Point of Inquiry

Host: Chris Mooney Earlier this month, Point of Inquiry host Chris Mooney attended Science Online, the premiere science blogging conference, in the research triangle area. There were many science aficionados, communicators, and wonks present, but Chris found himself hanging out a lot with Brian Malow—aka,  the Science Comedian . And get this—Malow lived up to his name. He was pretty funny. Chris d...

Host: Chris Mooney Eugenie Scott is no stranger to Point of Inquiry , or to the secular community. Her endless travails to defend the teaching of evolution have won her immense respect. And that's why, when Scott and her National Center for Science Education take on a new initiative, everybody listens. So for this Point of Inquiry episode, we invited Eugenie to break some news about why she is ven...

Host: Chris Mooney It's the beginning of a new year here at Point of Inquiry , and we've got a pretty good guest to kick it off. He needs no introduction. He's Brian Greene—celebrity physicist, bestselling author, television star and all around science communication maestro. Officially: Greene is co-founder and director of Columbia University's Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle P...

Host: Karen Stollznow Dr. Stuart Robbins is a postdoctoral researcher in astronomy at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His work focuses on planetary geophysics, and he’s currently researching craters on Mars, and on the moon. Stuart received his PhD in Astrophysics through the Geophysics program from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Stuart has a special interest in astronomy education, e...

Host: Chris Mooney How do you successfully debunk misinformation? The question is a deceptively simple one—which is precisely the problem. Debunking is easy—just refute false claims, and provide corrective information. Debunking successfully is something else again-you have to change minds, and make the corrective information stick. And how does that work? Well, as it turns out, we actually don't...

Guest Host: John Shook Recently, the Center for Inquiry held a conference titled "Daniel Dennett and the Scientific Study of Religion: A Celebration of the Fifth Anniversary of Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon ". During that conference, John Shook, CFI's Director of Education, sat down with Dennett for this interview. 

Host: Chris Mooney Over the last decade, there have been many calls in the secular community for increased criticism of religion, and increased activism to help loosen its grip on the public. But what if the human brain itself is aligned against that endeavor? That's the argument made by cognitive scientist Robert McCauley in his new book, Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not . In it, he lay...

Host: Karen Stollznow Scott Gavura is a registered pharmacist in Ontario with a personal and professional interest in improving the way we use medication. Scott started the  Science-Based Pharmacy  blog in 2009 to scrutinize pharmacy practices, and to begin a discussion within the industry about its obligations as a health profession. Scott has a Bachelor of Science in Pharmacy and a Masters of Bu...

Host: Chris Mooney Our guest this week is Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist and director of global studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Weiler is co-author, with Marc Hetherington of Vanderbilt, of the book Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics . In it, they describes this strange and troubling creature called an authoritarian—usually conservative, usuall...

Host: Robert Price Ebenezer Scrooge once called Christmas "a false and commercial holiday." Is it? Should Humanists refuse to observe it? Should they wage war on it? Should they celebrate "Sanka" versions of it like Solstice and "HumanLight"? Christians complain that the holiday has become secularized—so should Secular Humanists just say "Thanks!" and enjoy listening to "Let It Snow" and "Winter W...

Host: Chris Mooney Recently in New Orleans, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry held the very first CSICON—the conference dedicated to scientific inquiry and critical thinking. The main honoree: Bill Nye the Science Guy, who was given CSI's premiere "In Praise of Reason" award. The next day, Point of Inquiry caught up with Nye, a guest who really needs no introduction... at least not to the thousa...

Host: Karen Stollznow Dr. Seth Shostak is the Senior Astronomer at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI). Seth is the author of Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence , and is well known as one of the hosts of the popular radio show Big Picture Science . (Formerly known as Are We Alone? ) Seth is a science communicator who per...

Host: Chris Mooney Human cloning. Synthetic biology. Mood (and mind) altering drugs. Personalized medicine. Such topics are rarely at the top of the political agenda. Yet the changes they're causing, often below the radar, are monumental. Issues of personhood, identity, ethics, are at play. The human future may be very different from the human past as these changes are negotiated and assimilated....

Host: Robert Price Richard C. Johnson Ph. D. is a retired chemist and serves as Treasurer for Freethought Arizona. For some 25 years, the company he founded worked with scientists and researchers in chemical analysis. Through family ties, Richard had long been a kind of participant observer of religion and learned well its social bonding functions, though always remaining suspicious of its metaphy...

Host: Chris Mooney In recent months, political attacks on science have been back in the news. Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman even  famously tweeted , "To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." So it's very timely that Shawn Lawrence Otto, co-founder of a nonpartisan organization called  Science Debate , has got a new book out about...

Host: Adam Isaak This October-on Halloween weekend-the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry is holding a conference:  CSICon . It's the latest in a line of CSI skeptics' conferences going back to what is likely the first skeptics' conference ever held, a CSICOP (CSI) conference back in 1983. This episode of Point of Inquiry revolves around CSICon. It features interviews with Barry Karr, Jim Underdown,...

Host: Karen Stollznow Indre Viskontas is a neuroscientist, a soprano, and a skeptic. She is a host of the television show The Miracle Detectives that recently aired on the Oprah Winfrey Network. Indre appeared as the scientific investigator pitted against "believer" Randall Sullivan, author of the book The Miracle Detective . The show investigates claims of "miracles"; from supposedly miraculous d...

Host: Chris Mooney This coming October, in Kabul, Afghanistan—on a date, and in a location, that remain undisclosed—there will be a rock concert that's billed as the world's " first stealth music festival ." It will feature rock, heavy metal, and funk from Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Iran. Why "stealth"? In some of these countries, music is equivalent to political and religi...

Host: Robert Price Lee Salisbury was at one time an up-and-coming Charismatic Christian pastor, even a healer! Then how did he wind up actively involved in the ranks of Minnesota Atheists? Often successful Christian activists simply cannot allow themselves to entertain doubts as to the worthiness of their enterprise, but Lee had a dangerous yearning for critical thought. It caused him to look back...

Host: Chris Mooney We've heard a lot in the news lately about Dominionists—Christians who believe, basically, that they ought to be running this country. Dominionism has different strains. But one is embodied in a group called the New Apostolic Reformation, which helped organize a recent prayer rally for Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry. How seriously should we take this group,...

Host: Karen Stollznow John Dodes is a dentist with a special interest in dentistry and pseudoscience. He is one of the founding fellows of the Institute for Science in Medicine, a former President and Chairperson of the National Council Against Health Fraud, and a member of the Health Fraud Advisory Council. He is also a member of the American Council on Science and Health, and the Dental Consulta...

Host: Chris Mooney In less than two weeks, the ten year anniversary of the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil—9/11—will be upon us. In the past decade, there has been much debate and discussion about the root causes of terrorism and violent extremism. There has also been considerable scientific study of the matter. Fortunately, Point of Inquiry recently caught up with the anthropologist Scott At...

Host: Robert Price Host Robert M. Price felt uncannily as if he were talking to himself when he interviewed Dan Barker, the two share so much in common. But then their story is not so unusual, come to think of it. The same sort of thing seems to be happening to more and more Evangelicals these days!  For you see, Dan used to be an Evangelical preacher and a Christian musician. One day he started h...

Host: Chris Mooney Why are human beings simultaneously capable of reasoning, and yet so bad at it? Why do we have such faulty mechanisms as the "confirmation bias" embedded in our brains, and yet at the same time, find ourselves capable of brilliant rhetoric and complex mathematical calculations? According to Hugo Mercier, we've been reasoning about reason all wrong. Reasoning is very good at what...

My guest this week is Donald Prothero, Professor of Geology at Occidental College, and Lecturer in Geobiology at the California Institute of Technology. Don is a distinguished academic; a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the Paleontological Society, he has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation. Don contributes to the SkepticBlog and...