Charles Murray: On Human Diversity

07/01/22 • 139 min

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The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss

After writing the book, The Bell Curve, Charles Murray became a controversial figure in the US Social Science scene, and was much maligned in the public arena. His work has been misinterpreted as being racist and sexist, and at Middlebury College students forcibly stopped his guest lecture and rioted.

As often the case with stereotypes, Murray is instead a thoughtful scholar who has tried to base his social science research on data from empirical science, something that should be standard, but isn’t.

I wanted to discuss his most recent book, Human Diversity, with him. It is far from controversial, and instead is a clear effort to explain often complex genetic concepts in a popular format. He makes it clear that he focuses on only well understood and well accepted concepts, and the discussion we had was instructive and enjoyable. He is a delightful and thoughtful individual and I believe that comes out in our dialogue.

I know from experience, as I indicated at the beginning of our discussion, that many people will condemn the discussion without listening to it, just as they condemn his writing without reading it. But if you take the time, I think you will be pleasantly surprised, as well as learning some new things about the world.

One of the purposes of The Origins Podcast is to connect science and culture, and Murray connects hard science with social science issues in a refreshingly honest and detailed way. Indeed, if all social scientists and policy makers took his approach, the overall tenor of popular discussion would improve, I believe. And while Murray and I do not share political views on a number of issues, thoughtful discussion is far preferred to blanket cancellation and denunciation or a refusal to even engage. Again, that, I hope, is a hallmark of the podcast. I hope you enjoy the discussion as much as I did.

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Previous Episode

(Audio) John Mather: From the Big Bang to Searching for Life

John Mather is an astrophysicist at NASA who has been involved in important space missions to probe our fundamental understanding of the Universe for over four decades. He helped lead the design and deployment of the Cosmic Background Explorer Satellite (COBE), which launched in 1989 to probe the cosmic microwave background radiation from the Big Bang with a precision that could not be obtained from terrestrial experiments because of absorption of radiation by the atmosphere. The experiments on COBE, and its successor missions WMAP and PLANCK, literally have turned cosmology from an art to a science, allowing the precise measurement of cosmological observables that previously were either not measured at all or only measured to within a factor of two. This has led to a golden age of cosmology, where theories of the early universe can now be compared directly to observation.

John directed the building of the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer (FIRAS) on COBE which was able to show that the cosmic microwave background radiation was indeed an almost perfect ‘black body’ spectrum associated with a very well defined temperature of the Universe at a time of about 300,000 years after the big bang. Indeed, no terrestrial experiment has ever produced such an accurate black body spectrum, which was one of the fundamental predictions that helped develop quantum mechanics early in the 20th century.

For his work on COBE, John shared the Nobel Prize with George Smoot. But John didn’t rest on his laurels, for several decades after COBE John helped lead the design and development of the James Webb Space Telescope, which recently launched and will probe both the very early universe and also extra solar planets, possibly helping us discover evidence for life elsewhere in the Universe.

John and I talked about his origins in science, the science he has accomplished, and what his future plans are in a discussion that will help provide a valuable perspective for anyone on the current status of cosmology and astrophysics, as well as what we might learn in the future.

The ad-free video is available for all paid subscribers to Critical Mass in an adjoining post.. Video with ads will be available on the Podcast YouTube Channel, and audio is also available wherever you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

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Next Episode

Andy Knoll: The First Four Billion Years of Life on Earth

Andy Knoll is a Renaissance Scientist. He is a geologist, paleobiologist, and geochemist and has applied key ideas from chemistry, biology, physiology and more to understanding the key developments associated with life on Earth—both how geology and chemistry have impacted on life, and vice versa. He has made ground breaking contributions to the understanding of almost every phase of life, from early Pre-Cambrian single cell life, to the emergence of more complex lifeforms, to mass extinctions. His group was the first to demonstrate that the rapid rise of CO2 was probably responsible for the last great extinction on Earth, a subject of some relevance today. For his work he most recently won the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Crafoord Prize in Geosciences... the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in that field.

But more than all of this, Andy is a wonderful teacher and human being, and a great communicator . He has written numerous books on the history of life on Earth, and we discussed his most recent book, “A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters” in this podcast, along with his own origins and evolution as a scientist. The discussion was so fascinating that we went overtime during our first session and had to continue the next day.

Our discussion will forever change your perspective on our planet, and our place within it. Enjoy.

As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers . Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project Youtube channel as well.

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