creativity has produced technological improvements which has enhanced the prosperity and the security of the scientific nations although that is part of the story. but that the freedoms protected by liberal? democracies are essential to facilitating scientific inquiry and democracy itself is an experimental system without which neither science nor liberty can flourish. that a book with such a thesis can be written and that its argument can be so generally persuasive is evidence for the russians saying that the only thing more unpredictable of the future is the past because when i was growing up in the 1960s, the received wisdom was that the relationship between science and human freedom was, well, adversarial. that the progress of science went hand-in-hand with the eclipse of freedom. after allwsmx this was the spac age, which in the early going at least was dominated by soviet communism. and while america representing

the free world eventually came our top rocket wernor von braun was making missiles for hitler. and the computers of the massive ibm mainframes that were symbols and enablers of centralized power. . ..

>> overthrown by the conative revolution in psychology and with the the idea that human beings were nothing but wind-up toys. that is about it. and the current computer age is all about decentralization and liberalization. so in our current setting it is much easier to see the truth of the basic story that timothy ferris seeks to tell, the scientific and liberal democratic revolutions were deeply intertwined and, indeed, involved overlapping canvases of characters. the discovery process of science with this decentralized competition of theories directed by the feedback of experimental results had its analogue in both aspects of liberal democracy.

first is the liberal side with what is they called the discovery of the marketplace. and second to the democratic side with the discovery process of politics, the decentralize competition amongst the bottom of political coalitions directed by this feedback elections. and thus there are good reasons for including that all three of these policies which share common origins and deep resemblance in character are all part of a larger, a phenomenon that we know as the free society. to develop this thesis further we have timothy ferris who has made for and sell a glittering reputation as a best-selling and award winning science writer. his previous books include seeing in the dark, the mind's sky both which remained york times best books of the year.

he has taught in the five disciplines at four different universities. he is an emeritus professor at university of california berkeley and a former editor of rolling stone. he has written articles and essays all over the place including the new yorker, vanity fair, national geographic, scientific american. he has made three prime-time pbs television specials, the creation of the universe, life beyond earth, and seeing in the dark. ladies and gentlemen, please join m an adjoining timothy ferris. test test x. >> thanks so much. i'm going to attempt to use a power point. this is a topic designed to take

45 minutes. i am going to do it in 20. i will speed quickly through. my thesis is that there is a symbiotic relationship between science and liberalism. let me quickly define my times. by science i mean what sometimes is called modern science, which is to say the entire social institution. scientific the establishment that has professional scientists, university departments, laboratories, referee journals, scientific conferences, and all the rest of it. in the book i am not concerned with how science originated or why it happened to originate when and where did. i think any toolmaking species will inevitably develop science. that is not part of the argument here today. what i do want to avoid is going back and cherry-picking the occasional scholar who did something that today looks

scientific and interesting great scientific achievements to that time and place. that is interesting historically, but is not very helpful when you are looking at the interactions of science and democracies today. there has never been in history anything like the scientific establishment we have today. it does have a method despite the efforts of hundreds of dollars to claim otherwise. the essence of this method is the kind of feedback loop. you have an idea. instead of just testing it either by its internal logic or by testing it against other competing ideas which aristotle has identified as the only two ways to evaluate an idea before science you conduct an experiment. based on that, that is where the tools come in. you do have to have a technology. based on the experiment you might affirm, revise, or deny the hypothesis. that really is how science works as far as i can tell in forty years of covering it, even

though many people seem to think otherwise. i quickly give you an example. paul dirac writes an equation that accurately describes the behavior of the electron. in every respect a beautiful piece of work. implies there ought to be an anti-electron. he is embarrassed by the prediction. therefore carl anderson when he discovers the anti-component doesn't even know that the prediction was in his paper. consequently the prediction is affirmed. now by liberalism i have in mind classical, sometimes classical liberalism. not a term that benefits from modifiers. a don't think we need to talk about modern science are classical liberalism. liberalism is just liberalism. and so when i talk about it, that is what i mean.

one reason i think that americans have had problems began out where various opinions like liberalism might lie on the political spectrum is that for some reason we have this tradition of looking at politics in terms of a one dimension left to right spectrum. in science, one dimension, it is sort of like the questions that involve favorites. what is your favorite? take this entire field and reduce it to a one dimension. who is the greatest athlete in the world? it is not enough dimensions. this happens all the time. this, for instance, is a one-dimensional version of a photograph. so in science it is quite common to take problems and say maybe the confusion here is that we don't have enough to mention. let's add one. often you can go to 10, 24

dimensions. mathematically you can get to 10,000 or more. here i would just revive the old idea that it is better to look at politics in two dimensions. i have a diagram like this. the detail of the diagram doesn't matter. this one opposes progressive conservative and liberal totalitarian. you might want to construct one for yourself. you're much better off starting with two dimensions. back liberalism the seven common with science that one constructs experiments. there are inherent to the system. every election of the experiment, every act of legislation. this isn't the when we talk about it so much now. the founders did talk in experimental terms. jefferson's second inaugural. he points out.

yet not only did the a message to survive. to make the leap toward in scientific terms the need to analyze. we have not been on so good at that. liberal democracies. tendancy to do the first three steps. the u.s. department of education. spending increasing amounts of money to evaluate what works and what doesn't. liberal symbiotic. both are authoritarian, self-correcting, powerful social activities that maximize -- that require maximizing intellectual resources. they both put the stress on universal public education, which has been a principal of

liberalism from the beginning. now i argue historically that science has enlightenment. i would just like some of the amusing fathead newspapers essentially began in large measure to reports the earliest scientific discoveries, particularly galileo's observations. coffee was coming into europe from turkey. the result was a combination of newspapers and coffee houses which proved seditious in every jurisdiction which they arose. every leader from cairo to london sought to suppress coffee houses. once again people drink coffee, read the papers, talk, and discover it is not just them that thinks the government is off base. and all of those efforts. this combination, science and the liberalism, has quite a

number. in the book i try to boil down some of them to what i think are fairly universal values. health, wealth, and happiness. in terms of health we, thanks to science and free enterprise, the average expectation of a baby born in the world today is more than twice what it was in 1800s. food production is up 52% per person. that is actually just 2001. the reason is that agriculture is much more productive. it is not productive because a scientific council got together and made up a set of precepts that were then carried out. it is projected because of experimentation. that is what i have tried to emphasize, the important aspect of science. it is not just that it is

rational. lots of things are rational. science is experimental. was agricultural experiment station that brought about these games. in terms of wealth by world per capita gdp was around $700 a year. growth rate was under 1%. i think it is roughly 7,000 now. growth rate of around 3%. that is an amazing accomplishment despite the considerable increase in population during that same period. happiness is hard to measure. one thing i looked at his literacy. it clearly people are better off if they can read or write and feel better off. world literacy went from 63% in 1970 up 10% by 1985 and over 80% today. that if you were sitting in a coffeehouse in 1700 london,

let's say on change alley where a lot of the science-minded people would gathered. you were all. francis bacon saw some of what was coming with science and try to predict it. it is very difficult to do. hard to make predictions. had you said i had an assembly that by somewhere around 2000 or so 80% of the entire human population with the literate or that, you know, there would be a country the size of the united states where the median household worth exceeded $100,000. nobody would have believed that. but here we are. you also have a thing called the

united nations subjective well-being index to measure these things. just includes the interesting fact that people get happier as the get wealthier. after that it may solve problems but does not make them happier. what to make of that i don't know. the number of liberal democracies worldwide has been something like three in 1800 or zero if you count universal suffrage to something of around 89 today. 46% of all humans are living in democracy. the abolition of slavery was a major accomplishment. i am running out of time. the emancipation of women. some time this year women will become the majority of the american workforce. there are lots of interesting achievements like this. half of the electricity now being generated in u.s. nuclear plants comes from decommissioned soviet nuclear warheads. there are challenges. how am i doing on time?

how am i looking? really? okay. there are challenges to this alliance. i will just mention a few. one that is often concerning people is population growth. there is less under, even with the growing population. less poverty even with the growing population, better education, but population rising does threaten to challenge all of these things. whenever you see a curve and biology start up like this big question is always whether you are looking at an as curve, going to level out on the other side or is it an inverted-u? is a guide to go to go up and ch back down. you see both in biological all the time. there are an awful lot of those

u-curves. but fortunately it now appears that the human curve is likely to be an s-curve, at least barring some unforeseen disaster. the reason is that the rate of increase is now finally rolling over. the major reason for that is urbanization, the same thing that decreased birthrates in western europe in the united states and other parts of the wealthy world is now taking place worldwide. for the first time most people now live in cities, and these two curves are total population in the bars. the blue line is rural population, and in all societies through history greatest poverty has been rural. there is a particular cruelty of intellectual life that at the same time the poorest and most desperate people have been a

rural and has been a propensity of intellectuals who don't do farm work to imagine that their lives were wonderful. you read in virgil just how great it must be to work on a farm. you read in the works of john jacques rousseau literally a madman whose achievements include conspiring terror. we could lay considerable amounts of nazism at his door. simply made up everything about some primitive state of mankind. depicted our subsequent devolution as one of becoming corrupted but the influences of property ownership and civilization. millions of kids are still taught this stuff every year even though there is not an internal fact and a lot of it. whenever people have been free ticket out of the country and come to the cities they have done so, and now worldwide more of them have that freedom they

are doing so. the result is the birth rate goes down. a lot of kids move to cities and cramped quarters. they have your children. we have all seen pictures like this of islam's. they are usually used to depict the disparity of income which is really thought to the growing worldwide. it is certainly going in the united states at the moment, which i consider to be an unhealthy situation. worldwide it is not to receive these sorts of photos. he could have taken a photo like this of any major european city at the same time. once people started trying to move in faster than the city can acquire the new influx there are always these periods of horrible slums, what dickens writes about. you want to try to do right. you want to try to move to what london has today. but each society has to figure

out how to do this. the main thing about the situation, it is very unlikely to remain static because there is a lot of talent in the slums. that was actually one of the things. when london get people out, that was when the term suburb originated. suburb meant under the city. one of the great forces trying to keep them out were the guilds. they knew there was a lot of talent out there. they did not want the competition. the logical stress, i didn't say a word about global warming. we seem to be in a weird period on global warming. fewer americans today than two years ago accept the science of global warming. let me just point at bad global warming has been identified in a lot of independent scientific studies going back to the 18th century. the phenomenon of scientifically

robust mechanism is not difficult to understand. it is not a model sensitive, not an argument against global warming to say, their is a fault model. all models are faulty. nor does the personalities of the scientists matter. we have had such a flap recently about some wildly inappropriate e-mail's among climate scientists. but the makable statement. if the most famous scientists in the world were discovered tomorrow when the videotape sitting at a meeting with the next five most famous client scientists of rubbing their hands together and saying, ah ha, our plan for global domination is proceeding at pace. soon we will have the world government we all desire, it would not matter. science doesn't work that right. the personalities don't matter. you just have to look at the work. there is also lots of resources.

u.s. spending on foreign oil alone is half a trillion. so there is a lot of money in the pipeline. there is nothing. once you're able to start addressing housekeeping problems, which is of global warming is. you to have some resources to deal with it. world at large was currently around 15 terawatts. 80% of it from fossil fuels. that means that you, when you got 70% reducing that portion is not that hard of a challenge. current costs have been estimated around 1% of global gdp. i know that is a controversial number. we don't really know quite what it is. the future cost made rose steeply. there are all sorts of things here. of talk about this in the last chapter of the book. global warming is not very amenable to be you can't just

pound the table and say, we can't have government indifference. have to take care of our grandchildren. you always end up looking at karzai graphs. a lot of opportunity for learning. there are control issues. a little bit done with global warming early saves a lot of money and trouble. you will recall the mechanically fine ship. there was not anything wrong with it except that it was so big that it was slower to turn them the sense that had preceded it. captain did not quite realize that and was a little slow to apply the initial corrections. but he should have done was slowed down so that he had more time. you will find a lot of scientific careers in global warning. he do a little bit now pitted you don't have to do a love letter. finally opponents of science and

liberalism a light can be lumped under dogma including political and religious absolutism. it comes straight out of european fascist and communism. radical criticism such as the most modern, i was amused to see that my book the signs science f liberty was attacked on amazon by two post modernists neither of whom had ever laid eyes on a copy of the book. one of the things the postmodernists love to do is tell you that you don't have to read this or that book. that is why they're so popular on college campuses. this is kind of an old german philosophical tradition. through one particular approach can this problem be solved. only by accepting the verdict of

so-and-so can we hope to on log such-and-such. people listen to this kind of talk. it is kind of mainstream thought. i would just said that scientifically you never hear. if you heard a scientist get up and said we are running this little experiment and only through our experiment can you ever hope to understand the origin of cosmic rays. he or she would be laughed out of the hall. it is funny to see these approaches. in dogma you have a theory. don't bother experimenting. you confirm the theory no matter what happens. dogma tends to bifurcate the world. you also end up with some kind of other. science might have ended up bifurcating the world, too. you know, if the world were two

worlds or if there were two or three kinds of people science would have found that out. instead it found that all humans of the same species so that one of the reasons that racism is diminishing so rapidly is because science showed that it had no basis. all earthly life is kin. we really are in the same boat, brother. rock one end. there there is only one universe. one set of laws applies to a nything. they turn out to be true. with that i will thank you for listening and return to our panel. [applauding]

>> our first commenter this afternoon , jason kuznicki. a research fellow. also managing editor of the cato web magazine. of particular relevance, he has a ph.d. in history. he studied an era that was the seabed about the scientific and democratic revolutions. we look forward to his comments. everyone, please welcome jason kuznicki. [applauding] >> thank you. i would like toçó start by sayig that my own training is in intellectual history, although it is not specifically in the history of science. i personally am not a scientist. some some of the material you just heard, i'm actually a little bit afraid to comment about, in particular global warming because it is not a

subject i really do much work on unfortunately. but i would like to say a few things about the book the science of liberty and about its thesis, about what i did it is time to do and why i think that it is a very important and interesting but. i would also like to offer a few criticisms of the book because it really would not be fair of me to give up here and have nothing but praise. it would make the discussion kind of boring if that were the case. so most of us who have heard of timothy ferris think of him as primarily a science writer. i know when i was in high schoolbag i was very interestedn it. i would probably be a little bit embarrassed to see my notes in that book right now given that i didn't eventually choose

science. the new area that ferris moves into, namely the history of political fought. here is one that the system as a very well. when i did end up spending my formative years on, i think he did a very good job in this. i am impressed. i would summarize the essential argument of this book as being an elaboration on a play made by carl hopper. namely that the introduction of scientific thought to politics is not what you typically might imagine it to be. we imagine that the introduction of scientific fought into politics will be universal, it will be all encompassing,

completely remake society. we think of, for example, isaac and the foundation theory, which many of you have probably read in which there is a universal path to history, one which can be discerned by mathematical law. if science is just discerning enough it can pick out that path and it can run the world using that mathematical formulas. this is a very appealing vision in the 1940's and 1950's. but it has not proven to be a workable vision. societies that have tried it have suffered. why is that? he offers an answer. i think timothy ferris elaborates. i will read a quote from the open society and its enemies that i think is one of the things is really a central theme also in ferris' work. the utopian engineer is convinced that we must recast

the whole structure of society when we experiment with it. but the kind of experiment for which we can learn of the most is the alteration of one social institution at a time. only in this way can we learn how to fit institutions into the framework of other institutions and how to adjust them so they work according to our intentions. only in this way can we make mistakes and learn from our mistakes without risking the repercussions of a gravity that must endanger the world through future reforms. furthermore this utopian method must lead to a dangerous dogmatic attachment to a blueprint for which countless sacrifices have been made. powerful interests must become linked up with the success of the experiment. all of this does not contribute to the rationality or the scientific value of the experiment, but the piecemeal method permits repeated experiments and continuous readjustments.

this and not the utopian planning or historical processing would mean the introduction of scientific method into politics. the whole secret of scientific method is a readiness to learn from mistakes. which is to say that scientific government is not totalizing, not totalitarian, not all encompassing. we will try one thing at the time. that is more consistent with the scientific spirit of experiment. this list considerable individual initiative and individual human freedom or myself as a libertarian. fairness also offers the disappearance of experiments pervaded the american revolution and the democratic liberal revolutions that it inspired. i think he makes a very convincing case. i think that he rides to notice that many of the american revolutionaries were scientists

and that they spoke in scientific terms very frequently when they talked about what they were doing in politics. conveniently great on the other side of the atlantic at approximately the same time through another revolution. this one, however, illustrates the other side of what they were talking about. i mean the french revolution which is inspired and which very frequently did take the utopian hernando approach to politics and did see itself very literally as restarting the calendar and remaking the entire society that it sought to govern from the ground up and in fact this revolution was a disaster. now, i mentioned that i would offer some criticisms of the pieces of this book, and i will.

it is certainly true that many of the early liberals were scientists. dissymmetry that many of the american founders are scientists. even if they had never become politically active we would still remember benjamin franklin, benjamin rush, and thomas jefferson in the history of science. histories of science would know these names even if they had never done anything in politics. but i would say that for any phenomenon in history that is as large and as complex and as enduring as the liberal democratic revolutions of the enlightenment and the subsequent revelations that they inspired, for any event or series of events you are not going to find one cause. very, very seldom does anything this big and this transform into in history caused by one thing or sparked by only one bank. i was

i would suggest first of all not only where franklin and rush and jefferson all scientists. they were also each in their own way religiously unorthodox. so were many of the other american founders. there were dissenters. there were unitarians. they were agnostic. there were even occasionally athiest. and so what i would suggest is that there is also a religious aspect to the foundation of liberal democratic state, specifically a critical religious dimension. yes, you do find orthodox religious believers within the liberal democratic camp with enlightenment. but you certainly find many people with some very odd religious ideas to say the least and with some believes that could not easily beçsquared wih

orthodoxy. john locke certainly was not an orthodox believers. many people have argued what he did believe. a reasonable and open historical question. he certainly was not an order last believer. voltaire, everywhere you looked uc religious innovation, religious experiment, new ideas in this other area. now, i don't want to say that science is unimportant and it is always the worst critic of a book to say, yeah. he did write about this other subjects that i find really, really interesting. that is not what i'm saying. but i am trying to say here is that i think in religious and politics and science, all three of them at the same time we have a series of related intertwined developments meant all three of them are undergoing a similar process of revaluation at the same time that by many of the same people. and so there are, in fact,

commonalities, not just between science and politics, but science, religion, and politics. when you add all of those three things up that is a lot of human society. i would leave professor ferris with two questions. first there is already in name with this general revolution in human society in the 18th-century, that is the enlightenment. to what extent is your story a retelling of the general image in the story building some bets out and second, to what extent do we still live in it the amendment today? do we face the same questions the 18th-century faced, particularly regarding dogma. do we, in fact, still live in the 18th century. you know, what are your views on that? would be curious to your in your

response what you might have to say say about that. [applauding] >> we will give you a few minutes to ponder that as we let our final commenter come to the podium. that is jonathan rauch. a senior writer and columnist for national journal, also a correspondent for the atlantic monthly and writer in residence at the brookings institution. jonathan is one of the most astute, interesting, and original commentators on the political scene today. he is the author of several books, including gay marriage, why it is good for days commended for storage commended for america, a book most relevant to the current drama in washington. governments end. why washington stopped working? it doesn't seem to have resumed.

and most relevant for today's proceedings, timely inquisitors, new attacks on free thought. please everyone join me in welcoming jonathan rauch. [applauding] >> thank you, everybody. i am here to tell you today, unfortunately, what an annoying book this is. i have to admire timothy ferris since 1988 coming-of-age in the milky way, a marvelous book. beautifully written yet scientifically sophisticated. the author has a particular flair bordering on genius with a pen portraits that bring science to life. like all professional writers when it comes to my rivals my heart is a lump of clay or small dried raison. it is not enough for me to

succeed. others must fail. when i saw the ambition of this new book from timothy ferris, when jason said why don't you look at this. this time he falls on my face. surely he can write a treatise on science and society, and liberal theory with the same kind of grace and skill and clarity that he has brought some pure scientific topics. i deeply regret to say that he has, indeed, done exactly that. one good reason to read this book is for the sheer pleasure of it. it is vivid. here is a quotation. i could have taken hundreds of this. sputniks suggested to politicians and pundits alike that the united states lost in a hedonistic a brew of martinis, bikinis, and cadillacs sporting tail fins logic and slabs of barbecued ribs was losing out to the stern efficiency of totalitarian technology. the eraser and if you think you can write a sentence e a senten. how about this.

like the european totalitarians who preceded them, the islamist preach an ideology. who has said it better? there is another idea important reason to read this book. this does tell part of the enlightenment story. it tells a part that is too often neglected. classical liberalism. i think every libertarian in this room knows all about friedman and the connection between capitalism and liberalism. no one in this room has read the work of karl popper you ought to be just as widely known who argued for the deep connection between liberalism and the open society and the scientific

method of trial and there. most people think of science as a political and, indeed, a partisan sense. republican and democrat. is and should be. but politics and the larger sense is about how we organize society to make large social choices and resolve disputes, preferably peacefully. science in that larger sense is fundamentally very much a political system, and an important one. it is a liberal one. assuming that the family is a natural system the greatest social innovation in the entirety of human history is the liberal social system. its trades are, as timidly put on the board does not, it is decentralized, depersonalized a novel based, open-ended, and trial driven. it is a method to make social decisions, that is to resolve conflict. think about it.

what a radical idea this is a jacket contravenes every human impulse, which is to be travel list, personal favoritism is at the core of how we ought to resolve disputes, closed ended, outcome oriented, authoritarian, natural societies tend to be all of those things. there are, of course, the great liberal systems. to order our politics. another is capitalism to allocate resources. there is, of course to make deep and profound connection. and between capitalism and liberty. the third which i think is the greatest of the three. what i call in my book kindly inquisitors. the damage and i have a book for $10? and as quantity of paper for your money. liberal scientists is the most important. they all arrived at about the same time and about the same

place among people who often a new and dealt with each other. that is no coincidence. put an end to decades and centuries of conflicts frequently violent conflict over greed and power. by replacing individual authorities and personal relationships with decision making by the vast social networks liberal social systems, all three of them, not only make much better decisions by mobilizing infinitely more knowledge and talent. they also bring peace by delegitimizing the very concept of a unitary authority over power, money, or believe, the subjects of our three great liberal systems. when there is no head honcho were tried, no one in charge, when everybody is in the game plan by the same rules there is less to fight over, less incentive to fight, and therefore much more peaceful society. we all know that science does

hand-in-hand with prosperity and technology. timothy does an excellent job listing in his book that science goes hand-in-hand with freedom. that would argue the least appreciated and most important of all, science makes peace possible by providing society with an impersonal nonviolent mechanism to settle disputes over truth. that is karl popper, whose great, i'd think, formulation is in science we killed our hypothesis instead of each other. think about it. in the past 50 people had a profound disagreement over true of the way they often settled it is one of them lived and one of them died. we don't do it that way anymore. i really fundamentally disagree in a big way with nothing in this book. by jason a search for a way to say something other than just yakima what he said. i will do it by offering three points in the way of what we can think of as i suppose friendly

amendment to real ways in which the case through science as the core of liberalism is actually even stronger than timothy ferris makes out in this book. the first, i suppose, is a disagreement. i think timothy defines empiricism to nearly. he defines it as something that you do in a laboratory that is very scientific. you may have a white coat. you are checking in to give a clear positive or negative answer. that is physics. i would argue that empiricism is something much broader than that. simply an imperative to check in order to say that what you say is true. there are all kinds of ways of checking. they are all kinds of ways that we can resolve disagreements over who is right including appeals to logic. we can use deduction, induction. we can have moral arguments. even moral statements.

now, locks empiricism, john locke has been the patron saint of all of this. a moral statement, fundamentally not just a statement. lot said legitimacy to say you have knowledge, not just an opinion is not an individual private. comes from taking your views, bringing them out to a community of searches, suggesting into criticism. that is how we jack. public criticism. end only when a few is accepted by the preponderance of critics can you say that it is knowledge. that is what empiricism is. that leads me to a second friendly amendment. define science more broadly. what we are talking about is not just hard sciences. that is obviously at the core of the proposition. it is the entire system of that trip seeking by a community of seekers to accept not just practically but morally the necessity of subjecting their

claims to criticism and to renounce any this bessel personal authority whether it comes from themselves or god or wherever over the outcome. that includes, of course, none of the physics, mathematics, the soft sciences, the humanities, all of which are expected to subject their work to criticism and peer review. also includes what i do for a living which is a journalism to release a a lot of stuff but unexpected to put it out there. one of the greatest i know is david broder, the dean of washington journalists to be did your mother says she loves you, ejected. that is the ethic of journalism. is fundamentally the same. of course you don't give the crisp results in journalism or history that you do in physics, but the method is the same. that is what defines the community, the enterprise to find science, and that leads me to my third friendly amendment which is understand what it is that we are defending. it is more broad than people in

white lab coats, and it is not just freedom. timothy ferris is certainly correct that signs of depends upon and foster's freedom, but it is important to remember something i never tire of reminding people in this institution. rules are no less important in this enterprise than rights. liberal communities are liberal communities because they accept a binding obligation of contracts, of election results, and of a culture of criticism and the emerging consensus therefrom. the biggest challenge in the west today, i would argue, to science, liberal science broadly defined peace does not come from those to challenge civil-rights at the top with big government clap downs, the totalitarian stuff that al qaeda wants to do.

comes from the bottom up. that is creationist and afro centric and other minority centrist that wants to jam their opinions into the school curriculum on the grounds that knowledge should be determined by a new rule of fairness. another big challenge i think even more important is for proponents of speech codes and harassment codes and now religious advocates, in particular who want to punish our prescribed criticism if it hurts someone, worse than the fans, if it gives deep offense to my religion they want to say you can't criticize that. the girls science, ience, i woud us all, i think we too often forget this is about discipline and no less than about freedom. it is about understanding that if we want the fruits of this enterprise we must subject of our beliefs including our beliefs about the profit to

muhammod about criticism but that is another book. that is more like a book i wrote. did i mention i wrote a book? there is absolutely nothing wrong with this book. if you can't tell, it is a marvelous piece of work. [applauding] >> i was talking in the greenroom beforehand with the author's wife about what a bold and unfashionable book this is. while this is new territory for timothy ferris he has written in the science from pretty much exclusively beforehand. we are in a golden age of popular science writing. these days the political books that find the biggest audience and generate the most attention are dogma books. there are books for us against them. their books to strip the

preconceived notions of one tribe or the other whether it be red or blue and demonize the other side. this, however, is a book that has something to offend everybody. it is too high on science to be completely appealing to conservatives. it is too high at classical liberalism to be too appealing to progressives. and then the stuff about global warming is sure to drive libertarians crazy. on that point let me make the point, although that they are incapable of resolution by blanket statements one way or the other. specifically to state the global warming is happening and human beings have a role in it does not resolve any import in the public policy question with much be resolved by further inquiry into the actual dimensions of the problem, the cost that there are going to impose an on him

their price to fall and when. the cost and of various different strategies were mediation or adaptation. and there is ample ground in that very detailed empirical and query for descent from what had been the major policy initiatives pushed by the people most concerned by global warming. i'll leave it at that and ask the author if he wants to comment on anything the commenter said. >> thank you very much. having heard so many kind words i'm hesitant to change the bang. i remember that years ago there was a folk festival in north carolina. i think it was many green to was

a managing the great blues man who had disappeared for decades and been rediscovered in had a whole career in his 60's. young audiences would turn up. he was due to play at this festival. many could not find him. he went out on stage to kind of keep the crowd going until they could find him. he was talking about john. our next entertainer will be a man of such genius, a great songwriter, he keeps looking to the wings. i know you are going to enjoy him. he's sitting in the middle of the audience. there you are. come on up. afterwards he said why did you keep me out there hanging like that to back down said, well, when i heard you saying all those nice things it never occurred to me that you were speaking about myself. one of the things about this

subject is that it is not personal. the enlightenment, for instance, such change in the world. there will be a kaleidoscope that people will be looking at and into and through and revaluating for as long as we are fortunate enough to have free societies in the world. and i think it is quite fair to ask a question of just how much to my think i am changing the history of the enlightenment. excuse me. it is really not for me to judge. when i was a student the enlightenment was always explained by this odd kind of fragmented account which suddenly several philosophers all started writing staff. it was often talked about as being of victory of rationality over superstition. that i don't think is good enough. so i asked a question, what was new here. the answer was science.

starting with galileo and particularly with newton which just swept the world. it was intentionally written to be hard to understand by someone who was already hard to understand because there was no one nearly as smart in the known world. even john locke had to get a mathematician friend to explain to him. he did follow the argument, but he needed reassurance that it was sound. yet it had a tremendous impact because it showed that science was capable of not just explaining things, which are philosophers do, but making predictions. and i find that this has still not penetrated very widely to human consciousness. the answer to your second kind question, the extent to which we are still living in the enlightenment facing the same questions, i think we really are. most of the students i encountered don't know how

science works. they have never acquired the habit of, in argument, saying to someone. is why they are so easily pushed around and recruited de deus campaigns based on belief rather than fact because because theye not learned how to reference fact. and similarly i find that many university students, and i know it is easy to blame. i'm not blaming education. as an educator encountering students i find they don't understand science, and they don't understand liberalism. about ten years ago one fourth of july i went out to a barbecue. there were a bunch of kids. many had finished their education in the last few years. there were more than a million dollars of tuition standing around us in this party. so i just started asking them what happened that we have this independence today? they did not know the answer.

we are still, i think, in the midst of it. the verdict is not at all clear. >> with that, let me open up to questions. when i call on you please give your name and make it a question. a mic will come to amplify your voice. right down here in front. >> i wonder in your scheme what is the place for scientific theory and scientific theorists was einstein and his ideas, his theories before there were tested and proven, was he doing science? should he be acknowledged as a scientist? and let me just mention that this has some bearing of a very

practical sort because one of the favorite moves of scientific rejection is to say to a theorist, well, we don't like that theory. we are not doing to fund any tests of that theory. and therefore the theorist can spend decades in limbo. >> yes, which is pretty much what happened in the soviet union. you had brilliant astrophysicists who had to stay really in theory because there were not much in the way of tools to test it. einstein was certainly a scientist. i think there is an interesting element to your question. it is, sort of, more popular in history have a scientist who is purely doing theory. a lot of scientists are pushed that way because our intellectual history associates great achievement with solitary intellectuals writing great

books. science is typically much more communal. even when einstein offended his dean, he could not get a job. every time he will apply for the job the dean would write a letter of support. the same thing happened to john wheeler. interesting propaganda. so i stand had to get to work at the patent office. he still had a lot of friends. he was doing science. yet his seeming estrangement really added a lot to the luster of his reputation. ..

block that no one knew what he was doing. beside and other people began looking at it, criticizing, checking it not just in dirichlet by looking at things with telescopes but checking the math and thinking it through that is the distinguishing characteristic of science plus the willingness of the members of the community to abide by the results which is the part a lot of rejectionists' don't like. >> right down here in the corner >> good afternoon. my name is todd riggins. i operate under the pseudonym of revival media on youtube which is one of my addictions. i would like to ask a question

about the big picture and life beyond earth. i assure you and asked this question from a philosophical standpoint as well as a science. will we find intelligent life on other planets in our lifetime and what form will it be and how will it look at what has a drive and or those of the things and the second question is have you thought about taking your presentation skills to another level in terms of say producing a video online or discovery channel segments were going to a more on nm approach to the media. >> thank you. of course whether intelligent life will be discovered in our lifetime is hopefully a different question for you than for me. because you are less than half my age. i don't know. the big question -- life is

probably commonplace in the universe. there's no unusual events in the history of the birth of what makes you think this was a real accident. life got started early in the history of the earth and they're got to be a lot of planets that are roughly comparable to the earth. intelligence we don't know because intelligence if we define as the ability to build a radio telescope and listen for other species has only been around here on earth something in the order of a century, so we hope it will last a long time but we don't know. if intelligence typically lasts a short time you can have lots of intelligence societies but they find they are alone because they are a long time so the great issue is a time when there than space. thank you for the invitation about new media. i wish i knew more about but i am trying to learn how to go from the kind of dinosaur $2 million per hour level of film making to the 21st century

buffett's -- methods. >> it hutchins from the atlas society. first of all things for the excellent panel and your work going back several decades on everything from science to now your book. i'm glad you're showing the relationship between the scientific revolution and what you call the liberal revolution. it's quite correct in your work complements people like michael schirmer who for example this trying to show the secular emerging secular market you might say the importance of the free-market. what i want you to address a little bit more especially given that we have a marketplace for ideas is the problem of dogma. we see in the united states today for example with the market for ideas the prevalence of creationism unfortunately still. we see traditional religion replaced by colts, scientology, things like that. we still see unfortunately in

the university's postmodernism kind of hanging around and it seems like dogmatism is undermining the core of the enlightenment enterprise and that is the importance of reason as an approach to your life person as well as understanding the world. there's a rational life treated more like a lifestyle choice that you can take or leave rather than the core of our civilization. it seems that really is in danger and freedom in the country and i would like you to address more help you see the problem especially given we do have a marketplace of ideas today. >> is a problem. there is a skating chapter in my book about postmodernism and my editor wondered aren't these culture wars over which is a reasonable question because they are over for people like us media but they have an ongoing life in education, particularly

because of schools of education. there is a vague sense that postmodernism represents some kind of thing you achievement in scholarship, and in the schools of education this is often taught we have graduated a lot of teachers who haven't had that much time to pay close attention to say in english literature or anything like that. that might not be the field, but suffer from the notion that this postmodernism somehow has changed the rules and what they specifically know is that you're supposed to be careful about what kind of words you use. and you shouldn't ever say that anybody ever really knows anything. you want to be careful not to assert their are any facts because the so-called facts are just from your perspective as a particular ethnic group and that

if you move over to some other group there would be a different set as equally valid facts. and i just think this is pernicious nonsense and it's funny it is considered offensive to say so. and if you do say so or read a page from my book in many such conclaves i will immediately be dismissed as a political conservative which is a bad word. as it happens on not a political conservative. i'm interested in facts however, and i do think the important thing is to call dogma by that name. there are a lot of intimidating trickster used by people to sell dogma. it kind of guilt trip students. and the one they should all be called on is they all claim that they are benefiting some underprivileged group of people.

there is a simple question i would suggest students as they are walking down through the gauntlet of of these tables that are set up to fight for this or that collis, some of them much more valid than others of course is what good has this donner anybody. what has it ever accomplished. tell me one thing. i had dinner the of the night with two anthropologist's for both fond of the works of bruno, the reconstructionists french sociologist anthropologist. who will tell you he's devoted a lot of work undermining science. what good is it? there must be something, one thing that he has ever said or done that has helped. they didn't know the answer. until you know the answer you are not in the realm of beyond the confines of dogma and that should be called as much.

>> right down here. >> my question is to jonathan. jonathan, you talked about to notions, checking and criticism. how do you make a society make these notions commonplace and acceptable? >> we certainly have which is the main thing. you teach a thick of criticism and checking coming you protected legally which is what the first amendment is all about. as timothy points on in his book the same people who from the constitution were of a very scientific frame of mind. the understood the connection and then you defend it. you remember as i said there are rights as well as rules. it turns out to me the big

surprise of science is that it is a sustainable enterprise. before any of this happened if you had come along and said you know what, let's take the decisions about the things we think our most important, the nature of the universe, the ordering of society, what's true and what's false and let's turn goes into an in person machine. it will make the decisions and the bond -- t-bond and a philosopher who claims to settle these disputes. i would have said that might work in a very small society for about ten years. astonishingly it turns out to be far more robust than the alternatives that it does depend -- this goes back to john adams, republicans to be based on internal republican virtues. the same is true of science. internal believe that we have an obligation to submit ourselves and our views to the discipline of checking if empiricism and

criticism. we turn now to be very good at that but i don't take it for granted which is one reason i wrote kindly inquisitors and i glad timothy has written this book. >> i think with that we will adjourn and had upstairs for sandwiches. books are available for sale. i sure he would be happy to sign them for you. everyone, thank you for coming. [applause] >> timothy ferris is the writer of seeing in the dark the whole shabang. he's professor emeritus of california berkeley and former editor of rolling stone magazine. for more information, visit timothyferris.com. ariel glucklich, what are the best qualities of religion that you claim are also

dangerous? >> the single most important quality of collection is it makes people happy. but the way it makes people happy is by social integration, getting in a group. if the group demands you do certain kind of things in order to become a member you become dependent on those demands and might do anything. and if the group is their own kind of group you might be actually a dangerous person. so the good thing is happiness. it's a bad thing is depending on that for your sense of fulfillment is the problem. >> who is dying for have been? >> people by and for heaven who feel like they don't belong and that the need to prove themselves in order to be long. the group that tells them that they are going to have and is usually a religious group but to the problem they have to begin with is not a religious one.

the problem that they have is they don't belong and that is what is happening around the middle east and asia today that too many people no longer belong in any recognizable group. that's why you see all the violence there and not here. >> how did you come up with your furies? >> i've been doing psychology of religion over 20 years and i've studied other cases of people and injuring themselves for religion for example rites of passage or pilgrimage where the pilgrims walked on their knees or initiations and so forth. we've all seen monks whipping themselves and that sort of thing qassam deacons i'm an expert why people feel they need to hurt themselves in order to get what they want which is spiritual salvation. >> where do you teach? >> georgetown university. >> ariel glucklich, dalia and fer have an wholley pleasure and suicide bombers with the best

qualities of religion are also its most dangerous. harvard business school lecturer robert pozen looks at the causes of the 2008 financial collapse. he argues for changing the incentives system on wall street and calls for strengthening the government regulation of the financial markets. the center for american progress in washington, d.c. posts this hour-long event. >> welcome all of you and thank serra and the center for hosting this little discussion group and i hope it will be