially when, you know, it's been policy oriented science or application oriented science. But I think this issue became incredibly sensitive in the early nineteen nineties.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Because of the end of the Cold War, meant that the federal government and the governments of all the major nations that were involved in the Cold War, had to reassess their science funding, because they all had these budget overruns, right? The Cold War left everyone in a deficit, and you want to cut the deficit, and you know, this expansive funding for science, you know, it was a golden age for science, the Cold War. Now that we're not going to blow each other up with nuclear weapons, then what's the point of keeping the science agenda going? And so what you started to see in the United States Congress, and by the way, influenced somewhat by the people in my field, by sociologists of science and people like that, right, asking different kinds of questions about science, in order to make it eligible for public funding.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  So in other words, we were no longer just accepting, you know, a kind of, you know, saying that, you know, if Steven Weinberg and 12 Nobel Prize winners tell us that this is going to solve the problem of matter set forward by dailies, therefore, we will support the supercollider, right? I mean, that's the way it used to be, right? That the scientists just come in there, they tell you, they give you this kind of metaphysical justification for the project. They think they're right, yeah. Yeah, you know, and this is the most important project of Western civilization, right? And then they expect to get the billions, right? The point is that, that Congress started asking different kinds of questions, and in fact, one kind of question, and this is, and so we're talking about now the superconducting supercollider, which would have been the largest particle accelerator in the world, but Congress killed it in 1992.

• 28:12Speaker 03

  And one of the reasons that was, that the Congress people put forward, informed by what was then called the Office of Technology Assessment, I don't know if you remember this. Yes, of course. Okay, well, so the people who were staffing that, were people from my field, a lot of them, right? And, and so these guys, what they came up with, was a survey asking all practicing physicists in the United States, to prioritize different research projects in physics, that they would like to see funded by the government. Now, of course, if you do that, right, given the relatively small number of people who are working in, you know, high-energy physics, right, it didn't rank in the top three. Okay, and so that was used as evidence, right, against Steven Weinberg, right?

• 28:57Speaker 03

  And he was deeply upset and outraged by the whole thing and wrote this book, you may recall, called Dreams of a Final Theory.

• 29:04Brian Keating?

  Yeah, I got it in my graduation.

• 29:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, well, the thing is, this book is all about, you know, and he attacks science and technology studies and sociology and history, and he attacks feminists, he attacks everybody, because in a sense, yes, that this whole change of mindset with regard to what is it that the public wants out of science was changing. And that, of course, put guys like Weinberg on the back foot. And so that's the whole, if you know, and I think we have, we have resonances of all of that stuff I've just been talking about in where we are today.

• 29:34Brian Keating?

  Exactly.

• 29:35Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed-sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed-sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

• 30:02Brian Keating?

  Clay, and I think, you know, one thing that you hinted at that I really want to dig deeper into is this, the responsibility of a scientist. I've mentioned a lot lately that I believe a scientist has a moral obligation, not just a financial or, you know, kind of fiduciary or scientific duty to the public, but we have a moral obligation to do what you and I are doing now, which is to give for free exposure to the deepest scientific topics in a way that I never dumbed down, I never, you know, people say, you dumbed it down so great, I say, that's an insult, you know, I don't want to dumb it down, I don't want to have a dumb audience, I want to have the most magnificent and munificent audience in the known multiverse. But, you know, science extends beyond the laboratory, and we don't get out of it to our peril.

• 30:46Brian Keating?

  And eventually we'll realize, yeah, we're not building atom bombs or, you know, Al Cubieri warp drives, and the public may tire of us if we don't actually show them that they get some ROI. I mean, if you work at a Boots Pharmacy, I'll use a UK reference for you folks over there, I have a lot of listeners in the UK, love it, you work there and your manager came over to you and said, what did you do today, you know, Steve? And you say, you can't understand what I'm doing, I'm very sophisticated, using very specialized tools and jargon, like, you would say you're gone, or you'd be out of there in a second, so. The implications of that the scientist can just do his or her work with a blackboard and/or a atom smasher are really a bygone error. But I want to talk about another bygone

• 31:28Brian Keating?

  error, which is the 20 years that have elapsed since Kitz Miller versus Dover. I'm going to give a trigger warning. Okay, so many of my audience are devout, practicing atheists. And I've had on the foremost atheist of our time, Sam Harris, I had Daniel, I had the three of the four horsemen. I didn't have your countryman, Christopher Hitchens, unfortunately, but I had Dan Dennett. He did the final interview of his life with me. I'm very honored with that.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  There's no causation going on there, is there?

• 31:54Brian Keating?

  I don't think so, Steve. But you know, you and I can talk, you know, someone to death.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  As long as I'm not, as long as I'm still around, right?

• 32:00Brian Keating?

  Well, we'll see what happens. You should live in me well to 120. But the point, I hosted Richard Dawkins in a public lecture that he gave for his, you know, final swan song tour in Vancouver. And he flew me out there to do it. And we got along great. But a lot of my audience are atheists and, you know, devoutly so, as I said. I call myself a practicing devout agnostic. We can get into that some other time. But I want to add, I want to just notify the audience that I have on theists, I have on atheists, I'll have on whoever the hell I want. And I've had on a lot more atheists than I've had on actual believers and supporters of at least, you know, the traditional Judeo-Christian values. And especially, you know, Steve, you can tell is very devout. And I've witnessed that firsthand. And he's an exemplar of this. And I've had on, you know, fellow people

• 32:45Brian Keating?

  from the conference that you and I attended, including James Tour and Luke Barnes and many other people, Jay Bhattacharya and Eric Weinstein many times. So I want to ask you, first of all, what was Kitz Miller versus Dover? Why was this case, wasn't this already resolved? And what does it tell us about how scientific truth can be institutionally governed?

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Well, this is a, for people, a lot depends, you know, in a sense, I think a lot will depend on the age of the audience in terms of how much this resonates with them. Because in a sense, the Kitz Miller case, which took place in 2005, in a way kind of ended what had been for the previous 20 or more years, actually quite a lot of relatively high profile court cases involving the teaching of creation. In public schools in America, state schools. I think one of the things that's important to recognize, it's not just the First Amendment issue about free expression in the Constitution. But there also, and there is this, there is this separation of church and state. But also there is this separation of, of education from the federal government.

• 33:48Speaker 03

  And in fact, the explicit devolution of responsibility for education to local communities. And this is a very unique feature about the United States. It's a very deliberate feature of how the US is, is governed. And a lot had to do with the founding of the United States, where most of the founding fathers were dissenters, basically, right? They were, they were dissenting Christians, but the point is they weren't part of the established churches. And so they wanted to make sure that the, was going to keep up that kind of variety, right? That kind of diversity of opinion, which they believed actually led to a much kind of richer country and that people could learn from each other and, and all the rest of it. So I, you know, my view, and I, and I think this is kind of the spirit in which I certainly entered into this trial, is that the founding fathers would support school districts that

• 34:30Speaker 03

  actually, in a way, use different science textbooks, right? I mean, you know, not, they don't all have to use the same ones. They could use different.

• 34:37Brian Keating?

  Isn't it true, Steve, starting to interrupt you, but I mean, and you may not be familiar with this from an education policy perspective in the US, but for example, California textbooks, because it's the biggest market in the United States by a wide, wide margin, and indeed in much of the English language speaking world, the outsized importance of California and public school district does influence what happens in Arkansas or New York.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, as, as a matter of fact, yes. Right, yeah, but not as a matter of principle.

• 35:03Brian Keating?

  Yeah, okay, go on.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  That's all I'm saying, right? I mean, sure, as a matter of fact, you're going to have all these market attractors going on. There's no doubt about it. Because what, what, what in a sense, the founding fathers were trying to create was a kind of open field, a kind of market, right? Where, where depending on the people living in a particular. School district, right, they will kind of get books that they think that their students ought to be learning from, okay? And then maybe the state can serve, you know, can serve as a kind of an accrediting body as to which textbooks are in principle acceptable. But then you leave to the school districts to decide which of those textbooks one's going to use. Now, the thing is that if we're talking about, now, obviously, the motivation for people wanting to have creationism taught in the public schools in the first instance was because

• 35:46Speaker 03

  they believed that Darwinism radically contradicted their fundamental religious beliefs, right? So there was a sense in which that if students were being taught Darwinism in the biology class, then in some sense, and sometimes because of the way the teachers presented the matter, they felt that their religion was under threat, right? That, and that there was a kind of indoctrination going on, which should not be the purpose of doing a science class. Science class is not there to indoctrinate you into a certain ideology, okay? And that's kind of the way in which I think a lot of these Christians who first started mobilizing, you know, these court cases in the 1980s, that's where they were coming from. They felt a kind of overbearing, overweening Darwin-led biology that was threatening, in fact, their religion. And in fact, you know, there would be all these anecdotal reports about how students,

• 36:31Speaker 03

  when they raised questions about God or whatever, they'd be dismissed, right, by the biology teacher, right? And so that was the premise on which these court cases were often fielded. The problem with the court cases ever, none of them won, and none of the significant ones won. And that was largely because what was often being offered as the alternative was, you know, the Bible, right? I mean, and, and, and so that is clearly not a scientific textbook, right? And, and so in a sense, that was, they, they, these cases were relatively easy to dismiss. Now, when you're moving to something like intelligent design, which is kind of the version of creationism that, in the case that I was participating in, intelligent design, you might say, presents itself, and I think is true, right?

• 37:14Speaker 03

  That even though the people who promote intelligent design are, for the most part, Christians, there's no doubt about that, but at the same time, they're promoting it, saying that the science leads to God. It's kind of like that, right? And so they try to pitch the argument entirely on the scientific grounds, leaning very heavily on the sorts of things that evolutionary theory cannot answer now. If you actually look at the textbooks, let's say, the textbooks that, that were being offered in court case in Pennsylvania, the Kitzmiller case, right? You will see that the content of, of, of the textbooks tended to be, you know, Kind of objections or criticisms or, you know, aporia, things that we don't know that evolution cannot explain, right? And that, and that these are supposed to add up as a kind of implicit argument for

• 37:58Speaker 03

  there being some kind of intelligent design, right? I mean, that's basically the thrust of, of these textbooks. I was called in as an expert witness in the history and philosophy of science and sociology of science. So I wasn't, I wasn't an expert witness in the sense of, as an advocate of intelligent design, but, but as a kind of expert observer, you know, someone who can give a kind of meta theoretic perspective on what's going on here, kind of like the way we've been talking about stuff in this conversation. And so one of the points that I made, because one of the arguments that the opponents would make is, look, if these people start talking about God and intelligent design and stuff like that, that will turn them off from science, right? That'll just lead them back to the Bible, you know, and, and, and they'll never learn any science.

• 38:41Speaker 03

  And, and, and my point was that, in fact, if you want to look at the rise of modern science, especially the specific character that it has, the kind of unified character, the idea that it's rational, that, that, that the universe is covered under, you know, an economical set of laws that is intelligible to us, those sorts of assumptions that we make about the pursuit of science, certainly in the physical sciences, comes from this idea of getting into the mind of God. That's where it comes from, right? And in a sense, it is unlikely that those assumptions would have been the assumptions otherwise, because if you look at the way in which knowledge is pursued in other cultures outside of, you know, the, the monotheistic cultures, you know, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, you have people interested in the nature of physical reality, you have people

• 39:26Speaker 03

  interested in astronomy and all this stuff. But these people tend to think that there is no unity that you can get at rationally or intelligibly. In other words, they, they don't actually conceptualize the reality as being the product of a single intelligence. They don't actually conceptualize it that way. This was really important in the scientific revolution, this idea of getting into the mind of God. And these scientific revolutionaries, whether we're talking about Galileo or Newton or Copernicus or Kepler, or any of these people, Descartes, You can name them all. They all believe to varying degrees that the church, which is supposedly the authority in the religion that they believe, was in fact inhibiting inquiry, right? So in other words, these were all Christians trying to take back their faith

• 40:10Speaker 03

  from the institutions that they believed were corrupt and in fact were inhibiting free inquiry. That is the dynamic that you need to understand about these people, you know, trying to get into the mind of God. They felt they were being prohibited from doing so. And if you look at somebody like Galileo, who you mentioned earlier, right, Galileo was full of all these arguments where, you know, if Moses looked through the telescope, he would have seen the, you know, the craters on the moon, right, right? You know, in other, in other words, you know, that there's a sense in which he presents the people who are interrogating him as somehow trying to shut down inquiry. And so he comes back not by saying the Bible is rubbish and Moses didn't exist, but rather saying, look, Moses just didn't have the tools available to him.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  Right? That's, you know, and, and so that's a different kind of way of going. And so my point was that in this regard, right? The quest for God was very much behind the scientific revolution. And in fact, this idea carries on into the 19th century. You see echoes of it even in somebody like James Clark Maxwell. You know, it is not crazy. It is by no means crazy to somehow think that, you know, an intelligent designer could be part of the explanatory framework of science, because it pretty much was for a whole lot of people until the end of the 19th century. Okay, so, so it's not a cra- it's not some idea about smuggling in the Bible where-

• 41:29Speaker 00

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• 41:58Speaker 03

  Doesn't belong.

• 41:59Brian Keating?

  Although that is a classic, you know, kind of criticism of the of the Discovery Institute, that it's religion disguised as science through strategic wordplay, or that they, you know, emphasize or cherry pick positive research and then, you know, will neglect things, you know, confirmation bias, et cetera. And then it creates a self-publishing ecosystem, echo chim. How to respond to people that criticize the Discovery Institute?

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Okay. Well, so here's the-

• 42:21Brian Keating?

  I know my audience is going to scream about this if I don't ask you about-

• 42:23Speaker 03

  I actually addressed this in my expert testimony there, too. I think the reason why the Discovery Institute and the way, you know, and Discovery Institute is pretty much the main vehicle for intelligent design in terms of publicizing it and putting out certainly the textbooks on it, you know, yeah. And as I was saying before, if you read their stuff, it's all about picking holes in Darwinism. And in a sense, if you if you're able to add up enough objections, then it subsets you could topple the paradigm, right? It's kind of like that, where of course, that's not how science works. You can't just come up with a list of objections. You actually have to come up with an alternative. And the problem, of course, is that if you want to talk about anything relating to intelligent design as an explanatory principle, right? So if you wanted to articulate, in what sense

• 43:06Speaker 03

  is there an intelligence? How does this intelligence go about designing? Right? I mean, you know-

• 43:11Brian Keating?

  Yes, exactly. How does it actually interact with the-

• 43:12Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. I mean, you're-

• 43:13Brian Keating?

  Interact with the Big Bang and then leave it, leave it. Yeah, I've discussed that with Steve Meyer and-

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right. And, you know, ultimately, I do believe this is a theory of divine agency and the levels at which God, you know, is in fact interacting and, you know, and there are and theologians and scientists down through the ages, the people who we call natural theologians, have in fact given some very creative answers to this. But the problem is that you can't get any of this stuff published in an established science journal, right? So the point is, if you got, if you're, if you're somebody who is actually trying to come up with an intelligent design style of explanation, to be able to explain certain phenomena that Darwin can't explain, you're not going to get out of the starting gate, because the peer review process is just going to say, in principle, we are not going to accept any intelligent design stuff. So Michael Bihe, you know, who was the only

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Discovery Institute guy who ended up testifying in that trial, right? He was cross-exam- On this and he was pointing this out about how in a lot of his articles, which he was putting forward as in a way substantiating intelligent design, they were published in peer review journals. There's hardly any mention of anything relating to intelligent design. And he said, the reason why it couldn't be more explicit was because the peer review process basically told him, if you're any more explicit than you are now about this, we're not going to publish you. So there's effectively a kind of censorship, which discourages the bringing up of certain kinds of explanatory principles. So as a result, you don't have that kind of open enough intellectual environment for developing this.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  You know, and, and this is why, I don't know if you know about this, but there is this new institute named after William Huell. William Huell at Cambridge, which is on, on natural theology. And the idea is actually to bring scientists, philosophers and theologians together to in a way conceptualize these possible intelligent design explanations that are quite sophisticated. And of course, because you would have scientists involved in the process, you could, you could be more concrete about how all these concepts attached to the data and how they could be testable and stuff like that. And so they're trying to create a safe space for that kind of discussion. So this is the William Huell, I don't know if your, your, your audience will be familiar. W H E W E L L.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  He is the person who coined the word scientist in the English language in the 1830s. He's often seen as the founder of, of, of the history and philosophy of science as a field. And he was the master of Trinity College, Cambridge in the middle of the 19th century. And it was equally well versed in natural science and in natural theology. And was a correspondent of all the great people of the time, like Darwin and Faraday. Darwin mentions Huell, I mean, Huell was a big deal in his day, debated John Stuart Mill on the scientific method. And so there's this center that's, you know, going to be opening up in Cambridge, which is in a way trying to create a safe space where one could start getting into what an intelligent design explanation would look like. Because that's the thing, at the moment, there's an institutional lockdown on discussions of these things.

• 46:12Speaker 03

  So that even though the evolutionary biologists recognize that there are a whole lot of problems. With evolutionary theory, I mean, their conferences being held all the time by biologists talking about, you know, how we got to get out of this stuff, you know, all these difficulties that we have, but but they'll never invite an intelligent design person. They'll invite somebody from Gaia, okay, they'll invite a Gaia person who believes that the earth is one big organism, they'll invite that person.

• 46:38Brian Keating?

  A SETI person who believes.

• 46:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:40Brian Keating?

  And actually, you know, that part of the impetus for us to have this conversation grew out of the, you know, wars I've had with our good friend Eric Weinstein about the, you know, mission creep of peer review and how it's exceeded in his mind, all, you know, possible justification. And in my mind, how I've, you know, aped your countrymen, you know, adopted countrymen, you know, Winston Churchill and saying it's the worst system of scientific governance, except for all the others. And, you know, even though there was an explicit peer review, as Eric will say, you know, 200 years ago, there were still, you know, kind of informal peer review, you get up, literally, I've been to the Royal Institution, I gave a Faraday lecture there, and you'd get up and you'd do an experiment in front of somebody in front of your peers, actually, and yes, the public would be there too. But let's talk about peer review. Talk about the mission creep as you've described

• 47:24Brian Keating?

  it. What is the role of peer review? Does it have a role, in your opinion? And I don't want to interject too much of my own, you know, biases, but that's the host prerogative on all these podcasts. So talk about peer review, and how can the validation process take place so that the public gets ROI and the taxpayers, you know, understand things, but the journals that themselves profit on the scientific backs of scientists and uncompensated in all cases that I know about, and whether or not it needs severe reform by what you've described as a Doge-like agency for oversight of peer review?

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Peer review is useful in its strict sense, namely, in terms of catching error, right, or raising flags, you know, red flags with regard to certain things that don't seem quite right about the way the research is being described, checking to see if the arguments make sense and the references, whether, you know, whether they really support what's being said. I mean, there's, you know, there's all this kind of internal validation stuff, right, where where you're basically kind of judging the article on its own terms, putting itself forward as a contribution to knowledge. And that's a really important thing to do. Somebody's got to do that. And obviously, you need a certain level of competence that the author, in a sense, presents themselves as having in order to do that. So in that sense, it's a literally peer review, right? I should be able to understand what this article's saying.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Does it make sense to me? Yes or no? The mission creep occurs, and this a lot has to do with the nature of academic journals, I would say, because peer review generally occurs in the context of academic journal publication. And that's where the problems begin. Because then there is this additional judgment that's made. It's a kind of a meta-level judgment beyond the level of the text itself about whether whether this is relevant, right? When when when the peer reviewer says, is this really relevant research? Is this research really contributing to what's, you know, what really or ought to be going on in our field? Or is this a diversion? Is this a tangent? Is this taking stuff in the in the wrong direction? Right? So these kinds of judgments also get made by peer reviewers. And they effectively, you know, close off lines of inquiry because you can't, you know,

• 49:22Speaker 03

  especially from the more impactful journals, right? The journals that more people in the field read, right? Because they're basically being siphoned off and marginalized into, you know, very often journals nobody reads. So that is the mission creep. And that mission creep is often encouraged by journal editors because the journal editors see themselves as the standard bearers of their disciplines. And they and they imagine their disciplines in a very Coon-like way. Right? So they say, there's a paradigm. And the paradigm is, you know, we're in this field and our field is devoted to these problems. And we have certain ways of solving these problems. And so I could take any paper that's submitted and I can judge it in those terms. And if it doesn't fit that, you know, if it doesn't fit the paradigm, it doesn't belong here.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  And I think this is kind of where where the problem is, is is this kind of mission creep, where where in a sense, what peer review does is it creates this, what I call path dependency within the scientific inquiry, where basically the only people who get center stage in terms of their work being examined are the people who are contributing to the trends as they already exist. And so everybody else then gets put into the margins. And and and this has a, you know, this is a pretty significant phenomenon in science, one that I I sometimes mention in lectures, you know, where we're in a situation where, and this has been true at least since the 1960s, when the measurements were first taken, that 80% of the published literature gets zero to one citation.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  That's right. Right? And this has been true ever since Derek DeSola Price and these scientometric people started measuring this stuff in the 1960s. A very interesting book for those in your audience who wants to, who want to look at this stuff in the beginning. Big Science, Little Science. That's the name of the book from Derek DeSola Price. And he, he first pointed this out and it's certainly true now, right? So, you know, you, you have this situation where, where basically the vast majority of stuff in the scientific literature probably doesn't even get read. It's just there. And the reason why people keep on publishing it is largely for promotion purposes. Right? Because in order to get promoted, right? You have to say, I've published these articles. And, and especially if these articles get into journals that are halfway decent.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  And so it becomes a kind of a, a self accreditation process, but it doesn't serve any clear cognitive function. And that's largely to do with the way in which peer review works, which in a way is designed to systematically ignore most of what's out there.

• 51:44Brian Keating?

  What would it actually look like? A Doge-like agency for peer review that you've talked about? How could it actually reform? How would we implement it? Would it be pay to play? How would it actually be instantiated?

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Well, there are a lot of things to deal with here. I mean, Doge could have a field day, I would say, with regard to different levels. Here's something I would suggest, okay? And, and, and maybe, and maybe it would appeal to Elon Musk, especially given the role of generative artificial intelligence and stuff like this. One of the things that's very interesting about generative artificial intelligence in this whole discussion that we're having about scientific publication is that you may know that these companies, right? OpenAI and all these other companies that are around that do generative artificial intelligence are buying up all of the academic publications, right? They're going to all the publishers and the publishers are basically selling these generative AI firms, all of these academic publications.

• 52:33Brian Keating?

  Dollars, yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, and you know, and, and so all that stuff is now inputted into generative artificial intelligence.

• 52:40Brian Keating?

  We have AI writing papers that get it passed for being better than the computer science average submission, right?

• 52:45Speaker 03

  Well, well, not only that, I think we're pretty close to a time where if you, let's say, want to call, you know, you want to say, how do I address this problem? And you ask generative artificial intelligence. And let's say this is a problem that in a sense, no science Has been able to get their heads around or solve or anything. The kinds of things that'll end up saying will be drawn from lots of different sources, including the ones that are systematically ignored in the major peer review journals. Because the generative artificial intelligence doesn't have the biasing factors of impact factors and stuff like that in its program. It just has the literature, right? In a sense, it treats all the literature equally. And so as a result, the result you're likely to get from generative AI, looking at the full range of academic publications,

• 53:30Speaker 03

  is going to be much more egalitarian, you might say, with regard to how it sources stuff. And it'll give you, and you know, and it'll give you a different look at the problem, right? It'll give you a different look at the problem, and that might serve in itself to break some of the path dependency, right? And so if you, if you invest in generative artificial intelligence with this specific purpose, so you input all the academic publications, and then you start asking it the kinds of standing problems of science and see the kinds of things it comes up with, I bet you will come up with ideas for hypotheses that the scientific establishment basically are systematically ignoring because of the path dependency of peer review.

• 54:10Speaker 00

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• 54:40Brian Keating?

  So let's talk in the final few minutes about how we can transform universities. I mean, you and I know that what we've been doing is the actual, you know, world's second oldest profession. It's a, it's a guy, you know, with a rock and, and he's scraping on another rock. And there's a bunch of students in front of him. And it's been used since the year 1080 in Bologna, Italy, when the barbaric practice of students going on strike would mean that the professor would no longer get paid. So thank God for. Tenure and and so forth, Steve, as we know. But how could we transform it? There are new institutions, you know, in addition to our good friend, you know, Peter Thiel's fellowships and the new University of Austin, Texas. What about, I mean, truly independent labs? I mean, are we going to discover dark matter?

• 55:24Brian Keating?

  You know, because we're going to get funded by some rogue, you know, person who is, you know, Robert Bigelow character or discover UAPs are actually bringing us new technology and so forth. I mean, there's only so many times Elon will be, you know, asked to go to the well. And quite frankly, I don't think he cares. I think he singular focused like going like many great minds are of going to Mars. And he's not been charitable to my knowledge at all compared to his wealth. And that's, that's fine. He's, as I say, singularly focused. How could we reform higher education? Or will it be thrust upon us? I thought COVID would be the end, you know, beginning of the end when it started because Zoom for $72,000 a year for out of state tuition here was just not worth it. Even, you know, as great a professor as I am, and I know I, no, I'm just kidding. I'm decent, but I know I could be better.

• 56:07Brian Keating?

  But why do that when they could actually have Galileo teach a student from a generative AI platform who has all the students, you know, transcripts, scores, test scores, emails, your correspondences? Are our days numbered? Or is it so entrenched that the trend of, you know, colleges being more exclusive than ever, as has emerged from COVID, going to be maintained for the foreseeable future?

• 56:28Speaker 03

  The first thing I would say is that the main thing that keeps universities afloat and not necessarily all universities, but is certification aspect of it. So from the standpoint of just getting information and and knowledge and even learning about stuff, you're right, you don't need to go to university anymore, even for relatively high level subjects. Right? You can, as it were, enter at whatever level you you are able to begin, because there are many different levels you can enter, and then you can just learn your way to where you want to go. But of course, you don't get a degree at the end of that necessarily. Or at least you don't get a degree that necessarily will give you any leverage in life. Right? And that's why the university degree still matters. But that's primarily where it matters.

• 57:09Speaker 03

  One thing that I think that that universities have done, in a way, it began with the Cold War, but it's certainly exacerbated since then, is the separation of the teaching and research functions from the university. Right? So in other words, we're now in a situation where basically you have a class of people doing research and a class of people who teach. And this is a real problem, especially from the standpoint. Of the students' experience. Because I think the ideal of a university education is to have somebody teaching your course, including your introductory course, somebody who's kind of in the front lines of knowledge, bringing some of that enthusiasm, as it were, that they have in their research, bringing it into the classroom, and in a sense translating it to an audience that, you know, might get affected with the enthusiasm and go forward in some way pursue those ideas further.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  If not in a kind of professional capacity, at least take them in, in general, as part of their liberal arts, you know, liberal education. And I think we're losing that. Because I think the one, the one real selling point of a university, and I think this, you know, to my mind, this is where I think the university will live or die, is if you can get good people who are, you know, research active, teaching well, right? And in a sense, it's kind of a performance skill. And one of the problems that we have nowadays is that we have a lot of these short-term teachers, right, who aren't committed to anything and live off PowerPoints. A lot of these educational technologies that have been developed to routinize teaching, like PowerPoints, in a sense, really kill the incentive to have any kind of academic personality.

• 58:39Speaker 03

  And I think, you know, the thing that always kept the university alive as a kind of institution was that it was exemplified by certain personalities who were academic. And they had a distinctive personal quality to them, which was typically displayed in the classroom, perhaps primarily in the classroom. You know, Richard Feynman, okay? That's a great example of somebody. You know, if we lose that kind of person, then I think the university doesn't have anything distinctive, except, you know, giving a degree. Right? And, and, and so now what I think this ends up meaning is that the university sector will shrink. I mean, Peter Thiel talks about it being a bubble. And I think there's something to that, actually. And I think there are too many people who go to university and are sorely disappointed,

• 59:23Speaker 03

  but then they shouldn't have been sold on the idea in the first place. I think it'll be a, a smaller university sector, but hopefully one where the distinctiveness of the academic personality is the thing that gets across more, most strongly to the students. Because, look, one of the things that we can do as academics is that we and our person, by the way we talk, by the kinds of things we talk about, we can exemplify sophisticated thinking. Right, you know, over vast array of subjects, right? We could do that. And that is something that I think people actually need to be exposed to. That's not just something that you can get from a set of PowerPoints or even reading a book. You actually need to see what it's like. So Feynman is really interesting in terms of the manner

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  in which he talks about all this abstract stuff in quantum mechanics, right? It's really interesting. The way, you know, the emphasis, the whole theater of it is really interesting. And it really enhances what he's saying. And I think we are in danger of losing that kind of idea because there's no incentive to cultivate it in the academy.

• 1:00:26Brian Keating?

  How do you draw the line? You know, as our final question, where do you draw the line between productive scientific iconoclasm and versus conspiracy thinking? We're speaking on the day after the JFK files were released in the US. We're about to hear disclosure, whatever that means. It's been a big nothing burger for years. I think the JFK files are also fall into that camp. Those are kind of the big pillars and, you know, except for, you know, nine 11. And so I don't think there's going to be much difference there, whether it's institutional capture, whatever. But where do you draw the line between productive, scientific, iconoclastic thinking versus conspiracy thinking?

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  I too am not a great fan of conspiracy theorizing, but I could see. I mean, the reason why it happens is because clearly people are not getting satisfactory answers to questions that they think they ought to be getting satisfactory answers to. And across a wide range of subjects, I think that's pretty clear, right? And the whole point about a conspiracy theory is to kind of hook up all of these unanswered questions together, right? As having some kind of common source, right? You know, Klaus Schwab or somebody, I don't know. I mean, you know, and so in a sense, you could see where conspiracy theory is coming from. And I would say that the presence of conspiracy theory is a real, it's like the canary in the mine shaft, right? It shows that there is a legitimation crisis in the establishment, if nothing else, right?

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  You wouldn't have conspiracy theories if people actually believed what people were saying. So the point is conspiracy theories are sociologically useful, you might say, as a kind of an indicator of something. So I don't want to, you know, so they do serve a function. I would say that the Think about scientific iconoclasm is just how productive is it of science? You know, and that's a tricky matter as we were discussing earlier with intelligent design. Because you need the right environment to be able to develop these iconoclastic views into something that in fact can be competitive with the established view. You may know the philosopher Karl Popper, who was right. And Karl Popper said, you know, what makes something a science is that you falsify, right? You're always trying to falsify even your most cherished theory.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Now, he had a student, Imre Lakatosh, at the London School of Economics. And Lakatosh said, well, that's fine, Popper, except you have to give some time, right, for iconoclastic views to actually develop in a sophisticated way. So that then there's something to actually to falsify, right? So in other words, you can't make the falsification task too, too easy, right? You have to actually have a fairly, you know, sophisticated articulated theory, you know, with lots of different consequences, and then you try to falsify it. But the point is, how do you scale up that way? How do you begin to scale up that way? Well, you actually need an institutionally open minded environment in order to develop theories in a way that then allow them to be tested in a relatively severe way.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  And I think with, with things like intelligent design, and I think this may apply also to some of that UAP stuff, right, I, I think the environment is just not there, right? That you need the open mindedness so that you could explore lots of different alternatives and not just be shut down after 30 seconds. So that's a tricky institutional thing, right? That science needs to be institutionally more open on this matter. But ultimately, you know, you, you know, the scientific iconoclast by their fruits, basically.

• 1:03:40Brian Keating?

  Well, Steve, this has been an exceptionally interesting, impossibly delicious conversation. We'll have to do a part two. Like I said, we'll do it in person. We'll do it in person in a sumptuous setting. If Peter Thiel and David Berlinsky and others can arrange it for us. A third time would be the charm. And I'm really delighted in it. And I hope that you had a good time as well. And I'll be sure to, you know, we'll be sure to put this out to all the corners of the internet, wherever people need to hear this message. Because I think we can learn a lot from getting outside of our silos as, as, you know, hardcore practicing, quote unquote, real scientists. We do need to learn from our brethren and cisterns in the, you know, humanities adjacent to science and, and actually the, the kinds of, you know, meta conversations that need to be had. And I think they're sorely needed. So Steve, thank you so much.

• 1:04:25Brian Keating?

  Enjoy your evening and I hope to see you again in the very near future in person.

• 1:04:30Speaker 03

  In person, Brian, indeed. Bye bye.

• 1:04:33Brian Keating?

  Okay. Bye bye.

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