I was on RT America’s The Alyona Show last night, and have pasted the video below. The topic, as usual, was Rick Santorum…who I compared to George W. Bush, and not advantageously. Here it is:
I’m going to be talking about some of the left-right material in my new book today at AAAS in Vancouver (panel here). And because the subject matter tends towards the, er, controversial, I’m once again putting up some links so that interested attendees can go read some of the peer reviewed research themselves.
First, there are the studies on left-right differences in brain structure, function, attention, and physiological responses. I’ve listed seven of them here. An eighth, just out, is discussed in detail in my recent Huffington Post piece entitled “Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution.”
Second, there are the studies on the genetics of politics. I’ve listed eleven of them here. To understand how genes could influence our political views, I’d recommend reading this paper most of all. To quote one key sentence:
“In this paper, we present the individual steps by which genetics connect to neurotransmitter systems which connect to cognitive and emotional processing tendencies which connect to values and personality traits which connect to orientations to bedrock principles which finally connect to preferences on specific political issues of the day.”
All of this is still just the tip of the iceberg, as the largest number of studies are in psychology and personality, and I haven’t listed those yet. I’ll discuss those further in the talk, though.
Any questions?
Sunday in Vancouver, I’m interviewing climate hero Michael Mann about his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines.
Already, there has been an Amazon.com war over the book, with climate deniers going over there and, rather appallingly, giving it 1 star ratings (surely without even having read it).
For the record, you can get the book on Kindle now, though I am not sure if it is out in print yet.
If there are things you’d like to hear Mann asked on the air, leave your comments here. (more…)
James Hansen, Wiki Commons
Tomorrow I fly to Vancouver for the annual AAAS meeting (most of the geeks are already there already, of course). I’m going for this panel, which includes quite a luminary:
Climate Solutions: The Challenges of Getting to 350
Sunday, February 19, 2012: 8:30 AM-11:30 AMRoom 214 (VCC West Building)Society is on a carbon dioxide emissions trajectory committing itself to dangerous climate change this century with potentially catastrophic effects. It has been argued that society can avert this dangerous climate change by stabilizing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at 350 ppm. Because of the climate system’s memory, the time window is relatively narrow for society to find solutions that avoid dangerous and largely irreversible rises in temperature, sea level, and the incidence of extreme weather events. The symposium will explore the challenges society faces in finding solutions to the problem of getting to 350 ppm. These challenges are not only scientific and technological; they are also economic, political, and ethical. The panel will discuss the scientific basis for targeting 350 ppm as a goal and describe the uncertainties involved as well as provide evidence that makes this goal compelling. The session will examine the role of science and technology in getting to 350, emphasizing that society can only be successful in getting to 350 by century’s end if it supplements aggressive emission reductions with carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere and subsequent sequestration. Also explored will be the economic, political, and ethical challenges that must be overcome before society can effectively implement a climate and energy strategy that does not compromise the sustainability of the planet’s natural and human systems.
Organizer:Charles H. Greene, Cornell UniversitySpeakers:James E. Hansen, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Human-Made Climate Change: A Scientific, Economic, and Moral IssueCharles H. Greene, Cornell University
Geoengineering: The Inescapable Truth of Getting to 350Johannes Lehmann, Cornell University
Agricultural Carbon Sequestration and Emission Reductions: Challenges and OpportunitiesRuth Greenspan Bell, Woodrow Wilson Center
The Role of International Climate Policy in Getting to 350Kristen Sheeran, Economics for Equity and Environment Network
Building the Economic Case for 350
Should be pretty provocative, no? Especially the geoengineering part. (more…)
This is my second post about the Dan Kahan show, which has just gone up at Point of Inquiry.
After my long post yesterday laying out the cultural cognition model, I wanted to bring up one point in particular that came up on the show.
Kahan’s cultural cognition model is at least in part about the power of group affiliation. It postulates that we want to affirm the values held in our communities about how society ought to be ordered, and that it is this sense of belonging that leads to motivated or biased reasoning about things that may threaten the group–like science.
But on the show, I pointed something out: Aren’t there reasons to question whether we all have an equal sense of group loyalty or belonging? (more…)
Update: The Heartland Institute has put out a statement, claiming that “Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.” This post has been updated accordingly.
The web has been aflutter about allegedly leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, a global warming skeptic think tank.
However, the Heartland Institute does not seem to have officially claimed the documents yet (see here), and I have not verified their authenticity myself. So we will exercise an abundance of caution and call them alleged documents for now.
I am sure we will be learning much more about this very soon.
The latest Point of Inquiry just went up. It’s actually a double length episode, because that’s how long I needed to really get into the question that I’ve been meaning to air on a show for some time–the question of, er, who’s right, politically, about everything for all time.
That sounds ambitious, and I’m of course exaggerating..but actually somewhat less than you might think. Let me explain.
My guest was Yale’s Dan Kahan, who was also on the show a year earlier, discussing his cultural cognition model. This is a very powerful and increasingly influential account of how different ideological groups–hierarchs, individualists, egalitarians, communitarians–are biased towards rejecting science on particular topics that are, shall we say, in their emotionally defensive “zones.”
Kahan ascribes this to motivated reasoning--e.g., our preexisting emotional commitments, or group commitments, skew our reading of evidence (scientific or otherwise) and lead us to elaborately defend our prior commitments. And because hierarchical-individualists have a very different vision of the “good” society and how it is organized than do egalitarian-communitarians, they accordingly reason very differently about scientific issues that threaten their values (like global warming) than do those on the other side.
So far, so good.
The question we debated on the show, though, was whether the different camps are “equal” in their biases–or not. I think not, and argue as much in my new book. Kahan isn’t so sure, though, and rightly points out that his studies have captured all the ideological groups showing biased reactions, at least to an extent.
Why does this matter? (more…)
Rick Santorum has begun to take head-on the charge (originating with people like, um, me) that his party is “anti-science.” He recently rebutted it directly, declaring,
You hear all the time, the left: ‘The conservatives are the anti-science party.’ No. No we’re not. We’re the truth party.
As I explain at DeSmogBlog, Santorum is slightly off on this. Actually, Republicans are the certainty party, which not only implies that they think they know the truth about things, but also that they’re very sure of themselves.
This can actually be good quality–provided that you’re right. But if you’re not, well, it can get you in oodles of trouble. (more…)
I was away this weekend, and so could only distantly watch as responses to my “Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution” piece trickled in. There are over 2,000 comments at Huffington Post, and 1.5 K Facebook likes. I haven’t even been able to read through them all.
Two prominent blogosphere responses came from Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking and Jerry Coyne. Reading these, I see that there are things I need to clarify, as both raise the idea that I am advancing an “adaptive” account of why liberals and conservatives differ–e.g., these differences were the result of evolution and exist because they increased our ancestors’ reproductive fitness or ability to survive, and therefore were passed on.
To the contrary, the Huffington Post piece (which was merely a report on a new scientific paper, not some grand statement of my book’s thesis), itself says that “I’ll leave it to others to speculate on the root causes of these differences.” (more…)
I’m giving a preview lecture at Thirst, D.C., tonight about my new book. And because the subject matter tends towards the, er, controversial, I’m putting up this post now so that interested attendees can go read some of the peer reviewed research themselves.
First, there are the studies on left-right differences in brain structure, function, attention, and physiological responses. I’ve listed seven of them here. An eighth, just out, is discussed in detail in my recent Huffington Post piece entitled “Want to Understand Republicans? First Understand Evolution.”
Second, there are the studies on the genetics of politics. I’ve listed eleven of them here. To understand how genes could influence our political views, I’d recommend reading this paper most of all. To quote one key sentence: (more…)
Chris Mooney is host of the Point of Inquiry podcast and the author of four books, including The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality. His recent articles include pieces on the science of fracking, why people deny science, and how the reality-based community is moving to the left.
For more info see Chris's bio and events. You can friend Chris on Facebook, and follow him on Twitter and Google+. You can also stream Point of Inquiry, or subscribe via iTunes.
