I’m excited to announce my Point of Inquiry guest, for the program airing on Friday, June 18: Bill McKibben. He is author of many great books including, most recently, Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet–which is prompting a ton of discussion right now about the new world we’re going to have to inhabit for the rest of our lives (and indeed, for many generations) because of anthropogenic climate change.

Although I’ve failed to do so for the last two shows, I’m announcing this interview in plenty of time to take questions for McKibben from POI listeners. I will be interviewing Bill on Monday afternoon, the 14th, so that leaves three full days for thinking about questions you might like to hear him address on the air.

So leave your questions for Bill McKibben below, or, head over to the Point of Inquiry forums and leave them there. Either way, I’ll be reading some off on the air…

Over at the Point of Inquiry forums, a commenter named citizenschallenge has done something very, very useful. He (or she) has basically listed all the different parts of my interview with Naomi Oreskes–idiosyncratically, at points, but nevertheless pretty comprehensively and also at times memorably.

So I think I’ll repost; it is not often that one has such a handy roadmap:

7:00 Naomi explains why she doesn’t like the term “manufacturing doubt” since doubt is actually an integral part of science.

7:50 Strategy for delaying legislative action & legislation

9:10 Chris: “How do we know historically that these tactics are without precedent…?” Defending claim that 1953 ushered in an entirely new era in attacking science:

10:10 Interesting phenomena fighting the evidence though you appreciate it is correct.

13:00 The balance between what we know & what we don’t know. (more…)

The latest episode of Point of Inquiry has just gone up. My guest this week is Naomi Oreskes, science historian and author (with Eric Conway) of the new book Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.

You can stream the eposide here, and download/subscribe here. Here’s part of the write up:

Through extensive archival research, Oreskes and Conway have managed to connect the dots between a large number of seemingly separate anti-science campaigns that have unfolded over the years. It all began with Big Tobacco, and the famous internal memo declaring, “Doubt is our Product.”

Then came the attacks on the science of acid rain and ozone depletion, and the flimsy defenses of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program. And the same strategies have continued up to the present, with the battle over climate change.

Throughout this saga, several key scientific actors appear repeatedly—leaping across issues, fighting against the facts again and again. Now, Oreskes and Conway have given us a new and unprecedented glimpse behind the anti-science curtain.

Once again, you can stream the eposide here, download/subscribe here–and order Merchants of Doubt here.

Eli Kintisch, Point of Inquiry guest (listen) and the author of Hack the Planet, was on “All Things Considered” yesterday. Here’s an excerpt from the show transcript:

Another scientist is taking a different approach to geoengineering. Instead of looking to the sky for solutions, he’s looking to the ocean. Victor Smetacek, a German oceanographer, is trying to cool the planet by growing carbon-absorbing gardens in parts of the ocean with little life.

In 2009, Smetacek and a team of Indian and German scientists added 6 tons of iron into a section of the Southern Ocean, which rings Antarctica, to see if they could get a massive bloom of algae to flourish. (more…)

I’ve just confirmed that I’ll be joining my fellow POI hosts, Karen Stollznow and Robert Price, at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York in late June. The occasion is the Center for Inquiry’s summer annual leadership conference, which brings in freethinking student leaders from across the country for workshops, lectures, and to finally get to know each other.

This is a blast from the past for me, in many ways, as I worked at the Center for Inquiry to organize student freethinkers back in 1999. (Matt Nisbet worked there too, at the time.) So going back to Amherst ten years later–as a speaker this time–is really something that stirs a bit.

Plus, it will be great to finally meet Stollznow and Price. I’ve been admiring their shows from a distance, and I hope now that we’ve all gotten our feet wet, we can try to collaborate and cross-pollinate a bit more.

More details can be found here….if you’re a student freethinker, or are just generally interested, I hope you’ll attend.

And now the very difficult question becomes…what shall I speak about?

My seventh hosted Point of Inquiry episode is now up–it’s with Michael Specter of The New Yorker, and yes, it is about denialism. You can stream it here, and download/subscribe here. Here’s the write up:

This week, we learned that J. Craig Venter has at long last created a synthetic organism—a simple life form constructed, for the first time, by man. Let the controversy begin—and if New Yorker staff writer Michael Specter is correct, the denial of science will be riding hard alongside it.

In his recent book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, Specter charts how our resistance to vaccination and genetically modified foods, and our wild embrace of questionable health remedies, are the latest hallmarks of an all-too-trendy form of fuzzy thinking—one that exists just as much on the political left as on the right.

And it’s not just on current science-based issues that denialism occurs. The phenomenon also threatens our ability to handle emerging science policy problems—over the development of personalized medicine, for instance, or of synthetic biology. How can we make good decisions when again and again, much of the public resists inconvenient facts, statistical thinking, and the sensible balancing of risks?

Michael Specter has been a New Yorker staff writer since 1998. Before that, he was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and the national science reporter for the Washington Post.

At the New Yorker, Specter has covered the global AIDS epidemic, avian flu, malaria, the world’s diminishing freshwater resources, synthetic biology and the debate over our carbon footprint. He has also published many profiles of subjects including Lance Armstrong, ethicist Peter Singer, and Sean (P. Diddy) Combs. In 2002, Specter received the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Science Journalism Award for his article “Rethinking the Brain,” about the scientific basis of how we learn.

Once again, you can stream the show here, and download/subscribe here. I’ll have more to say about it throughout the week.

I’m a bit late in doing this–I have already interviewed the guy, so you can’t pose online questions to him as with previous guests. They’ve already been asked!

Still, I’m psyched that the next guest for the program is New Yorker staff writer, Denialism author, and Daily Show guest Michael Specter.

Specter and I happen to have developed a bit of a dynamic/rapport over the past year, having done a recent panel together at the Cambridge Science Festival, as well as a Bloggingheads.tv episode and a Slate dialogue.

Indeed, and as you’ll see, we’ve been arguing for some time about the meaning of a famous John Milton quotation…er, but to say more about that would be giving too much away.

And we’ve also been arguing, in a pretty friendly way, about whether there is anything we can do about American irrationalism, whether the left is more guilty than the right–and much else.

So listen for the show on Friday–and in the meantime, if you haven’t already, get yourself a copy of Denialism by clicking the book cover….

I’ve talked in the last two posts about some of Elaine Ecklund’s surprising findings about atheist scientists, as discussed on Point of Inquiry (show website here; listen here; download/subscribe here). In this blog post, then, I want to move on to discussing another group that she finds in her survey: spiritual scientists, some of whom are also atheists. This is a topic we discuss beginning around minute 25:20.

The first point about these “spiritual” scientists is that they aren’t like spiritual Americans in general. They don’t believe in angels and demons. They don’t put together an eclectic blend of, say, Christianity, Buddhism, and New Age beliefs.

Rather, as Ecklund observes, they want their spirituality to be of a sort that is entirely consistent with science. And a considerable percentage of them actually overlap with the group of atheist scientists in Ecklund’s sample.

For these spiritual but essentially atheistic scientists, “spirituality” involves a sense of awe and wonder at the complexity and beauty of nature. But this raises a pretty big question. Why call it “spirituality” at all? Why use the “S” word, if it does not mean what everyone thinks it means?

Scientific spirituality appears to be an important trend and one we need to understand–but it is certainly open to this criticism. And I would be interested to hear how a “spiritual” scientist would respond to it.

(For more on the Point of Inquiry episode with Elaine Ecklund, you can find the show website here; listen here; download/subscribe here).

As I’ve said, there is much that is surprising or unexpected about Elaine Ecklund’s findings on religion among scientists. I’m going to be blogging on this all week, but again, as background, if you haven’t yet you should first check out our Point of Inquiry episode (show website here; listen here; download/subscribe here).

The second point that arises from Ecklund’s research that I find intriguing is this. There’s a cliche out there, particularly among some conservative religious folks, that there is something nasty about science (and particularly evolutionary science), such that studying it will kill off your belief system.

However, Ecklund’s research seems to give the lie to this idea–and our discussion of this topic begins around minute 17:55-19:10.

First, among scientists who are atheists, Ecklund found that they tended to come from irreligious or not very observant family backgrounds. In other words, their atheism or lack of religion was in place long before their scientific training began.

Meanwhile, for scientists who retained religious beliefs, they tended to have started out with them to begin with, and then held on to them after a struggle or crisis of faith. But once again, if I understand Ecklund right, the struggle tended to happen before one’s scientific training and so was obviously not caused by it.

In both cases, then, what seems to be the key predictor of a scientist’s religious belief is family religious background…and not whether one studies science.

So why then are Christian conservatives so afraid of letting their kids learn real science? It doesn’t seem to be the threat here at all.

(Again, as background, if you haven’t yet you should first check out our Point of Inquiry discussion: show website here; listen here; download/subscribe here).

As I expected, some intriguing (and potentially controversial) points emerged in the interview with Elaine Ecklund (show website here; listen here; download/subscribe here). In particular, at around minute 15:10 or so, I ask Ecklund about her finding that there are two types of atheists in her scientist sample–first generation, and second generation.

First generation atheists start out in a faith tradition and then, at some point, reject it. By contrast, second generation atheists start out with atheist or non-religious parents, and so never really have to reject anything. (I don’t know how many third, fourth, etcetera generation atheists there are out there.)

On the air, Ecklund observed that the first generation atheists tend to be more critical of religion, and more driven in making such criticisms. After all, religion is something that is much more personal to them, and that they have rejected. We second generation atheists, though–for I am one–we tend to be more mellow. Or so Ecklund finds, anyway.

But I pressed her on the point. After all, although I’m “second generation,” I was pretty angry at religion when I was a college atheist activist. I was pretty driven. Yes, I mellowed with time–but I was and still remain second generation.

What’s more, I’m sure that there are some first generation atheists who aren’t particularly driven to bash religion, no matter the difficulty of their deconversion experiences or the powerful impact these had on their lives–it’s just not in their temperament.

Still, Ecklund defended the generalization despite my devil’s advocacy. In general, it is of a piece with her finding that family upbringing is a central  predictive factor for later life religiosity or the lack thereof, as well as for who actually becomes a scientist (they tend to come from less religiously observant households).

So what do folks think–is there anything to this idea?

(Once again, for those who haven’t heard the program yet: The show website is here; you can listen here; and you can download/subscribe here.)