Fascinating!: Deconstructing Conventional Wisdom to See the World with New Clarity

Send us Fan Mail Protestant Christianity split into many different sects following the big split with the Roman Catholic Church, with the salutary result that oppression by religious authorities, while still a problem within many localities, is far more difficult to achieve on a global stage.   Similarly, following the collapse of the regime in Soviet Russia in 1991, the quasi-religious movement o...

Send us Fan Mail Slime mold has been a subject of discussion on the podcast since Season 1.  Senior contributing editor Prego de Nada originally used slime mold, aka physarum, as an example of spontaneous emergent order in nature, with the purpose of demonstrating that what looks like design can, and frequently does occur without any designer.  Prego then penned an essay in Season 5 to talk about...

Send us Fan Mail Science journalist Ronald Bailey, who is also a trained economist, continues his career of debunking predictions of impending doom, which he began in his 1993 Book "Ecoscam", which demonstrated that predictions in the 1972 publication "The Limits to Growth", published by the Club of Rome, turned out to be spectacularly wrong.  In "The End of Doom: Environm...

Send us Fan Mail Contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya submits an essay on the much-discussed and widely applicable Dunning-Kruger effect, focusing on its relevance to the theme of evolutionary thinking that is the theme of this podcast.  David Dunning and his protege Justing Kruger published the results of a study they conducted in 1999 at Cornell University titled "Unskilled and Unaware o...

Send us Fan Mail Playing and having fun is a widely observed  phenomenon amongst many of Earth's creatures.  Why did it evolve? Why do some creatures play and others do not?  Contributing editor Prego de Nada has looked into this phenomenon and has penned this essay.

Send us Fan Mail A review of the 16 podcast essays, and one interview, from Season 5.  Hopefully you will find some of the short descriptions in the recap sufficiently interesting so that you will listen to them in their entirety. Have a look at the recently published book by friend of the podcast Eric Moon, titled "Cultivating the Sociome:  Governance Without Governors", now available o...

Send us Fan Mail If you have bought a recent model automobile, you have undoubtedly noticed that you do not have the option of steering the car without some "help" from robot-assisted lane tracking.  There is no setting that allows you to steer your car without at least some tugging on the steering wheel by the robot. The reason for the ubiquity of the technology is a mandate by regulato...

Send us Fan Mail In a first for the Fascinating! series, we present an interview. The interviewee is Cary Gray, an up-and-coming young Earthling friend of mine.  Cary is first and foremost a poet, and that is his passion.  He has had an adventurous past, from doing long-distance touring on a purpose-built unicycle of his own design, to living for three months in a giant redwood in the Santa Cruz M...

Send us Fan Mail Frederic Bastiat was an economist and essayist who lived and wrote in France in the early 1800's.  He came to prominence at the age of 43 because of his satirical takedown of producers who were arguing for tariffs and other protectionist measures in trade with England, pointing out that the true effect of protectionism is mostly to transfer money from domestic consumers to do...

Send us Fan Mail Although Marx's labor theory of value has been thoroughly trashed by Occam's razor and no longer enjoys any intellectual respectability, it still persists in the form of a quasi-religious dogma, kept alive by a disturbingly large number of otherwise intelligent Earthlings.  This dogma cannot be questioned or challenged, because without it there is nothing left of the cri...

Send us Fan Mail This essay was inspired by a quote from the eminent scientist Edward O. Wilson, the man who coined the term "sociobiology" and wrote a book with that title.  The quote was:  "The real problem of humanity is the following:  we have peleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology". For an optimistic appraisal of the prospects for civilization...

Send us Fan Mail Leviathan is the title of a book written in 1651 by the Englishman Thomas Hobbes during the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War, in which Hobbes argued that in the absence of a powerful sovereign the life of the average person was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short".  In this essay, senior contributing editor Prego de Nada challenges the conventional wisdom...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Rik calls attention to a very special Earthling, Richard Feynman.  Feynman's contributions to the science of physics by itself were enough to place him in the same category as Albert Einstein and Isaac Newton.   And this fascinating human also made a huge contribution to the philosophy of science, even though he claimed to be not much interested in the philos...

Send us Fan Mail Thomas Henry Huxley is known to history as "Darwin's bulldog" for his powerful advocacy of Darwinian thinking while Darwin's ideas were being attacked and even ridiculed by those in the entrenched  religious and academic establishments of 19th century Britain. In this episode, contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya argues that evolutionary thinking, although i...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, senior contributing editor Prego de Nada continues his queries with the chatbot about the evolution of Chinese civilization as Taoism and Confucianism, two opposing philosophies, each found a role in society.  The purpose of this investigation is to cast light on the contest in our time between the evolutionary thinking that stems from the scientific study of natu...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, the first of a two-part series, senior contributing editor Prego de Nada proposes to demonstrate some interesting parallels between the philosophy stemming from Darwinian evolutionary thinking in modern times and the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism.   Prego then traces the co-evolution of Confucian and Taoist philosophies in Chinese civilization beginning man...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Rik from Planet Vulcan examines the concept of a living wage, something that, incredibly, many otherwise intelligent Earthlings seem to believe is a good idea!  Those who advocate living wage legislation are thereby placing themselves squarely in the tradition of the White Man's Burden, the belief that a select few must coercively intervene in order to "...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Rik from Planet Vulcan reports on the ongoing research into the behavior of Physarum, aka slime mold.  The behavior of slime mold is an awe-inspiring and humbling example of the evolved wisdom of nature.  This simple superorganism forages efficiently and knows when it is time to produce spores, all based on mechanical and chemical signals. Listen to find out the l...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Rik from Planet Vulcan reviews the collaborative effort of Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel to pitch their scheme of confiscatory taxation in their new book, in the name of the nebulous concept of equality, for the undefined and undefinable "common good", in order to counter the effects uneven luck distribution, the machinations of an imaginary maliciou...

Send us Fan Mail The short answer to this question is "no".  Listen to this episode for details. The Federal Reserve Bank (the "Fed") stands as an example of the collateral messiness, and the distortions, that inevitably accompany intelligent design projects.  In this episode, Rik from Planet Vulcan explains why the Fed has always failed, and always will fail, in its mandate to...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, senior contributing editor Prego de Nada proposes that Earthlings would be happier, and life on Earth would be better, if they were to jettison the practice of characterizing their choices as between "good things" and "bad things", and instead adopt the practice of viewing the expected consequences of their choices as tradeoffs, where decisions...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya considers the tale of Alice meeting Tweedledee and Tweedledum in the Dark Woods.  This tale is from the second Alice book, "Through the Looking Glass".  Slainte's aim in this essay is to spread the word to Earthlings that they can liberate themselves from a lot of unnecessary worry by learning to recognize the...

Send us Fan Mail Nobody's right if everybody's wrong, in the words of the Buffalo Springfield song.  In today's world it is difficult for an Earthling of a scientific bent to choose who or what to support in the political arena, when ecnarongi (i.e, ignorance in reverse, "knowing" that which is not true) prevails on all sides. In this episode, Rik from Planet Vulcan argues...

Send us Fan Mail In this final episode of Season 4, Rik from Planet Vulcan reviews his mission on Planet Earth, which is to advocate for a world view based on the scientific investigation of natural processes; and reviews the essays published during Season 4. Rik and his little female Earthling pal are traveling to the the land of Aloha until winter has passed in the Smoky Mountains, with plans to...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Rik from Planet Vulcan demonstrates that the notion that international trade amounts to warfare that someone wins and someone loses is another of those pervasive undead ideas on Planet Earth that keep rising from the grave, wandering the land and eating brains. In truth international trade is an unalloyed benefit to consumers in all countries simultaneously, both...