baby born in the world today is twice of 1800. food production up 52% her person despite the increase the population since 1961 and that is only through 2001 the reason for that is agriculture is much more productive. not because some scientific council got together and made up a set of precepts carried out but because of experimentation that is what i tried to emphasize the important aspect of science not that it is rational. but it is experimental and experimentation that brought about the gains. in terms of wealth good gdp circa 1800 was $700 per year but the growth rate was under 1% it is now roughly

7,000 with a growth rate not including the recent financial trouble of around 3%. that is an amazing accomplishment despite the considerable increase of population during the same period. . .

it is hard to make predictions as mills boris said especially about the future. had you said that such an assembly that by somewhere around 2000 or so, 80% of the entire human population would be literate, or that you know they would be a country the size of the united states where the median household word exceeded $100,000, nobody would have believed that. but, here we are. we also have a thing called the united nations subjective well-being index which attempts to measure these things and it just includes the interesting fact that people get happier as they get wealthier and tell around $15,000 a year and after that it may solve problems. what to make of that i don't know. the number of liberal democracies worldwide is gone from something like three in 1800 or zero if you count

universal suffrage, to something around 89 today. 46% of all humans are living in democracies and this is preferred throughout the rest of the world. abolition of the slavery was a major accomplishment that i've running out of time. the emancipation of women. sometime this year women will become the majority of the american workforce were the first time. lots of interesting achievements like this one, half the electricity currently being demonstrated comes from decommissioned soviet warheads. something else that would have been hard to predict in the midst of the cold war. there are challenges. how am i doing on time? i am okay? there are however challenges to this alliance of science and liberalism. quite a few of them and i will just mention a few. one that has concerned people of course is population growth, that there is less hunger even with the growing population.

less poverty even with growing population, better education but population rising, curves to threatened to challenge all of these things. whenever you see a curve and biology start up like this, the question is always whether you are looking at an s-curve because it is going to level out on the other side, or is it an inverted q? isn't going to go up and then crash back down? you see both in biological context all the time as far as populations. there an awful lot of you curves because the population will often eat its way through a newfound resource, grow very rapidly and then crash when the resource is depleted. but, fortunately it now appears that the human curve is likely to be an s-curve, at least our inc. some unforeseen disaster and the reason is that the rate of increase is now finally rolling over. and a major reason for that is urbanization, the same thing

that decreased earth rates in western europe, 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 if you can't see the legend are total population in the bars. the blue line is rural population and in all societies through history, the greatest poverty has been rural. there is a particular cruelty of intellectual life that at the same time that the poorest and most desperate people have been rural, it has been a propensity of intellectuals who don't do far more to imagine that their lives are wonderful. so you read in virtual for instance, just how great it must be to work on a farm, something virgil never did a day in his life. and you read in the works of john sauk bench mac jean jacques rousseau whose achievements

included inspiring terror in the view french revolution and considerable amounts of naziism on his door. simply made up everything about some primitive state of mankind which everybody was delightfully happy and depicted our subsequent evolution as one of becoming corrupted by the influences of property ownership and civilization. millions of kids are still taught this stuff every year. even though there is not an empirical fact and a lot of it. whenever people have been free to get out of the country and come to the cities, they have done so and now worldwide more than have that freedom, they are doing so. the result is the birth rate goes down because people have a lot of kids when they are in the country because they need the farm help. they move to cities in cramped quarters and have fewer children. we have all seen pictures like this of slums. they are usually used to depict the disparity of income which is

wrongly thought to be growing worldwide. it is not. it is about the same or decreasing and certainly growing in the united states right now which i consider to be an unhealthy situation but worldwide it is not. we see these sorts of photos but you could have taken a photo like this of any european city. once people start moving and faster than the city can inquire the notebooks of folks there are always these periods of horrible slums and what dickens wrote about this one in jakarta. you want to try to do right by it. you want to try to move london what is today which is negligible slums and so forth. pity society has to figure out how to do this. the main thing about the situation is it is very unlikely to remain static because there is a lot of talent in those slums. that was one of the things, when london kept people out, it was when the term suburbs originated suburbs meant under the city.

under the city walls the shanty towns were built. a lot of the great forces tried to keep them out of the guilds because they knew there was a lot of talent out there and they didn't want the competition. ecological stress, i will just say a word about laval warming because we seem to be in a weird period of laval warming. fewer americans today than two years ago except the science of global warming or humans have anything to do with it. so let me just point out that global warming has been identified in a lot of independent scientific studies going back to the 18th century this phenomenon scientifically robust, the mechanism is not difficult to understand. it is not model sensitive. it is not an argument against global warming to say there is a fault in the model. all models are faulty. nor did the personalities of the scientists matter. we have had so much flap recently about some mildly inappropriate e-mails among climate scientists to let me make a bold statement about

this. if the most famous client scientist in the world were discovered to borrow the of videotape sitting in a meeting with the next five most famous scientist rubbing their hands together in saying a higher global global domination is exceeding the pace. soon we will have the world's government we all desire, it wouldn't matter. sites does not work that way. the personality and the motives don't matter. you just have to look at the data. the data are not that difficult to understand. there are also fortunately some, lots of resources to bring bear on these problems however we end up doing it. the world spends close to $7 trillion on energy every year. u.s. spending on foreign oil of loan is half a trillion. so there is a lot of money in the pipeline and there is nothing that says once you are able to start addressing housekeeping problems which is all global warming is, you do

have some resources to deal with it. the world at large is currently around 50-- 15 terawatts, 87% from fossil fuel. when you have 87%, reducing that portion of the total is initially not that hard of a challenge. current cost of estimated 1% of mobile gdp. i know that his controversial number. we don't know quite what it is. the future cost may grow steeply and there are all sorts of things that i talk about this in the last chapter of the book. the main thing is global warming like many scientific projects is not very amenable to absolute statements. you can't just pound the table and say we can't have government interference or we have to take care of our grandchildren or any of that. you always look at curbside graphs in trying to find a sweet spot. there are however control issues. a little bit done with global

warming early saves a lot of money and trouble. the titanic you are call is a ship. there wasn't anything wrong with it except that it was so big that it was lower to turn than the ships preceded it. it happens did not realize that and it was a little slow to apply the initial corrections. really what they should have done to slow down a little so they would have more time after seeing an iceberg. you will find there is a lot of scientific curves and global warming. you do a little bit now, you don't have to do a lot later or face doing a situation which you don't have enough resources left to deal with the problem. finally upon us of science and liberalism alike can be lumped under dogma including religious, political and religious absolutism. at least half of the islamist terrorism doesn't have anything to do with islam at all. it comes straight out of european fascism and communism.

and radical cynicism such as the postmodernists, i was amused to see that my book, the science of liberty, was attacked on amazon initially by to postmodernists neither of whom had ever laid eyes on a copy of the book. one of the things that postmodernists love to do is tell you you don't have to read this or that but. that is why they are so popular on college campuses. because come and this is an old german philosophical tradition, they are only for one particular approach can this problem be solved. all made by except being the verdict of so-and-so can we hope to unlock such and such. people listen to this kind of talk for centuries now. it is kind of mainstream philosophy and i would just say that scientifically you never hear it. if the scientists were to get up and say we are running this little experiment and only through our experiment can you

ever hope to understand say the origin of cosmic rays. he or she would be laughed out of the hall. so it is funny to see these approaches. and dug my you have a theory, you don't bother experimenting. dogma tends to bifurcate the world, even though let's say religious dogma, there baluchi zero is latin for binding together but you ultimately end up with some kind of us in some kind of other. science might have ended up bifurcating the world too. if the world war ii worlds or if there were two or three kinds of people as people used to think, science would have found that out but instead it found that all humans are the same species, so one of the reasons that racism has diminished so rapidly in the world is because science has shown it has no basis. all earthly life is can win the same-- a quote from leadbelly,

you rock one and, you are going to rock the other. and one universe. there is one set of laws that applies to everything so these inspirations were at the heart of the founding of liberalism in science. it turned out to be true. they are not just beliefs. and insofar as one can tell they are scientific facts and with that i will thank you for listening and return to our panel. [applause] >> our first commentor this afternoon is cato institute on jason kuznicki a research fellow at cato and managing editor of the cato web magazine, cato unbound. of particular relevance to today's proceedings he has a ph.d. in history from johns

hopkins where in particular he studied vieira that was the seed that is both the scientific and democratic revolutions and so we look forward to his comments. everyone please welcome jason kuznicki. [applause] >> thank you. i would like to start by saying my own training is intellectual history although it is not specifically in the history of science and i personally am not a scientist, and so some of the material you just heard i am actually a little afraid to comment about and 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 his thesis, about what i think it is trying to do and why i think that it is a very

important and very interesting book and i would also like to offer a few criticisms of the book because it really wouldn't be fair of me just to get up here and have nothing but praise and it would make the discussion i think kind of boring if that were the case. so, most of us i think we have heard of timothy ferris in the past and think of him as primarily a science writer. i know i did. i read the red limits when i was in high school i think it was very interested in it. i probably would be a little bit embarrassed to see my notes in them look right now, given that i didn't eventually choose science and was perhaps only modestly talented in that area. but, i do think that the new area that ferris moves into in this book, namely the history of political thought, is one that he seems to master very well. this is what i ended up spending my formative years on, my

graduate training on and i think he did a very good job with this. i am impressed. i would summarize the central argument of this book as being sort of an elaboration on a claim made by carl kopper and the open society and its enemies. mainly 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 thought into politics will be universal, we'll be totalizing, will be all-encompassing, will completely remake society. we think of for example isaac asimov and the foundation series, which many of you have probably read, in which there is a universal path to history, one which can be discerned by mathematical law and science is just discerning enough they can

pick out that path than they can run the world using mathematical formulas. this was a very appealing vision in the 1940s in the 1950s when asimov was writing this but it has not proven to be a workable vision. the societies that have tried it have suffered and why is that? carl kopper offers an answer and i think timothy ferris elaborates on it. i am going to read a quote from the society and its enemies that i think is one of the things that is really the central theme in ferris's 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 from which we can learn the most is the alteration of one social institution at a time. are 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 the stakes and learn from our mistakes without risking repercussions of the gravity that must endanger the will to future reforms. furthermore, the utopian method must lead to a dangerous dogmatic attachment to a blueprint for which sacrifices have been made. powerful interests must become linked up with the success of the experiment. all this does not contribute to the rationality or the scientific value of the experiment. at the piecemeal method permits repeated experiments and continuous readjustments. this, and not the utopian planning or historical prophecy methods, would mean the introduction of scientific methods into politics. since the whole secret of scientific method is a readiness to learn from mistakes. which is to say that scientific government is not totalizing.

it is not totalitarian. it is not all-encompassing. is going to try one thing at a time because that is more consistent with the scientific spirit of experiment. this leaves considerable space for individual initiative and individual human freedom and for myself as a libertarian i count this as a good thing. ferris also argues the spirit of experiments pervaded the american revolution and the democratic liberal revolutions that it inspired and i think he makes a very convincing case here. i think he is right to notice that many of the american revolutionaries were scientist and that they spoke in scientific terms very frequently when they talked about what they were doing in politics. inconveniently, right on the other side of the atlantic at approximately the same time another revolution. this one however i think illustrates the other side of

what kopper and ferris were talking about, i mean the french revolution which yes was inspired by jacques cousteau in which very frequently did take the utopian totalizing approach to politics and did see itself very literally as restarting the calendar at year one and remaking the entire society that it sought to govern from the ground up and in that this revolution was a disaster. now, i mentioned that i would offer some criticisms of the thesis of this book and i will. it is certainly true that many of the early liberals were scientist and it is certainly true many of the american founders were scientist. even if they had never been politically active, we would still remember benjamin franklin, benjamin rush and thomas jefferson in the history of science. historians of science would know

these names even if they had never done anything in politics. but, i would say for any phenomenon in history it is as large and as complex and as enduring as the liberal democratic revolutions of the enlightenment and the subsequent revolutions that they inspired, for any offense or series of events in this complex you are not going to find one cause. very very seldom is anything this big in this transformative in history caused by one thing or sparked by only one thing, and i would suggest that there is another cause at work here as well. i would suggest first of all and begin my suggestion by saying not only were frank lenin and rush and jefferson all scientist. they were also each in their own way religiously unorthodox and so were many of the american founders and so were many of the early scientist. they were the centers, they were

unitarians, they were agnostics. they were even occasionally atheists. and so what i would suggest is that there is also a religious aspect to the foundation of the liberal democratic state, specifically a critical religious dimension. yes you do find orthodox religious believers within the liberal democratic camp in the enlightenment but you certainly find many people with some very odd religious ideas to say the least and with some beliefs that could not easily be squared with orthodoxy. john locke certainly wasn't an orthodox believer. many people have argued about what he really did believe and i think it is a reasonable and open historical question in some respects but he certainly was not an orthodox believer nor was isaac newton. everywhere you look you see religious innovation, religious

experiment, new ideas in this other area. i don't want to say that science is unimportant and it is always the worst critique of a book to say well yeah but you didn't write about this other subject i find really interesting and i wish he would have written this this other book instead. what i'm trying to say here is that i think in religion, and in politics and science, all three of them at the same time we have a series of related, in fact intertwined developments. all three of them are undergoing a similar process of reevaluation at the same time but by many of the same people. and so there are in fact commonalities not just between science and politics but science, religion and politics and when you add those three things up that is a lot of human society. and that is a general revolution in human society. so i believe-- woodley professor ferris with two questions.

first there was hearted name for this general revolution in human society in 18th century. that is the enlightenment. to what extent is your story and that you are telling of the general enlightenment story leaving-- and second to what extent do we still live in the enlightenment today? do we face the same questions the 18th century phase, particularly regarding dogma and the place of dogma and science and in politics and in religion. do we in fact still live in a very very very long 18th century and what are your views on that and i would be curious to hear in your response what you might have to say about that? [applause] >> we will give you a few minutes to ponder that as we let our final comment to come to the

podium and that is jonathan rauch who is a senior writer and columnist for national journal and also a correspondent for the "atlantic monthly," and writer in residence at the brookings institution and massachusetts avenue. jonathan is one of the most astute, interesting and original commentators on the political scene today. he is the author of several books including marriage and why it is good for, straights in america, a book most relevant to the current drama in washington, why washington stopped working. it doesn't seem to have resumed since he wrote that. and then most relevant for today's proceedings, his book kindly inquisitors, new attacks on free thought, a book published by the way by the cato institute so please everyone join me in welcoming jonathan rauch. [applause]

>> thank you everybody. i am here to tell you today unfortunately what an annoying book this is. i have admired timothy ferris' writing since 1988 "coming of age in the milky way," a marvelous book or go it is beautifully written yet scientifically sophisticated and the other has a particular flair of bordering on genius for the portrait that bring science to life. and like all professional writers, when it comes to my rivals my heart is a lump of clay or a small dried raisin and i hold with gore vidal, it is not enough for me to succeed or go others must fail. [laughter] when i saw the ambition of this new book from timothy ferris when jason said why don't you look at this i said ah ha, this time he falls on his face. surely he can't write a treatise on science, society and liberal theory with the same kind of grace and skill and clarity that

he is brought to peer 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's a quotation. i could've taken hundreds like this. sputnik suggested politicians and pundits alike that the united states awash in a hedonistic grew up martinis, bikinis and cattle exporting tailfins larger than slabs of barbecued ribs was losing out to the stern efficiency of totalitarian technology. raise your hand if you think you can write a sentence like that. or how about this? pithy. again i quote like the european europeans or trial of terry and superceded them the islamists preach an ideology of purification through total mobilization, violent struggle and death. who has said it better in a single short sentence? there is another i think important reason to read this book, which is its neglected

subject, my answer to jason's-- it tells a part that is too often neglected and that is important. it tells the part about the profound connection between science and liberalism, always speaking as we do in the confines of these walls of classical liberalism. i think every libertarian in this room knows all about hayek and friedman and the connection between capitalism and liberalism yet virtually no one in this room i would venture has read the work of karl popper who ought to be just as widely known in libertarian circles who argued for the deep connection between liberalism as he called the open society and the scientific method of trial and error. most people think of scientists apolitical and indeed in a partisan sense republicans and democrats it is than then it should be but politics in a larger sense of course it's about how we organize society to make large social choices and resolve disputes, preferably

peacefully. science in that larger sense of political is fundamentally, indeed very much a political system. and it is an important one and it is a liberal one. assuming that the family is a natural system, the greatest social innovation in the entirety of human history i would argue is the liberal social system. its trade czar, as timothy put on the board just now, it's decentralized, de-personalized, rule-based open-ended and trial trip in and it is a method to make social decisions. that is to resolve complex. think about it, what a radical idea this is. it contravenes every human impulse which is to be tribalist , personal favoritism is at the core of how we ought to resolve disputes, closed ended, authoritarian, natural societies tend to be all of those things.

there are of course three great liberal systems. one of course is the one to choose leaders and to order our politics. another is capitalism, to allocate resources. there is of course a deep and profound connection between science and capitalism. and between capitalism and liberty and the third which i think is the greatest impact of the three is what i call in my book kindly inquisitors-- did i mention i have a book, $10 on amazon? a nice quantity of paper for your money. liberal science is the most important of the three but they all arrived at about the same time and about the same place among people who offer new and dealt with each other and that is no coincidence because i would argue they are all driven by the same fundamental imperative, which is put an end to decades and even centuries of conflict frequently violent conflict, over greed and power.

by replacing individual authorities and personal relationships with decision-making by these 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 i.d. legitimizing the very concept of a unitary authority over power, over money or over believe, the subject of our three great legal systems. when there is no head honcho or tribe, no one in charge, when everybody's in the game playing by the same rules there there is less to fight over, lists and send to fight them there for a much more peaceful society. we all know science goes hand-in-hand with prosperity and technology. timothy does an excellent job illustrating this book that science goes hand-in-hand with freedom. i would argue however the least appreciated and most important of all, science makes peace possible by providing society with an impersonal, non-violent

mechanism to settle disputes over truth. that is karl popper, whose great grade i think pithy formulation is in science we kill our hypotheses instead of each other. think about it. in the past of two people had a profound disagreement over the way they often settled it was one of them lived in one of them died. we don't do it that way any more. i've really fundamentally disagree in a big way with nothing in this book so like jason i search for a way to say something other than just yeah, what he said. i will do it via offering three points in the way of what we can think of as a supposed friendly amendments, ways in which the case for science as the core of liberalism is i think actually even stronger than timothy ferris makes out in his book. the first, i suppose this is a disagreement to some extent, thinks timothy defines empiricism to narrowly.

he defines it as something you do in a laboratory that is very scientific. you may have a white coat. you were checking and you get a clear answer. that is physics but in fact i would argue empiricism is something much broader than that in simply this. and imperative to check the order to say that what you say is true. they are all kinds of ways of checking, not just aristotle's, but what goes on lend laboratories. they are all kinds of ways we can resolve disagreements over who is right including appeals to logic, to the past, we can use deduction, induction. we can have moral arguments come , even moral statements. locke-- john locke is the patron saint of all of us in this was a moral statement, fundamentally not just an epistemological statement. locke said legitimacy to say you have knowledge, not just an opinion, is not an individual prerogative or go it comes from

taking your views, bringing them out to a community of searchers suggesting them to criticism. that is how to check public criticism and only when a view is accepted by the preponderance of critics can you say that it is knowledge. that is what empiricism isn't that leads me to a second friendly amendment and timothy ferris's book. defines science more broadly. what we are talking about is not just the hard sciences though that is obviously the core of the proposition. it is the entire system of truth seeking by a community of seekers who accept not just practically but morally the necessity of subjecting their claims to criticism and who renounce any special personal authority, whether it comes from themselves, or from god or whoever over the outcome. that includes of course not only physics and mathematics, it includes the soft sciences, the humanities all of which are suspected to peer review for

code also includes indeed what i do for living, which is journalism. we see a lot of stuff but we are expected to put it out there and check. one of the great empiricists is david broder the dean of washington journalist who has said if your mother says she loves you, check it. that is the ethic of journalism and is fundamentally the same of the epic of science. of course you don't get the crisp results in journalism and history that you do in physics but the method is the same and that is what defines the community, the enterprise that define science in that leads me to my third friendly amendment which is understand what it is we are defending here. it is broader than people in white lab coats and it is not just freedom stupid to paraphrase bill clinton. timothy ferris is certainly correct that science both depends upon and fosters freedom but it is important to remember, something i never tire of reminding people in this institution, that rules are no less important in this

enterprise that rights. liberal communities are liberal communities because they accept the binding obligation of contracts, of election results and of a culture of criticism and the emergent consensus they are from. the biggest challenge in the west today i would argue to science, liberal science broadly defined, does not come from those who challenge civil rights at the top with big government clampdowns, the totalitarians for what al qaeda wants to do comes from the bottom up where people who are challenging the rules, challenging the discipline. that is creationist and afrocentrism and other centrist who want to jam their opinions into the school curricula. for example on the grounds that knowledge should be determined by a rule of fairness and equal time, not a rule of submit your views to checking and only the survivors get in. another big challenge, i think

even more important is from proponents of speech codes and harassment codes and now specially religious advocates and in particular protection to want to punish or prescribe criticism if it hurt someone if it is quote words that wound, if it gives deep offense to my religion. they want to say you can't criticize that. liberal science i would her mind is all i think we too often forget this, is about discipline, and in understanding if we want the fruits of this enterprise we must subject all our beliefs, including our beliefs about the prophet mohammed about criticism. if we don't do it ourselves and we must allow other people to do it. but that is another both. that is more like the book that i wrote. did i mention i wrote a book? there is absolutely nothing wrong with this book. if you can tell, it is a marvelous piece of work. [applause]

>> i was talking in the green room beforehand with the authors wife about what a bold and unfashionable book this is. this is new territory for timothy ferris. he is written in the science realm pretty much exclusively beforehand and we are in a golden age of popular science writing. for political writing, not so much. these days, the political books that find the biggest audiences and generate the most intention are dogma books. they are books for us, against them. they are books to stroke the preconceived notion of one tribe or the other be red or blue and demonize the other side. this however is a book that has something to offend everybody, so it is too high on science to be completely appealing to conservatives and too high in

the class of liberalism to be appealing to progressives and then the stuff about mobile warming is sure to drive libertarians crazy. on that point, let me just make the point although i have no expertise on the subject, that the controversies of mobile warming are precisely as timothy ferris mentioned incapable of like it statements one way or the other and specifically to state global warming is happening in human beings have a role in it does not resolve any important public policy question. those questions must be resolved by further inquiry and the actual dimensions of the problem, the cost they are going to impose and on whom they are going to fall and on land and the cost than the various different strategies for remediation or adaptation, and there is ample ground in that very detailed empirical inquiry for what have been the major

policy initiatives pushed by the people most concerned by global warming. i will leave it at that and ask the author if he wants to comment first on anything the commenters said before turning it over to more questions from the audience. >> thank you very much. having heard so many kind words, i am hesitant to change a thing. i remember that years ago there was a folk festival and i think north carolina and i think it was manny greenhill who was managing mississippi john hurt, the great blues man who disappeared for decades in them was rediscovered and have a whole career in the 60s and young audiences would turn out. he was due to play at this festival and manny could not find him so he went out on stage to dance and keep the crowd going until they could find him

or go he was talking about john hurt. he said, our next entertainer will be a man of such genius and great songwriting, and he is looking in the wings. i know you are going to enjoy him and he looks down and sitting in the middle of the audience is john hurt. there you are, come on up and afterwards he said why did you keep me out there hanging. john said mr. greenhill when i heard you say all of those nice things it never occurred to me that you were speaking about myself. one of the great things about this subject is it isn't personal. and the enlightenment for instance was such a changing world that it will be a kaleidoscope that people will be looking at and into and through reevaluating as long as we are fortunate enough to have a free society in the world. and i think it is quite fair to

ask the question of just how much do i think i am changing the history of the enlightenment 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 stuff. it was often talked about his being a victory of rationality over superstition. that i don't think is good enough. so i asked the question, what was new here? and the answer was science, and starting with galileo in particular with newton brick api which just swept the world. the book was intentionally written to be hard to understand by someone who was already hard to understand because there was nowhere nearly as smart in the world. even john locke had to get a mathematician friend to explain

to him. he could follow the argument that we 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 all philosophers do, but making predictions. and i find that this has still not penetrated very widely to human consciousness so to answer your second kind question, the extent to which we are still living in the enlightenment, i think we really are. most of the students i encountered don't know how science works. they have never required-- acquired the habit of an argument of saying to someone why are they so easily pushed around in so easily recruited to hideous campaigns based on belief rather than facts, because they haven't learned how to reference back to this facts. similarly, i find it any

university students, and they know it is easy to blame, i am not lending education. i'm just saying as an educator encountering students i find that they don't understand science and they don't understand liberalism. about 10 years ago when fourth of july i went to a barbecue and there were a bunch of kids there. some of them were still in college, many in graduate school and then he finished their educations. there was more than $1 million in fancy tuition on the hook standing around this barbecue so i started asking them what happened on the fourth of july that we have this independence day and they did not know. so yeah, we are still i think in the midst of it. the verdict is not at all clear. >> without that but may open it up for questions, and when i call on you please give your name and make it a question. and a mic will come to amplify your voice.

right down here in front. speak can dylan, cnc press. i wonder in your scheme what is the place for scientific theory and scientific theorists? was einstein and his ideas, his theories before they were tested and proven, was he doing science should he be of knowledge as a scientist, and let me just mention that this has some very practical sorts because one of the favorite moves of scientific rejectionists is to say to a theorists, well we don't like that very so we are not going to fund any test of that theory and therefore the theorists can spends decades in limbo.

>> which is pretty much what happened in the soviet union. you had brilliant astrophysicist who had to stay really in theory because there weren't, 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 and that it is sort of more popular in history to have a scientist who is purely doing theory and a lot of scientists are push that way because our intellectual history associates great achievement with solitary intellectuals writing great books. science is typically much more communal so even when einstein offended his dean, so he could not get a job. every time he would apply for a job that dean would write a letter saying don't hire him. the same thing happened to john wheeler in the 20th century. einstein had to go to work at

the patent office but he still had a lot of friends greeting the journal said he was doing science. yet his seeming estrangement during that reef time really added a lot to the luster of his reputation. there are scientific theories that have a long horizon. the string theory has been for 10 years down now and would be difficult to test experimentally and has been criticized. to me it is all science and the experimental side perhaps isn't as much appreciated by the public as the theoretical side. >> the science is as much about looking for a way to check as if it is about catching a theory. to me the greatest of all philosophers of science is a man named charles sanders hearst a philosopher of the 19th century who years ahead of the time was the first to understand science is a fundamentally communitarian enterprise. you can do it in a room by yourself.

no one knew what he was doing. science begins when other people begin looking at it, criticizing it, checking it not empirically by looking at inkster telescopes but checking the map and thinking it through. that is the characteristic of science plus the willingness of the members to abide by the results which is the part a lot of the rejectionists don't like. >> right down here in the corner. >> my name is todd wiggins. i operate under the pseudonym of prairie revival media on youtube which is one of my addictions i think. i would like to ask you a question about the big picture and life beyond earth. i am sure you have been asked this question probably from a philosophical standpoint as well as a pure scientific standpoint. will we find intelligent life on other planets in our lifetime and what form will it deanne how will it look and will it have a

drive-in? the second question is, have you thought about taking your presentation skills to another level in terms of say producing a video on line or discovery channel segment or going to a more omnipotent approach to the media? >> thank you. well, of course whether intelligent life will be discovered in our lifetime hopefully as a different question for you than for me because you are less than half my age. i don't know. that they question-- life is probably commonplace in the universe. there were no unusual events in the history of the earth that would make you think this is a real accident. life got started real early, and there got to be a lot of planets that are roughly comparable to the earth. intelligence we don't know because intelligence simply defined as the ability to build

a radio telescope and listen to other-- for other species. it has only been around here on earth for something of the order of the century so we hope it will last a long time. if intelligence typically lasts a short time then you can have lots of intelligent societies but they all find they are alone because they are alone in the times and the great issue is time rather than space. thank you for your invitation about new media. i wish i knew more about it but i am trying to learn how to go from the dinosaur $2 million in our level of filmmaking to the 21st century methods. >> ed hutchins from a à law society and thanks for an excellent panel and thank you for your work going back several decades on everything from science to now europe. i am glad you are showing the

relationship between the scientific revolution and what you call the liberal revolution. i think it is quite correct and i think your work complements people like michael shermer who for example is trying to show the secular, emerging secular market you might say the importance of the free market. what i want to ask you to address a little bit more especially given we have the marketplace right now, is the problem of dogma. we see in the united states today for example with their market for ideas the prevalence of creationism unfortunately still. wheezy traditional religion replaced by cults, scientology and things like that. we still see unfortunately and universities 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 personally as well as understanding the world, that rational life is

treated more like a lifestyle choice that can-- you can take or leave rather than the core of our civilization. it seems that that really is endangering freedom in this country and i would like you to address a little bit or how you see the problem especially given we do have a marketplace of ideas today. >> it is a problem. there's a scathing 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 maybe, but they have an ongoing life and education, particularly because of schools of education. there is a vague sense that postmodernism represents some kind of new achievement in scholarship. and, in schools of education this is often taught so we have graduated a lot of teachers who you know haven't had that much

time to pay close attention to say english literature or anything like that that might not be their field, but who suffer from the vague notion that there is, that this postmodernism somehow has changed the rules and what they specifically know is that you are supposed to, you are supposed to be careful about what kind of words you use, that you have to be-- and you should never say anybody really knows anything. you want to be careful to insert the facts because the so-called factors from your perspective as a particular ethnic group and if you moved over to some other group there would be a different set of equally valid facts. and i just think that this is pernicious nonsense and it is funny that it is considered offensive to say so. if you do say so or if you 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 i am not a political conservative. i am interested in the facts however and i do think the important thing is to call dogma bite that name. there are a lot of intimidating tricks that are used by people to sell dogma as a kind of guilt trip. the one really they should all be called on is they all claim that they are in a fitting some underprivileged group of people. there is a single question i would suggest that students as they are walking down through the goblet of all these tables that are set up to fight for this or that cause. some of them much more valid than others of course. it is what good has this done anybody? what has it ever accomplished?

tell me one thing. i had dinner the other night with two anthropologists, who were both fond of the works of bruno latour were, the deconstructionist of french sociologist and anthropologist and a lot of other words who will-- who has devoted a lot of work to undermining science. what good is it? there must be something, someone think that mr. live tour has ever said or done that has helped. they didn't know the answer. until you know the answer you are not in a round of the on the confines dogma and should be called as such. >> right down here. >> my question is to jonathan. it is nice to see you again. jonathan you talked about the notion of checking and criticism. how do you make society make these notions commonplace,

acceptable? >> we certainly have, which is the main thing. you teach an athletic of criticism and checking. you protect illegally which is what the first amendment is all about. as timothy points out in his book, the same people who framed the constitution were very scientific frame of mind. they understood the connection, and then you defend it. you remember as i said that 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 would have come along and said you know what let's take the decisions about the things we think are most important, the nature of the universe, god, the ordering of society, what is true and what is false and let's turn this into an-- turn those

over to an impersonal public machine, it will make the decisions. able to bunk in a priest, and a philosopher, any dogmatist who claims authority to settle these disputes. i would have would have said that might work in a small society for about 10 years. astonishingly it turns out to be far more robust than the alternatives but it does depend, this goes back to john adams, a republic has to be based on some eternal station of public virtue and the same is true of science. sum it internalization of a belief that we have an obligation to submit ourselves and our views to the distant one of criticism. week turned out to be good at that but i don't take it for granted which is one reason i wrote timely inquisitors and one reason i'm led timothy ferris has written this book. >> i think with that, we will adjourn and head upstairs for sandwiches. books are available for sale.

i am sure mr. peres will 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 shebang" shebang and "coming of age in the milky way." he is professor emeritus at the university of california at her glee and a former editor at rolling stone magazine. for more information visit timothy ferris.com. david horvitz president of the center for the popular culture, commemorates the life of his late daughter sarah while discussing their political clhes and eventual discovery of common ground. the four seasons hotel in los angeles is the host of this hour-long event. >> introducing, i i get to introduce david which is a real