Cosmic Queries – Science and Morality

Explore the intersection of science and morality when host Neil deGrasse Tyson answers fan questions with the help of guest Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic Magazine and author of The Moral Arc. Eugene Mirman co-hosts.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, and I'm your host, your personal astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, and I serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium, right here in New York City, at the American Museum of Natural History. And this edition of StarTalk is one what we call cosmic queries. And we've solicited questions from our fanbase and all the various social media on the topic of the role of science in the formation of our morality. And I can't do that alone, I could try it, but we got people who thought way more deeply on this than I have. But before I get to our principal guest, let me just introduce my co-host Eugene Mirman. Eugene, hey.

• 1:02Eugene Mirman?

  Hello Neil.

• 1:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk.

• 1:04Eugene Mirman?

  Thank you.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there's a man sitting to your right.

• 1:07Eugene Mirman?

  I know, I can see him.

• 1:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is, of course, Michael Shermer, if you don't know this guy. He's founder and editor-in-chief of Skeptics.

• 1:16Michael Shermer?

  Skeptic Magazine.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a magazine?

• 1:18Eugene Mirman?

  I don't believe it.

• 1:19Michael Shermer?

  See, I've never heard that one before.

• 1:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've known your work forever, and I'm glad somebody's doing-

• 1:29Michael Shermer?

  Almost eternity, yes.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, duh. Doing the good work. You do all the hard work, and I get to just tell people to have fun with the universe.

• 1:36Michael Shermer?

  Well unfortunately, there's a lot of bunkum that needs debunking that we do, yes.

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, one of your recent books, because you've got a lot of, you come out with books all the time, so be a regular guest for each book, please.

• 1:46Michael Shermer?

  Okay.

• 1:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And currently, it's called The Moral Arc.

• 1:49Michael Shermer?

  Moral Arc, yeah.

• 1:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Great title.

• 1:51Michael Shermer?

  Well, the title, of course, comes from Dr. King's famous "How Long, Not Long."

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be Martin Luther King.

• 1:55Michael Shermer?

  That's right, yes.

• 1:56Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, not just a doctor named King.

• 1:59Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 2:00Eugene Mirman?

  He's a cardiologist that I really love.

• 2:03Michael Shermer?

  But he had a moral arc. Which is a good thing, because, you know, doctors are supposed to heal.

• 2:07Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:09Michael Shermer?

  Actually, King got that from a 19th century abolitionist preacher named Theodore Parker, who first coined the idea that there's an arc to the moral universe and it's bending toward justice.

• 2:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he quoted that, like, verbatim, in that speech.

• 2:22Michael Shermer?

  That's right, he did, yes. Well, he had a whole bunch of religious tropes, and so often religions credited with a lot of the civil rights movements. But in fact, Dr. King's primary guide was Gandhi. That is, you know, nonviolent peaceful protests and that sort of thing. And that particular march from Selma to Montgomery, which is now

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The famous one.

• 2:40Michael Shermer?

  immortalized in film.

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Michael Shermer?

  Uh, was not just an accident. You know, they really shopped around to figure out, where can we march that will get the most attention for our cause? Who is the biggest racist we have? The biggest bigot, you know, in the South? And this is Bull Connor in Alabama, and so that

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Isn't that weird that there's like a portfolio of people to choose from?

• 2:59Michael Shermer?

  Yeah. On a scale of 1 to 10, who is really a badass? This is the guy we want.

• 3:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this category over here, now which one is right? Uh, so I hadn't paused to reflect on the fact that the entire civil rights movement is some steps towards morality in our species.

• 3:16Michael Shermer?

  Absolutely, the idea that

• 3:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At least in the United States, of course.

• 3:19Michael Shermer?

  Well, really worldwide, at least in the Western world, since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, the idea that the universe is knowable.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, that, I would date that from like 1600 onward. When we first start, uh, not only thinking about how the world must be, but testing the ideas and coming up with theories for how and why.

• 3:39Michael Shermer?

  Exactly right, right. So you can start wherever you want to start, Copernicus, or slightly after

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:44Michael Shermer?

  Kepler, but I

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This would be 400, 500 years

• 3:47Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, so a big turning point, though, is Newton's Principia, which, after that

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, Newton's my man.

• 3:52Michael Shermer?

  I know he's your man, that's why I brought him up.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just so you know. Just watch what you say.

• 3:56Michael Shermer?

  And he's not just your man, he was pretty much everybody's man.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got his back, okay? So just back up when it's, alright, so

• 4:04Michael Shermer?

  You must get those letters and papers from, uh, from alternative physics people that go, Newton was wrong and here's why.

• 4:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 4:10Michael Shermer?

  And, and it's really

• 4:11Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know about this at all, but I get it and we can move on.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 4:14Michael Shermer?

  You you probably get wannabe comedians that send you material.

• 4:17Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, that are like, Newton is wrong. I don't think so, but I.

• 4:21Michael Shermer?

  Newton wasn't funny at all, but I am. Well, you're right. He wasn't funny at all. He's very serious. Anyway, the idea was that uh the universe is knowable and it's governed by certain principles and laws that we can understand and even put into equations. And after the Principia was published, everybody wanted to be the Newton in their field. So Montesquieu wrote a book called The Spirit of the Laws, which was about what are the conditions by which people design certain laws and customs and economic systems and political systems? There must be some governing laws behind that. And then this would eventually gave rise to the study of the economy as a knowable system. The economy is governed by laws and principles, just like the universe is. So solar systems, ecosystems, economic systems. And so this is what the Enlightenment was all about.

• 5:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I still think that's a hope, that's a wishful thing for economists to analogize what they do to what physicists do in the universe. And you know that there's some physics envy going on in there, you know.

• 5:17Michael Shermer?

  Well, of course, but uh and and well, actually you have a deeper point there that maybe it's not doable. It may be sort of epistemologically, you can't ratchet up from a solar system to an economic system. Maybe there's too many variables, but that is what they try to do. At least uh uh.

• 5:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people are the biggest variables there are.

• 5:34Eugene Mirman?

  We need a functioning society with an economy.

• 5:36Michael Shermer?

  It's better than randomness.

• 5:37Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, it's true. It's better than, yeah.

• 5:39Michael Shermer?

  Chaos.

• 5:40Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 5:41Michael Shermer?

  Like some economists.

• 5:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, something. It sounds like you guys are really mad at uh or you want bartering.

• 5:46Michael Shermer?

  But why don't you ratchet up to say social systems and and then moral systems? I mean, they actually talked about the moral sciences. What's that? Well, if human behavior is governed by certain laws and principles like animal behavior is, like planets are, then how we treat each other should be treated as a problem to be solved rather than a sin to be condemned. So instead of religion condemning people for their bad acts, let's look at what they're doing. Homicides, for example, killing each other. What can we do to like decrease the amount of that? And that's what systems, political systems began to experiment with. Let's try this, let's try that.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And apparently-

• 6:20Eugene Mirman?

  Free hats.

• 6:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That did it.

• 6:22Eugene Mirman?

  All the violence.

• 6:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's odd that the threat of going to prison apparently is not working, given the prison population.

• 6:29Eugene Mirman?

  Well, I think, yeah, threatening in general is often not the best way.

• 6:33Michael Shermer?

  Well, the first book on that was by a guy named Cesare Beccaria, an Italian Enlightenment philosopher who wanted to be the Newton of his field. And his book was on how the punishment should fit the crime, his essay on crimes and punishments. He's the first to articulate-

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just acquired that book two weeks ago.

• 6:48Michael Shermer?

  You did?

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 6:49Michael Shermer?

  Seriously?

• 6:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just from an old antiquarian book.

• 6:51Michael Shermer?

  You've been thinking about punishing a lot lately?

• 6:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think I only learned that that book existed from reading some of what you've written.

• 6:57Michael Shermer?

  That's right, yep.

• 6:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's, he tried to figure out, how do you match a punishment to a crime?

• 7:03Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what do you go about to even establish that relationship?

• 7:07Michael Shermer?

  Exactly.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I was very impressed with what that was.

• 7:09Michael Shermer?

  At the time, the death penalty was, you know, not only on the books, but it was on the books for over 220 different crimes.

• 7:15Eugene Mirman?

  Like, like if you stole someone's moccasins?

• 7:17Michael Shermer?

  That's right. Stealing moccasins, death penalty, off with your head.

• 7:20Eugene Mirman?

  Wow.

• 7:22Michael Shermer?

  You know, so, I mean, you know, we're distressed about ISIS beheading people. You know, states used to behead people right and left or any, you insult the king, insult the king's garden, and you could be beheaded.

• 7:32Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 7:33Michael Shermer?

  Shoplifting.

• 7:33Eugene Mirman?

  His garden? This king sounds like a real jerk. Or a control freak.

• 7:38Michael Shermer?

  Oh, the gardens in the 17th century eighties were very regimented, and they were supposed to be very geometrical.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the English gardens were, the French gardens are more free-form, if I remember correctly.

• 7:47Eugene Mirman?

  But to insult them in either place was, was-

• 7:49Michael Shermer?

  Death penalty, yeah.

• 7:50Eugene Mirman?

  Wow, that does seem a little extreme.

• 7:51Michael Shermer?

  So Beccaria's idea was-

• 7:53Eugene Mirman?

  Were they very nice gardens, or was it kind of like it would be-

• 7:55Michael Shermer?

  Well, some of them were, but, you know, I mean, come on.

• 7:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were they insultable?

• 7:57Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, I don't know, maybe don't insult the man's garden.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Your rhubarbs are not quite lined up straight, yeah, all right.

• 8:03Michael Shermer?

  Off with his head. Off with his rhubarb. So, the idea that, it's the principle of proportionality, that punishment should fit the crime, and, you know, what a concept. And we would sort of take it for granted, and we often abuse it and then come back. You know, so the crime wave of the 60s and 70s was followed by the prison wave of the, you know, the 90s and the 2000s. And now we recognize, okay, this has gone too far. You know, these severe punishers for, you know, a third strike of a half an ounce of pot, you know.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of anything.

• 8:32Michael Shermer?

  Of anything, right.

• 8:33Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 8:33Michael Shermer?

  Oregano, oh, okay, off with his head. Uh, you know, that's, that's too far. So, but, but the idea that we're gonna experiment with things. That's kind of a scientific idea.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Michael Shermer?

  Let's try this.

• 8:43Eugene Mirman?

  Maybe you just dangle someone upside down for an hour and then they, and then they won't be criminals. Have we tried that?

• 8:48Michael Shermer?

  Uh, actually, that, this is not a bad idea. It's gonna shake up somebody's brain, uh, if there's a criminal brain. Anyway, but, so what we're after here is like, how we can apply the methods of science to a political system, society, human behavior.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's precisely how we posed the question to our fanbase, knowing that you'd be with us in the studio here and now. Visiting from Los Angeles.

• 9:12Michael Shermer?

  You psychically knew I would be coming.

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was, yeah, it was just data.

• 9:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, uh, so Eugene.

• 9:18Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have some of these questions. Now, neither Michael nor I have seen these questions before.

• 9:23Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're popping them on us, so let's.

• 9:25Eugene Mirman?

  I'm asking you questions that people have asked.

• 9:26Michael Shermer?

  They conceal in a fun and wet.

• 9:28Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:30Eugene Mirman?

  Um, this is from Patreon. This is a Patreon patron, uh, Mark Miller. And his question is, "With evidence proving we are all equally the same, why do racism and bigotry remain strong in certain groups with strong ideologies?" He's from Halifax, Nova Scotia.

• 9:46Michael Shermer?

  Right, wow, okay, whoo, that's the big question.

• 9:48Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, he jumps right to the.

• 9:50Michael Shermer?

  Uh, well, okay, so first of all, one of the cognitive capacities we have is pigeonholing things. We classify things. Planets, animals, other people. And unfortunately, we're very good at this. There's good reasons to do that, you know, it's good to be able to realize that those mushrooms are good to eat and these are bad to eat and you can tell the difference by the color of the skin of the mushroom.

• 10:09Eugene Mirman?

  You don't have to bite it and throw up or die.

• 10:11Michael Shermer?

  And die, that's right. So, uh, and, and it's good to get that.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you did, that would be immensely valuable to those who survived.

• 10:17Eugene Mirman?

  If they saw you. Otherwise, you're a dead guy by a bunch of mushrooms. Who knows what happened?

• 10:22Michael Shermer?

  And in fact, we have a, a brain mechanism that does just that. It's called one trial learning. If you eat a mushroom and, and vomit and become violently ill, you'll never wanna eat that again. And that applies to any food. In my case, it was red wine when I was in college when I had way too much red wine.

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 10:36Michael Shermer?

  And it took me about 10 years before I could drink red wine again. Just because my brain was put, you know, okay, that made you vomit. Don't eat that again.

• 10:42Eugene Mirman?

  Only gin. Gin will keep you safe. That's what you would tell yourself.

• 10:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It happened to me with, uh, I got, uh, what's that really bad one you get in your lower digestive tract? Uh,

• 10:51Michael Shermer?

  Well, there's Montezuma's Revenge.

• 10:53Eugene Mirman?

  Salmonella.

• 10:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I got salmonella.

• 10:55Eugene Mirman?

  Do you eat raw chicken, like chicken tartare?

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it was, it was mayonnaise likely. And the, at the time, what the taste in my mouth was an orange soda. And, and I went, I went 10 years before I could come near orange soda.

• 11:07Eugene Mirman?

  What about mayonnaise? You, you looked around.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't have the taste of mayonnaise in my mouth. That's the difference.

• 11:13Eugene Mirman?

  All right.

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the confounding of the accuracy of the data.

• 11:15Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 11:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That you would use it as a cause and effect.

• 11:17Eugene Mirman?

  Right, right.

• 11:18Michael Shermer?

  And, and in essence, that's what racism is. It's, it's just a hijacking of a system that's there for good reasons. Uh, and then say, okay, all people that look like X, that's in the category of, you know, the bad stuff and we don't want to get near them. We, you see this now with, you know, that, that most of the ISIS terrorists is, is related to Islam. So therefore we just lump into this big category. That's just so predictable.

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How much of it isn't just tribalism?

• 11:42Michael Shermer?

  That, well, that is what the tri- that is in part what tribalism is. Try, although see tribalism is whoever's going to be your kin and kind and the people you, you grew up with and hang around a lot with.

• 11:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And share culture DNA.

• 11:52Michael Shermer?

  And, and those are typically going to be, you know, ra- racially similar to you and so on. So we naturally just look at people in other tribes unless there's some way to interact with them to reduce the amount of anxiety and increase trust.

• 12:04Eugene Mirman?

  Which is where pop music comes in.

• 12:05Michael Shermer?

  Pop, pop culture and pop music. Music is actually one of the great unifiers. You know, if, you know, if you like Bono and I like Bono, or take your pick, uh, you know, then, then, uh,

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm okay with Bono, yeah.

• 12:15Michael Shermer?

  Okay, good. So, uh, you know, then, then we're less likely to, you know,

• 12:19Eugene Mirman?

  So maybe the real answer is to get ISIS some, well, first of all, U2. And then probably from there, just be like, well, okay, maybe we can agree on Led Zeppelin.

• 12:27Michael Shermer?

  Well, that would be good.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so is the,

• 12:30Michael Shermer?

  That's a good start.

• 12:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The,

• 12:32Eugene Mirman?

  We're wired to be racist.

• 12:33Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. So we're wired to be tribalists. Now, is it possible to, for the tribalism to relate to your proximity to them rather than to what they look like? In such a way than people in your city, however large, become your tribe.

• 12:49Michael Shermer?

  That's right. And the way that happens is through interactions of any kind, trade.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 12:55Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, so like, like, interstate trade reduces the likelihood of a conflict between two states by a significant percentage. It reduces it by like a hundred percent. So.

• 13:05Eugene Mirman?

  By a hundred percent?

• 13:06Michael Shermer?

  Well, but it's a.

• 13:08Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry, I got those. So, it's very exciting.

• 13:11Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, actually, I mispoke. By fifty percent.

• 13:13Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, okay. Oh, that's so much more believable now.

• 13:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming the other way, it would go up a hundred percent.

• 13:19Michael Shermer?

  Yes.

• 13:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 13:19Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Going from fifty to a hundred, you've increased by a hundred percent.

• 13:22Eugene Mirman?

  Yes.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But going from a hundred down to fifty, it's only fifty percent.

• 13:26Michael Shermer?

  I mean, Chinese are fairly different looking from us, but one reason not to go to war with them is they make your, they make your iPad there. And so because they do that, we don't want to bomb them. We want to buy their, you know, we want to give them their, our money and they want to give us their products. So there's, you know, there's a mutual exchange. But that works with ideas or music or any kind of pop culture.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a leftover evolutionary force. As you said, I love the word you use, hijacked or

• 13:51Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, hijacked, yeah.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Co-opted for, for, for completely nefarious reasons.

• 13:55Michael Shermer?

  That's right. So, but, but, but, well, but, yeah, that's right.

• 13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's an evolutionary shortcoming in our species.

• 14:00Michael Shermer?

  As Jared Diamond likes to point out, from hanging out at the pop, with Papua New Guineans, you know, indigenous peoples. If you run into a stranger on a hiking path, you should either try to kill him or run for it. Because he's gonna, he might try to kill you. The idea of reaching out and shaking somebody's hand is just insane. Because in the ancestral world that we evolved in, that would have been suicidal to do that. It's.

• 14:22Eugene Mirman?

  Plus, one of you had turmeric and the other had gold.

• 14:25Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So you, you make a swap or something. So that's one of the reasons why anthropologists have documented, like, the potlatch, where I'm gonna throw a big party for you and you throw a big party for me. It doesn't matter what it is. We're exchanging something and that tells me, I can trust this guy. You know, he gave me something, I gave him something, he trusts me, I trust him. And that breaks down the natural tribal barriers. So the idea would be if we could expand it to the whole city.

• 14:46Eugene Mirman?

  If we could have a worldwide party, let's call it Christmas. And exclude only, New Year's, let's call it New Year's, probably better.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New Year's is pretty good. And how much violence happens on New Year's? I mean, think about it.

• 14:57Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know. Probably less than, uh, on Christmas.

• 15:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Way less. And, and so.

• 15:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, in this, uh, some, I've always been fascinated by the, the leftover, uh, evolutionary baggage we have, simply to have us survive in the past that then would interfere with our survival.

• 15:15Michael Shermer?

  Absolutely, and you can turn it back on unfortunately, and that's what groups like ISIS do. They tribalize things and you know, they're the enemy, we're, you know, we're the good guys. It's, it's the, you know, the Mac, that's sort of dividing people up into black and white, good and evil, and it's easy to turn those things back on. Fortunately, we're, we're pretty good at turning it off, just through all these different mechanisms that, and so one of the things states have done by making their borders more porous, say, what's the chances of Germany and France going to war?

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All these scientifically literate, uh, adjectives.

• 15:44Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 15:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The porosity.

• 15:45Michael Shermer?

  Porosity.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's good.

• 15:48Michael Shermer?

  The gelatinous mass of the economy.

• 15:49Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah. Stop talking about Greece like that.

• 15:53Michael Shermer?

  Uh, but where, you know, for 500 years, the great powers of Europe were at war with each other pretty much every year, it just stopped in 1945.

• 16:00Eugene Mirman?

  Until they started trading transistor radios and stuff.

• 16:02Michael Shermer?

  That's right, yeah, absolutely, yeah. It's cheaper for the French and Germans to trade with one another and cross borders and so on. Well, now with the EU, you don't even have to show your passport.

• 16:10Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 16:11Michael Shermer?

  Uh, it's like going from here to Texas, or, no, wait, where are we? Oh, okay, not here.

• 16:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugene, we, a couple of minutes left, do we get, can we slip in another question, do you think?

• 16:19Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, I, I think we can.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 16:20Eugene Mirman?

  Here's one, uh, from, uh, George Isaac on Facebook. Neil, how far do you want human space exploration to be by the year 2115?

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 100 years, is, is he talking about? So, here's an interesting fact, and to the point of your book, The Moral Arc. The International Space Station, which is a collaboration of various nations, including the United States and Russia.

• 16:45Eugene Mirman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is the largest collaboration of nations outside of the waging of war.

• 16:56Eugene Mirman?

  Bigger than just trade in general?

• 16:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you talk about how many nations are involved and the value of that mission.

• 17:06Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many billions of dollars it represents. Yeah, I guess there's trade. Okay.

• 17:10Eugene Mirman?

  But, but yeah, I see what you mean.

• 17:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can interconnect economies. I'll grant you that. But they're not people working together in front of one another as it is in the space station. Someone upon hearing that thought, well, maybe the World Cup is like that, or the Olympics. But the cost of going to space exceeds this and the economic commitment is greater and there's no real, uh, uh, uh, private enterprise return on it. So it's really nations just trying to cooperate. And I'm fascinated by the possibility that maybe the best way to have the world cooperate is to put them all in one boat, basically, space boat. And now here, now they gotta treat each other right.

• 17:47Michael Shermer?

  A common enemy in the form of an alien is a popular sci-fi story that unites all nations to fight against this evil enemy, something like that. But what would be more interesting is if we had a new society set up on Mars to see what kind of government would they come up with? Just, you know, just 10 guys and then there's 50 and then 100 and then 1,000, 10,000. What would they do?

• 18:05Eugene Mirman?

  I think they'd probably have some.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Kill one another.

• 18:07Eugene Mirman?

  They'd have some version of Canada until it got too confusing. Then they'd go to war.

• 18:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or Lord of the Flies for grownups. When we come back, more of Cosmic Queries with Michael Shermer on StarTalk.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk and I've got Eugene Mirman, my co-host. Eugene, hello. Yeah. And our special guest today is Michael Shermer.

• 18:35Michael Shermer?

  Hey.

• 18:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he's publisher and editor, Grand Poobah of Skeptics Magazine.

• 18:39Michael Shermer?

  Head of director.

• 18:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Director. And you, every time I turn around, you've got a book out and The Moral Arc is your latest, I think.

• 18:47Michael Shermer?

  Yep, that's right.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think I even blurbed this book.

• 18:49Michael Shermer?

  You did.

• 18:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, my, my goal is to be the shortest blurb on any book jacket.

• 18:53Michael Shermer?

  Yours is the shortest.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did, good.

• 18:55Michael Shermer?

  Shermer's great. Read this book.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I tried to be a little cleverer than that.

• 19:00Michael Shermer?

  Like your tweets, they're very thoughtful and clever. I mean, not everybody does that.

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, yeah, it's usually the self-serving usually.

• 19:07Michael Shermer?

  The self-serving ones, the blurbs go on for like half the length of the book. It's like, no, uh, this is my book.

• 19:11Eugene Mirman?

  Right. You just needed to say, "This is very good, please buy this book."

• 19:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're fielding inquiries from our fanbase. This is the Cosmic Queries edition of StarTalk. And we're fielding questions related to the role of science in the formation of a moral philosophy. Because historically, that turf has been, at least in the popular belief, has been granted to religions as a source of moral code. And so, to come out with a book that takes another take on that, for some people, that might be fighting words.

• 19:47Michael Shermer?

  It is, and my chapter four, "Why Religion Is Not The Major Driver Of Moral Progress", has raised a few hackles. But, and let me say right off the bat, of course religious people can be as good as anybody else. And vice versa, atheists and seculars can be as good as religious people. I'm not talking about individuals. I'm talking about ideas that change the world. So, back to Newton, the Enlightenment, you know, Adam Smith, and Immanuel Kant, and David Hume. These are all skeptics, seculars. And their idea was that, instead of arguing, "This is the way things should be because our religion says so, or our holy book says so, or God says so", "Let's see if there's certain ideas that I can articulate and convince you by the power of the ideas alone."

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not by the power of the authority of a religious text.

• 20:28Michael Shermer?

  That's right. So, the idea of rights. Rights were invented in the Enlightenment. Really, the late 17th century, early 18th century. And then came to fruition around the late 18th century with the American and French revolutions. The idea that, just by dint of being human, you are born with these certain inalienable rights. Now, there's certain arguments beneath that, you know, natural rights, by nature, what does that mean? You know, where, you know, through the telescope or microscope, where do I see rights? You know, at some point you have to-

• 20:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's written on this, you didn't look to the left of the constellation?

• 20:59Michael Shermer?

  Oh, I didn't see, oh, there they are.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's on the sky, clearly, right.

• 21:03Michael Shermer?

  And that I can't just force you to accept my argument, I have to convince you.

• 21:07Eugene Mirman?

  Well, you could force them to accept your argument, but that isn't probably your intent.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, that's a different kind of government when you do that.

• 21:12Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:14Michael Shermer?

  And so immediately, a lot of these enlightenment thinkers, we call them philosophers, today we would call them scientists, I mean, they really had a grounding of-

• 21:21Eugene Mirman?

  We wouldn't call them bloggers?

• 21:23Michael Shermer?

  They might have been, you know, David Hume, he's got the biggest Twitter following of all the social scientists. I wonder how many Twitter followers the great philosophers would have had?

• 21:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't know, I think they might have been wordier than 140 characters.

• 21:36Michael Shermer?

  But the idea is that, so we have a human nature, they recognize that we're born with certain characteristics, certain inner demons and better angels, and the idea is structuring society in a way to attenuate the inner demons and bring out the better angels. How can we do that? So, certain laws, customs, economic systems, you know-

• 21:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They help inform this trajectory.

• 21:58Michael Shermer?

  That's right. One of the founders of economic science before, Adam Smith, was the-

• 22:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adam Smith's great work, The Wealth of Nations, 1776.

• 22:06Michael Shermer?

  That's right. But the real title of it is, "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations." It's a scientific treatise. He was a professor of natural philosophy, but what we would call science. And so he's looking for cause and effect relationships. Okay, if supply goes down, what happens to demand? You know, this is where we get these ideas, things move around like this.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's an exploration in the causes and effects of things?

• 22:29Michael Shermer?

  That's right, of everything, right?

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's see what questions we've got coming for us.

• 22:33Eugene Mirman?

  So, uh-

• 22:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we haven't seen these questions, and they're just from-

• 22:35Eugene Mirman?

  No.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And do we know the source?

• 22:37Eugene Mirman?

  We do, we're gonna say the source.

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, please.

• 22:39Eugene Mirman?

  @rnstraw on Twitter says-

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Asks?

• 22:43Eugene Mirman?

  He does ask, it's true, technically. Uh, "Hey guts," I think he means guys.

• 22:51Eugene Mirman?

  Sorry.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was that spell checked?

• 22:53Eugene Mirman?

  Hey, guys. What is the effect science has had morality on us as a race? Have we become kinder or started to grow cold?

• 23:01Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let me, let me shape that a little differently.

• 23:03Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you've already addressed the pieces of that.

• 23:05Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 23:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is scientific outlook that has informed people's attempts to arrive at a moral philosophy. Is there, are there any actual scientific discoveries you can point to and say, "That discovery will shape this current or future morality"?

• 23:21Michael Shermer?

  Um, well, I think there's certain things, like, certain technologies are somewhat neutral, say, the atomic weapon or something like that, that can be used for and against, but just the...

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, for good or evil?

• 23:32Michael Shermer?

  That, that's right.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:33Michael Shermer?

  But just the improvement of the general conditions of humanity, I think, helps. Just, just like the technologies of the internet that expands our moral sphere to consider other people as just members of our honorary family, our honorary group, even if I don't see them. Uh, that technology, I think, helps. I mean, one of the ways of tricking the brain into thinking of a complete stranger as an honorary friend or family member is what nonprofits do when they want you to adopt a child. You've seen those late night commercials, "Adopt this..."

• 24:01Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 24:02Michael Shermer?

  I've done this, and, you know, and, and studies show that if you show, uh, uh, people a picture of like a hundred starving kids in Kenya, they'll give X amount of dollars. If you show them one child and ask them to give, they'll give three to four times more money for a single child.

• 24:17Eugene Mirman?

  Because they're helping an individual, they feel...

• 24:19Michael Shermer?

  You give them a name, you know, here, here's the, you know, here...

• 24:21Eugene Mirman?

  You can even use the name the child has.

• 24:23Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 24:23Eugene Mirman?

  You don't even have to make up a name.

• 24:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, so that's the...

• 24:27Eugene Mirman?

  Peanut butter.

• 24:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the shaking the hands with the person who's on the, uh, outside of the city walls.

• 24:31Michael Shermer?

  Absolutely. So, it, it tricks the brain, it just, so you sort of bond with it, there's a little oxytocin there, some dopamine, like, "Okay, I'm feeling good about this person, and I think I'll be nice to them rather than be nasty to them."

• 24:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I shouldn't criticize those efforts? For how crass they are in their salesmanship. Because they really understand the shortcomings of the human emotional state.

• 24:52Michael Shermer?

  That's right, yeah, those are.

• 24:53Eugene Mirman?

  Cause they're effective.

• 24:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, cause they're effective.

• 24:55Michael Shermer?

  The big NGOs and nonprofits, they they've tried, you know, these they've tried.

• 24:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NGOs, non-governmental organizations.

• 25:00Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, and so they know what to do to get to raise the most money, and that's okay. I mean, they, again, they know how to trick the human brain into caring.

• 25:06Eugene Mirman?

  Drunk people at night into helping each other.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's the whole side of psychological sciences that helps us understand the failure of our reasoning. And then, when you're equipped in advance, you can compensate for that.

• 25:17Michael Shermer?

  That that's right, absolutely. And and and say behavioral game theory has helped us helped us get through the Cold War. It's like, okay, they're rational actors, we're rational actors, we don't want to die, they don't want to die.

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mutual destruction.

• 25:28Michael Shermer?

  Reagan and Gorbachev tough, or, you know, Nixon, so, yes, mutual destruction, it worked.

• 25:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it works if one of the other side doesn't want to die.

• 25:35Michael Shermer?

  That's right, so this is the problem we face now.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a big assumption, right.

• 25:39Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, this is the problem we face now, there's people that are willing to die because they have this, you know, supernatural belief in in that they're going to heaven with the seventy-two virgins and, oh, boy, I'm gonna, you know, so I'm gonna blow myself up. Okay, they're not gonna calculate rationally like.

• 25:50Eugene Mirman?

  You really only need like ten virgins to think it's reasonable.

• 25:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 25:54Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, what's the dimension in returns on that?

• 25:56Eugene Mirman?

  I don't know.

• 25:58Michael Shermer?

  I don't think there's been any studies on that.

• 26:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember hearing Joe Rogan, a great podcaster in MMA, I guess he's ex-MMA. He shows up every now and then to, I think, to host some of those contests. But he commented on the power of sex on the human male mind. That it can be promised even in another dimension. And you'll completely alter your behavior to be served in that way.

• 26:28Michael Shermer?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, life, what's the ancient Greek play, Lysasergis, where the women said, if you men keep continue to go off to war, no more sex. And then he said, okay, let's see if we can work out a peace program here.

• 26:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's Spike Lee's current movie.

• 26:42Michael Shermer?

  It is?

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes, his current movie, it's Shyarak. It's a it's a blend of Chicago and Iraq. So it's a movie that taps the theme of that play.

• 26:50Michael Shermer?

  Okay.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so all the women withhold sex from the men who are otherwise engaged in gang warfare in the city.

• 26:57Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 26:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah.

• 26:59Michael Shermer?

  But even our discussions on gun controls, like what, what kind of measures can we implement to bring down the rate of homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths, over thirty thousand a year in this country?

• 27:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's, it's the same as, as car accident deaths.

• 27:11Michael Shermer?

  Car accidents, yep, yep, yep.

• 27:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. A hundred a day, almost.

• 27:14Michael Shermer?

  It's appalling, you know, so fourteen died in San Bernardino, a- and yet that's how many die like every couple hours, just from gun accidents, suicides, and homicides in America.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I tweeted that, a sequence of three tweets, one of them, the third of which got the most attention. I, I just put up the number, three thousand four hundred, number of Americans who have died from terrorist attacks since two thousand and one. Three thousand four hundred, number of Americans who have died from firearms since five weeks ago. And that works at any five week interval.

• 27:42Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 27:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so these can be very telling to people.

• 27:44Michael Shermer?

  Right, so the question is, why is it that it doesn't happen in other countries? What conditions do they have that we don't have? This is a social science question. This is a statistical variance, multivariate analysis, what factors can we play? It's very complicated, it's hard.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 27:58Michael Shermer?

  But there are some things we can do, you know, that really can make a difference. Uh, I mean, obviously if a country has no guns, you know, there's certain European, no one has guns, uh, but in Germany, where my wife's from, uh, you know, they have fairly strict gun control, and mass, mass murders like that are almost unheard of.

• 28:13Eugene Mirman?

  Right, well, I think there's also the misnomer that it somehow can't work, and there's just, there's also all this false data, basically, that is often...

• 28:22Michael Shermer?

  And there's also kind of a magical thinking about guns. For Americans, guns are almost like a superstitious ritual. They, they almost, it's like...

• 28:29Eugene Mirman?

  But have they always been, or is that the last, like, twenty, thirty years?

• 28:33Michael Shermer?

  I, I think it's really just been the last few decades.

• 28:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I have to agree.

• 28:35Michael Shermer?

  I mean, the NRA people tell you, it all goes back to our founding, no, not really. Uh, you know, the NRA used to just be a safety, gun safety...

• 28:42Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, and like marksmen and hunters, and then in the seventies, they kinda went crazy.

• 28:46Michael Shermer?

  They went political.

• 28:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:48Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, they're the biggest lobbying organization in the country now.

• 28:50Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 28:51Michael Shermer?

  They have more power than probably any other lobby, it's pretty scary.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, some would say it would be immoral to not have a gun.

• 28:57Michael Shermer?

  That, that's right, they do, and, and, you know, so their argument would be something like a mutual sure destruction, you know, no, no... Criminals coming to my house if he knows I have a gun, so ergo if every house has a gun, no criminal will go to any house.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 29:10Michael Shermer?

  Well, unfortunately, you know, there's certain studies show that you are 22, your gun is 22 times more likely to be used in a homicide, suicide, or accidental gun shooting within your family and home than it is against an intruder.

• 29:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, between you and someone you know.

• 29:25Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:26Michael Shermer?

  So, you know, you get mad at your spouse, vice versa, you have a depressed sibling or daughter or parent that shoots themselves, or the gun just goes off. I mean, one of the most disturbing things that's almost, that are almost funny are the YouTube videos of people who accidentally shoot themselves. Yeah. I mean.

• 29:41Eugene Mirman?

  I didn't know that that was a thing.

• 29:43Michael Shermer?

  Oh, it's a thing. There are hundreds of these videos and.

• 29:45Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, my god.

• 29:45Michael Shermer?

  I mean, there's like one kid, he's, he's doing the Clint Eastwood thing with the gun on, you know, sideways and, you know, like, "I'm a badass," bam, and he's like, "Oh, my mother's gonna be so mad at me." It's like so much for Dirty Harry. You know, so, you know, the idea of arming everybody is a bad idea because of accidents, because, also because of human nature. We have short, some people have a short fuse, and all of us under certain circumstances could become violent. The potential is there.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what else you got from our fanbase?

• 30:15Eugene Mirman?

  Um, so, so here's, uh, Josh I on Twitter asks, "If we found life on other worlds, how would that affect the way like, the way we look at life on our world?"

• 30:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so let me, let me try to shape that. So, if we find aliens and they have a different social contract with one another, are we in a position to say, "No, that is morally low, we have a higher moral fiber, here's what you should do"? Because it's kind of what Star Trek did every now and then. You know, the prime directive is don't interfere with, with the civilization, but they always did.

• 30:47Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, that'd be a dull show. "Oh, these people are awful, we should go."

• 30:52Eugene Mirman?

  "These Greek dressed aliens are so sensual, goodbye."

• 30:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw that when they're all in togas.

• 30:58Eugene Mirman?

  I think it's like half the episodes of the 60s.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 31:02Michael Shermer?

  Togas and miniskirt.

• 31:03Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly. How unusual that they've adopted the fashion of the 60s in 5,000 years before that.

• 31:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so is there, um.

• 31:12Michael Shermer?

  Well, two, two things, I think.

• 31:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this, is this moral arc something that? Is not only goes beyond our species.

• 31:19Michael Shermer?

  I think so. I speculate.

• 31:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's audacious, you know.

• 31:22Michael Shermer?

  Oh, I know, but you gotta think big.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many aliens have you talked to?

• 31:25Eugene Mirman?

  Six.

• 31:29Eugene Mirman?

  Self-identify.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 31:31Michael Shermer?

  Let's see, my wife's from Germany. Is that an alien?

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to be an extraterrestrial.

• 31:36Michael Shermer?

  Oh, I see, extraterrestrial, okay, yeah. Well, so I do speculate about this at the last chapter of Toward the End of the Moral Arc, that what if we encountered aliens, would they be good or evil? As you know, Stephen Hawking came out with that statement, you know, I think the aliens will be evil, they'll conquer us, they'll be colonialists and so on. I argue just the opposite. You can't become a viable spacefaring civilization, say a type-two civilization, and be like the Romans, or the Nazis, or, you know, some conquering imperialistic, you know, 18th century, you know, constantly a war-type country.

• 32:05Eugene Mirman?

  So you, your claim is Battlefield Earth is unrealistic.

• 32:07Michael Shermer?

  Yes, that's right, yeah. I think, I think really you'd have to be a peaceful, more cooperative.

• 32:12Eugene Mirman?

  You'd be more like the Star Trek world.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, part of that argument is if you are that expansionist, and everyone feels that way about being expansionist, and you fight wars to accomplish it, as you start colonizing planets, your expansionist attitudes then conflict with one another.

• 32:29Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you basically self-destruct.

• 32:31Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's gotta be some sense of peace and cooperation, deep within how you function as a species, to not implode under your own shortcomings. Oh, the thing that got you there in the first place.

• 32:44Eugene Mirman?

  So, so Stephen Hawking said that because advanced civilizations, when they go to a new place, generally do attack. There are examples that that isn't the case on Earth.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On his actual knowledge of how humans treat one another.

• 32:55Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 32:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not on any real knowledge he could have treated. Not on any real knowledge he acquired from aliens, if this is a point. And I, I'd lean towards you, Michael, on this.

• 33:04Michael Shermer?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, when Putin took over that portion of Ukraine, that was very unusual, and it's really the first time any borders have been redrawn with any significance in decades. It's really unusual now for countries to like expand their territory and bust in and take stuff.

• 33:21Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 33:22Michael Shermer?

  And that's.

• 33:22Eugene Mirman?

  It's more likely that just there's just regular war.

• 33:24Michael Shermer?

  And besides, the aliens are gonna traverse the vast instances of interstellar space and come here and take our coal?

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 33:30Michael Shermer?

  I mean, surely their technologies have gone beyond, you know, fossil fuels by the time, you know, they get here.

• 33:35Eugene Mirman?

  But maybe they want all our pretty birds.

• 33:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard a radio show back when I was in college, a radio play while I was driving, and aliens were coming, they thrive on hydrogen, and they came to Earth and were sucking up our water supply to take the hydrogen out of our water. And I said, "They must never have taken Astrophysics 101." Because 90% of the universe is made of hydrogen. You don't have to come to Earth's water supply.

• 33:59Michael Shermer?

  Just open the window.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then separate the molecule and take out the damn hydrogen.

• 34:03Eugene Mirman?

  When you can just take, where would it be in asteroid?

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every star is nearly 100% hydrogen, every gas cloud, everything. Yeah, Jupiter is 90% hydrogen.

• 34:10Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, they'd go to Jupiter, then?

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just scoop up some gas. They'll take out the damn water supply. So, when we come back, more Cosmic Queries with our special guest Michael Shermer. We're back on StarTalk, Cosmic Queries. We're talking about morality in the universe, and whether science can inform that. And my friend, right here, Michael Shermer, has written a book on this called The Moral Arc, and the subtitle is?

• 34:43Michael Shermer?

  How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom.

• 34:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, you running for office? Yeah, I know, right? And so, this is Cosmic Queries, we solicited questions, I haven't seen them, you haven't seen them. And so, let's see how many we can squeeze into this last segment.

• 34:59Michael Shermer?

  Okay.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, let's go for it. Eugene.

• 35:02Eugene Mirman?

  Let's do it. Martin Bad asks on Twitter, "How has our moral standing affected the pace and direction of scientific discoveries?"

• 35:10Michael Shermer?

  Oh, in the opposite direction. Well, I do think a more open society, where there's more liberties and freedom, freedom of speech especially, and especially freedom for, you know, women to be involved and minorities and so on, all that just makes science more appealing and more people involved in all the different scientific enterprises. So, then I think it becomes sort of a feedback loop. You know, more science and reason is good for morality, more just and open society is more conducive to science.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But how about some of the experiments that you might say, "Why are you doing that?" For example, if you can get the DNA from a mammoth that just got thawed out from a receding glacier... Line and then clone it and then create a mammoth in modern times. And I always joke that, uh, how unfortunate for the mammoth because he was just fine for the Ice Age. And now bring him out just in time for global warming. How cruel can you be?

• 36:08Michael Shermer?

  Well, you put, well, well, the C- Canada.

• 36:11Eugene Mirman?

  You get, you leave them in Canada?

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you, you.

• 36:15Michael Shermer?

  There's plenty of room up there.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You plunk them down at the right latitude.

• 36:18Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 36:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good, good answer.

• 36:20Eugene Mirman?

  Maybe you put them all at the top of Everest. That it's quite cold.

• 36:23Michael Shermer?

  Siberia, there's plenty of space up there.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good answer. I had not thought of it. Okay, that's my first one because they couldn't get there before because they, they would ultimately be broken off.

• 36:31Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, now we can drop them out of airplanes.

• 36:33Michael Shermer?

  I mean, the Canadian population is decreasing as is the Russian population, so more mammoths.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that's good. Another one is I was speaking with, with Richard Dawkins and he said something that while I agreed with it, I didn't want to agree with it. He said, if we have the power of, of cloning from any genetic sequence, then he would be interested in creating the common ancestor between us and chimpanzees.

• 36:59Michael Shermer?

  I think that would be.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you did that, it means a chimp could mate with that as well as humans.

• 37:04Eugene Mirman?

  That would be so much fun. I can only imagine the, how popular on the internet that would become.

• 37:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, when he said that was like, wha- why would you?

• 37:14Eugene Mirman?

  Right. It would be under specific conditions.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is that morality or is that just ethics?

• 37:19Michael Shermer?

  Okay, there would be a moral question.

• 37:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or is it ethics? Is it the same thing?

• 37:22Michael Shermer?

  That is, do they have rights? So I, I think in order to allow that ethically, we would have to grant the offspring.

• 37:29Eugene Mirman?

  Right. You know, the. And then it would have to choose who it made it with.

• 37:32Michael Shermer?

  Right, right. You know, there was a, there was a, there was a, a novel, a French novel in 1950s called You Shall Know Them by an author named Ver Chors, V E R C O R S. It, it, and the story opens with this scientist. Who kills his son, or something like, yeah, kills his son. And then, you know, he calls the police, I murdered my son, the police show up. And he's basically mated with a female chimp and had an offspring and killed it. And now he's on trial. For, for what? For murdering what? Is it, is it a human, or is it a, okay. So that, that, that got into the charact-, you know, what are the characteristics of a human? This is back in the day, you know, are chimps humans, and do they have tools, language, reason? Um, you know, that kind of thing.

• 38:14Michael Shermer?

  But, you know, as, as, um, as Jeremy Bentham pointed out, as I, I talked about in the moral arc, that it isn't can they reason, or can they talk, can they feel and suffer? So always our moral consideration for other animals, uh, uh, including possible hybrids or a clone would be, you know, are, are, are they gonna suffer by us bringing them into existence? If they have a good life, then why not?

• 38:34Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so then we can, we can diversify the very species that we ever considered to be human.

• 38:40Michael Shermer?

  I mean, if, if, if, if we explore space.

• 38:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd be like X-Men, if you have other kinds of.

• 38:44Eugene Mirman?

  That would be really fun, there's, and nothing ever goes wrong in the X-Men universe, so I would like more of that.

• 38:52Eugene Mirman?

  Wait, so would this creature be able to?

• 38:54Michael Shermer?

  He has a point.

• 38:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he's got a good point. I retract, I retract it.

• 38:57Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, would it be able to learn and speak and sort of, it'd be?

• 39:00Michael Shermer?

  Well, that's what, I mean, what Richard is after there is, well, what can they, yeah, what can they do? What, uh, do they have language or not?

• 39:06Eugene Mirman?

  Can they throw parties?

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so the morality is not whether you did that experiment. The morality is, the product of that experiment needs to be

• 39:13Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  reckoned, reckoned as someone who is, uh, uh, part of the citizenry of.

• 39:19Eugene Mirman?

  Right, let's give them a seat in the House of Representatives. I think that would be a reasonable and fair thing to do.

• 39:25Michael Shermer?

  They may be a little smarter than the current, current.

• 39:27Eugene Mirman?

  They might.

• 39:28Michael Shermer?

  Uh, but same thing with the mammoths, I mean, we shouldn't bring them back if we're, if we don't have any place to put them. They can't live a normal life.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 39:34Eugene Mirman?

  Well, we can hunt them.

• 39:38Michael Shermer?

  See, this is the, yeah, this is the argument the gun people make, is that we're actually saving the ecosystem by allowing people to kill the animals. You know, it's a reasonable argument, but, you know, in the long run, we should, you know, give them their space to just live and not be shot.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugene, what else you have?

• 39:54Eugene Mirman?

  Um, uh, Keilia Silvis asks, "With eugenics atrocities in the 1900s, can humanity ethically use human gene editing tech?"

• 40:02Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, yeah, good question.

• 40:04Michael Shermer?

  Well, okay, so, again, we have the products of science.

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before you go there, let me ask. The Statue of Liberty and the writing, that poem from Ezra, who's the author of that, you know, "Give us your weak and your poor."

• 40:19Michael Shermer?

  Yes, yeah.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. That was the moral opposite of the eugenics movement that was trying to parse people by their desirability.

• 40:30Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over that same time, the, so you're an immigrant coming past the Statue of Liberty, you go to Ellis Island, and you have people trying to invoke eugenics on how to sort you.

• 40:39Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's that about?

• 40:42Michael Shermer?

  Conflicting political ideals, I think. On the one hand, the idea of eugenics, um, was really kind of a liberal movement at the beginning. It became a more of a right-wing movement later, but at the beginning, it was, "Let's see how we can engineer society from the top down in all things," you know, so, with laws and so on, but also with genetics.

• 41:01Eugene Mirman?

  What was it exactly?

• 41:03Michael Shermer?

  Well, just...

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The eugenics movement?

• 41:04Eugene Mirman?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 41:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, it was an attempt, it's traceable.

• 41:06Eugene Mirman?

  I know what it is in Star Trek, but I don't know how to find that.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even before the century, the turn of the century, there was a lot of thinking about, "Well, now that we understand that there's a thing called, you know, your genes," and some genes are desirable, others are not, "Let's breed a race of desirable genes, a race of humans with desirable genes."

• 41:23Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 41:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the early thinkers were thinking, "Maybe you could do that for the entire planet."

• 41:27Eugene Mirman?

  I don't see anything that could go wrong with that plan.

• 41:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But then it becomes localized, and you have Nazi, Nazi philosophies and things.

• 41:33Michael Shermer?

  Well, you know, the state of Virginia and the state of California both sterilized more people in 1930s than the Nazis did. So at the Nuremberg Trials, one of the defense of the Nazis was that, hey, we got the idea from the Americans. And they had a point. But this was all part of this-

• 41:47Eugene Mirman?

  Why were people being sterilized?

• 41:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if you're mentally, they judge that you're, they don't want any more of your genes moving forward.

• 41:53Michael Shermer?

  Right.

• 41:54Eugene Mirman?

  Oh, wow.

• 41:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. You're mentally deficient or deformed in some kind of way.

• 41:58Michael Shermer?

  So they, they started with, you know, physical handicaps and then mental handicaps and then things like, uh, work shy. He's work shy. In other words, he's lazy or doesn't want to work. They started moving to more social things.

• 42:09Eugene Mirman?

  Really?

• 42:09Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:10Eugene Mirman?

  And the, and that was hap- that was legal in America?

• 42:13Michael Shermer?

  Well, that was in Germany. I don't know about it. I don't think it went that far here.

• 42:17Eugene Mirman?

  Well, Germany did a lot of terrible stuff. That's well documented.

• 42:20Michael Shermer?

  But not anymore.

• 42:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, in these cases, they wouldn't kill you, they would just sterilize you. They'd stop your gene pool.

• 42:25Eugene Mirman?

  But in Virginia, they didn't do this.

• 42:27Michael Shermer?

  They ster- well, they sterilized mentally retarded people.

• 42:30Eugene Mirman?

  Right.

• 42:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:31Michael Shermer?

  And that, it was a famous Supreme Court case, uh, of, you know, three, three generations of imbeciles are enough was the final line in this.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I remember that line, yeah. I read that.

• 42:39Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, it's very disturbing. Well, okay, so that's obviously a negative use of science, but again, science is neutral, morally neutral in some respects. Uh, how it gets used is a political decision and a social decision. Well, so my, uh, back to science, my argument is that, but, but socially, politically, we're becoming more reasonable and rational and realizing that doesn't work. And besides that, the moral agent is the person being affected. We should ask them first. That's the idea of individual rights and autonomy. You know, before you tell somebody, you know, what they're, to do with their genes, let's ask them first.

• 43:13Eugene Mirman?

  And then if you don't like their answer, then you can do what you want.

• 43:16Michael Shermer?

  Well, sometimes that happens in some countries.

• 43:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I forgot what, what network it's on, uh, is it A and E? It was just one of these networks where they follow a group of, of, of dwarfs. Uh, what's the one where your long bones are shortened? Is it dwarf or midget? I think it's dwarf. Yeah, but they're called little people, I think is the general term. And so there is a couple who are both dwarfs, then they have children who are all dwarfs. And so it's their family and their, their house is a little different because it serves them and not us. And so here's a whole TV show, a reality show, based on their lives.

• 43:51Michael Shermer?

  One of the encouraging things to me is, um, is the Flynn Effect. You know about the Flynn Effect? IQ scores are going up three points every 10 years for about the last century. And not on the like mathematical vocabulary, things you can study for, but on the abstract reasoning portions of the IQ test. No one quite knows why this is, but the best ideas by James Flynn, the guy, eponymous James Flynn, Flynn Effect, is that in general, as a culture, we're getting better at abstract reasoning, just by the diffusion of scientific knowledge and the jobs people hold are more abstract in reasoning capacity. Only 3% of the world's population is in farming now. It used to be about 97%.

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, yeah, more people are creating more food on less land than ever before.

• 44:31Michael Shermer?

  Yeah. So we don't need as many farmers, so more people are working in information.

• 44:34Eugene Mirman?

  And then that is affecting people.

• 44:36Michael Shermer?

  You're just your capacity to reason and reason abstractly.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's hopeful.

• 44:41Michael Shermer?

  It's very hopeful.

• 44:42Eugene Mirman?

  It is very hopeful.

• 44:43Michael Shermer?

  Also, reading, it's looking at some preliminary studies I cite in the book, is that, is that reading novels, good novels, really makes you better at mind reading, that is, the capacity to think about what other people are feeling and thinking. And the reason for that is because in a novel, you become the character and you're looking at the world through their eyes, and that re-trains your brain into...

• 45:05Eugene Mirman?

  Movies don't have the same effect?

• 45:06Michael Shermer?

  And movies do too, also, yes, yeah.

• 45:09Eugene Mirman?

  Good. That might be a shortcut.

• 45:11Michael Shermer?

  And actually comedy has an important role in the moral arc, in the sense that comedians can bring about, you know, social criticism of leaders, and particularly political leaders, that in the early stages, if you get people to laugh, they kind of go along with you before they realize, oh, wait a minute, he's making fun of the commander in chief. You know, an op-ed writer may get nailed for this in certain countries, beheaded in centuries past, but comedians can get away with a lot, and that helps bring things about, change from the bottom up, just everybody's sort of making fun of him now, and...

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So Mike, we gotta go to the lightning round? And so, there was this bell you heard a second ago. So, lightning round, it's like, we're testing your sound bite-itude.

• 45:52Michael Shermer?

  Okay.

• 45:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? All right, ready?

• 45:55Michael Shermer?

  Yeah.

• 45:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Uh, Gene, go.

• 45:58Eugene Mirman?

  Um...

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gene, it was a lightning round. I can't have you take 20 seconds getting into the question. All right, ready, go.

• 46:04Eugene Mirman?

  Question for Neil, how can a scientist defend agnosticism?

• 46:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have to defend the absence of evidence for why you think what you do. Honestly, it doesn't need a defense. If you want to defend something, you want to defend a belief what you have that would not then have evidence. I mean, that's... Would you agree with that?

• 46:23Michael Shermer?

  Yeah, absolutely. It's always okay to say, "I don't know."

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Michael Shermer?

  It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean you're committed. It's just okay, because we don't know everything.

• 46:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Good, next. Okay.

• 46:32Eugene Mirman?

  James Miller asks, "As purveyors of truth, should more scientists publicly speak out on questions of morality and ethics?"

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good question.

• 46:40Michael Shermer?

  Absolutely, yep, definitely.

• 46:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that implies they've studied it and thought about it and could say something coherent. Not everyone has that background you do.

• 46:46Michael Shermer?

  That's right. Einstein spoke about war. He didn't really know what he was talking about. But, you know, it's okay. It brings us all to the table of like, hey, let's talk about this rationally.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so you want that to happen more?

• 46:54Michael Shermer?

  More.

• 46:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, more. Okay, go.

• 46:57Eugene Mirman?

  "Does modern science back up any old moral platitudes that modern society ignores?"

• 47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, good one.

• 47:03Michael Shermer?

  Oh, absolutely. The golden rule. I mean, that's reciprocal altruism. I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine.

• 47:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do unto others as others do unto you.

• 47:10Michael Shermer?

  Absolutely. That's the oldest rule, and science has continued... Evolutionary biology has continued to find that to be true.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that include even game theory?

• 47:17Michael Shermer?

  That is, yeah, absolutely.

• 47:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, nice one. Go.

• 47:20Eugene Mirman?

  Jason asks, "Will we ever get to a point when we profile or flag individuals with criminal, like, brainwaves?"

• 47:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 47:28Michael Shermer?

  Um, well, we...

• 47:29Eugene Mirman?

  Sterilize them with lasers from the sky.

• 47:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Modern phrenology. Go.

• 47:35Michael Shermer?

  No, not criminally, but scientifically, we might want to know, are there certain conditions that the brain is under where you lose control? For example, lack of control... Lack of prefrontal cortex activity means your impulse control is lost, and a lot of violent criminals have low-functioning cerebral cortex.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's nice to know if someone is susceptible to that.

• 47:56Michael Shermer?

  That's right.

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it.

• 47:58Eugene Mirman?

  And attack them, maybe make them wear a red hat that says, "I'm a menace."

• 48:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Michael, we got to end it there. Thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 48:03Michael Shermer?

  Thanks for having me.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not your first time, not your first rodeo, but we want to get you back every time you have a book.

• 48:07Michael Shermer?

  Sounds good.

• 48:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Michael Sherman, thanks for visiting. Thank you very much. And Eugene Mirman, always good to have you. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and we're here on StarTalk in New York City. We're signing off, and I bid you in that process. Keep looking up.