He’s expired. I’m either happy or sad about that, and I’m not sure whether he’s in heaven or hell. He’s probably vacillating between the two.

I’ve been seeing more examples recently of theists pointing at the ‘miracle’ of solar eclipses. It’s amazing the the diameter of the moon as seen from Earth is almost exactly the same as the diameter of the sun, as seen from the same position. That couldn’t possibly be by chance — it must be a sign from a god.

Except…sorry, this kind of thing is exactly what can happen by coincidence. It’s a neat phenomenon, but not at all persuasive of the existence of a deity.

But here’s another miraculous coincidence: both Adam Lee and Gregory Paul have written about this same event, and both are saying it’s not evidence for a god. A miracle! So unlikely.

Both Lee and Paul explain the physical basis for eclipses, and suggest it’s nothing but chance. Lee points out the fallacious reasoning behind thinking this is causally significant.

Creationists love talking about the “rare Earth” idea: the argument that Earth is specially and uniquely fine-tuned to support life. It orbits in the habitable zone, not too close or too far from the sun, which is a stable star without massive flares. We have a regular day-night cycle, a mostly stable axial tilt, a magnetic field that screens out cosmic radiation, and so on. The creationists claim that this is evidence of God’s special favor.

The fallacy of the rare-Earth argument is that it’s an inference based on incomplete data. Just as you can’t compute the probability of a particular hand of cards unless you know what’s in the deck, we have no basis for proclaiming how common Earthlike planets are. Our sample size is too limited (although it’s growing all the time).

Paul wonders why a super-powerful cosmic being who can juggle stars and planets is trying to impress us with a meaningless, illusory light show.

Wrapping this up by looking at the really big picture, it’s important to understand that the beautiful total eclipses should be seen as compelling evidence of God thing is part of a greater cover-up conspiracy. It is a use of a wowzer but trivial item to help divert mass awareness away from the far larger issues that tell a very different tale about the state of our existence. Theists have long been working to get us to focus on the supposed sheer existence of a creator via the beauty of our Lord’s creation. That’s because they don’t want us to pay due and necessary attention to the deeply dark underside of the proposed super intelligence. The universe may be pretty, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is correspondingly arbitrary, and can cover profound dysfunction or evil. Far from the universe being truly fine-tuned for intelligent life, it is in many respects hostile to it, to the degree that Earth is a toxic blue dot so infested with lethal microbes that diseases have killed off half of humans born, to the tune of fifty billion dead children (https://americanhumanist.org/what-we-do/publications/eph/journals/volume28/paul-1 and see part 2 too). There is nothing pretty about that.

Let us assume the following. That children are immune to diseases, so that few if any kinds die young. Rather than the 5,000 that will die around the globe on April 8. Such a world would be pushing happenstance way beyond its logical, natural cause limits. Such benign protection of the lives of the most vulnerable and innocent would not only constitute solid evidence for the existence of a truly intelligent designer of immense power. It would demonstrate that the entity really is ethical and in fact cares about the free will of humans. As it is, we dwell on a kid-killing planet that, regardless of its awe-inspiring aspects including total eclipses, is fully and far more compatible with amoral natural origins than with loving design, and there is nothing trivial about that terrible fact.

Yeah, I wonder too why a god would rather play shenanigans with the lighting than actually do something about all those suffering, dying kids. It’s not a good look, God. It makes you look like a clown in the cancer ward, tossing kids out the window.

I’m not going to indulge in the spectacle. I think we get about 60% totality here in Minnesota, and that’ll have to be good enough for me. It’s all going down on a school day, you know, and I’m not traveling to some ungodly place like Indiana or Texas for a brief period of darkness.

Which is worse: 1) the guy peddling silly Christian theology who truly believes in that nonsense, or 2) the guy peddling silly Christian theology who doesn’t understand it or believe it? For me, it’s a toss-up; #1 isn’t lying to everyone, but is still a gullible ninny, while #2 is trying to convince everyone to buy something he doesn’t think is worth it. They’re both awful people.

Now Donald Trump has become a Bible salesman. He’s selling them for $59.99. Of course he gets a cut — he’s not doing this because he wants to save everyone, but because he wants to save himself. He’s #2.

These are special Bibles, the Lee Greenwood Version. Greenwood is the folksy singer who got rich off one song, a patriotic country-western anthem that gets the good ol’ boys tearing up and cheering, while I’m leaning over to puke under the bleachers. What makes his Bible special is that it’s in easy-to-read large print (it won’t get read much, though), and also includes copies of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Pledge of Allegiance, and among those immortal words, the lyrics to Greenwood’s best-selling country song, “God Save the USA.” It’s also The God Bless The USA Bible is the ONLY Bible inspired by America’s most recognized patriotic anthem, God Bless The USA. It’s not just divinely inspired, it’s Lee Greenwood inspired, which makes it just that much better.

They have a FAQ page for this grift, with one question that did set me back a bit.

WHAT IF MY BIBLE HAS STICKY PAGES?

This is not something I usually worry about when I buy a book, but it just tells you how wonderful and exciting this Bible must be.

(They say it’s just because of the gilded edges, but we all know what it’s really about…)

Forrie Smith is a regular John Wayne — all hat and no cattle, nothing but air and noise pretending to be a cowboy. He’s on some show called “Yellowstone,” and he’s been making a fuss about vaccines and masks and all that right-wing BS. He’s taken it a step further than most, though, insisting that not only will he not wear a mask, but he will get mad if you wear a mask.

On March 24, Smith posted an Instagram story with the caption, “You need to hear this story.” He then proceeds to delve into the story of how he was kicked off an airplane. In the video, he appears intoxicated and disoriented, even expressing confusion about which city he is currently in. The video is filmed from the Houston, Texas, airport, where he claims, “I just got kicked off a plane … because I told them that I didn’t feel comfortable sitting next to somebody with a mask on.” Smith also revealed the staff cited his intoxication as the reason for kicking him off the plane. While he admitted he had “been drinking,” he insisted he wasn’t intoxicated.

He claimed the real reason he was kicked off was “because you people won’t stand up and tell everybody what bulls**t this is. I just told them I didn’t feel comfortable about sitting next to somebody that had to wear a mask, and I’m off the plane.” The incident may have gone unreported if Smith hadn’t posted it on social media. However, he seemed to think the video would garner sympathy or make some kind of point about vaccinations. Instead, it just made him look like a fool.

This is a new level of stupid. So he’s drunk — he mentions sitting in an airport bar for 3 hours — and he’s offended that he would be asked to sit next to someone wearing a mask. That’s bad enough, but then he goes on Instagram thinking he will be inspiring the people to rise up and complain right alongside him that someone dared to mask up in his presence.

I didn’t need to hear his story, but now that I have, I know to never pay attention to his pretentious, entitled, ignorant ass ever again.

It’s another busy week of EcoDevo, and even though the campus was closed I still had to give a lecture on endocrine disruptors. I started by laying out Wilson’s Principles of Teratology…wait, what? You don’t know them? I guess I’d better explain them to the internet at large.

These principles are a bit like Koch’s Principles, only for teratology — you better know them if you want to figure out the causes of various problems at birth, and you do: about 3% of all human births express a defect serious enough for concern. Here’s the list:

  1. Susceptibility to teratogenesis depends on the genotype of the conceptus and the manner in which this interacts with adverse environmental factors.
  2. Susceptibility to teratogenesis varies with the developmental stage at the time of exposure to an adverse influence. There are critical periods of susceptibility to agents and organ systems affected by these agents.
  3. Teratogenic agents act in specific ways on developing cells and tissues to initiate sequences of abnormal developmental events.
  4. The access of adverse influences to developing tissues depends on the nature of the influence. Several factors affect the ability of a teratogen to contact a developing conceptus, such as the nature of the agent itself, route and degree of maternal exposure, rate of placental transfer and systemic absorption, and composition of the maternal and embryonic/fetal genotypes.
  5. There are four manifestations of deviant development (death, malformation, growth retardation and functional defect).
  6. Manifestations of deviant development increase in frequency and degree as dosage increases from the No Observable Adverse Effect Level (NOAEL) to a dose producing 100% lethality (LD100).

The first two tell you what is tricky about teratology. There are multiple variables that affect the response: genetic variability in the conceptus (and, I would suggest, maternal variations), and also timing is critical. A drug might do terrible things to an embryo at 4 weeks, but at 3 months the fetus shrugs it off.

Ultimately, though, the teratogen is having some specific effect (3) on a developing tissue. We just have to figure out what it is, while keeping in mind that that effect might be hiding in a maze of genetics (1) and time (2).

Another complication is that in us mammals the embryo is sheltered deep inside the mother, who has defense mechanisms. The agent has to somehow get in (4). A complication within a complication: sometimes the teratogenic agent is harmless until Mom chemically modifies it as part of her defense, and instead creates a more potent poison.

#5 is just listing the terrible outcomes of screwing with development.

#6 I do not trust. It’s saying the effect is going to follow a common sense increase with increasing dosage, but even that isn’t always true. There is a phenomenon called the inverted-U response where the effect increases with dosage, then plateaus, and then drops off at high concentrations. We’re dealing with complex regulatory phenomena with multiple molecular actors that may have unpredictable interactions. There are teratogens that do terrible things to embryos at low concentrations, but do nothing at ridiculously high concentrations — as if the high dose triggers effective defense mechanisms that the low dose sidesteps.

I had to review these principles in class yesterday, because although I’d also discussed them earlier in the semester, we are currently dealing with teratogens of monstrous subtlety, these compounds that mimic our own normal developmental signals, the same signals our bodies use to assemble critical organ systems. It’s as if some joker were placing inappropriate traffic signals along a busy highway — most would do no harm, but some may totally confuse travelers who then end up detouring up into the kidneys rather than down the genitals, as they preferred, or they end up crashing into the thyroid.

Unfortunately, in this case the responsible jokers are mainly gigantic megacorporations who are spewing these dangerous signals all over the countryside…and then we get to wait until the people swimming in them try to have children, and then the teratologists get to say “death, malformation, growth retardation and functional defect”.


In case you were wondering, Wilson didn’t come up with his list first — a 19th century scientist named Gabriel Madeleine Camille Dareste did it first. No, not first. Lots of people have been documenting these developmental problems as long as there’s been writing, like on this Chaldean tablet:

When a woman gives birth to an infant:
With the ears of a lion There will be a powerful king
That wants the right ear The days of the king will be prolonged
That wants both ears There will be mourning in the country
Whose ears are both deformed The country will perish and the enemy rejoice
That has no mouth The mistress of the house will die
Whose nostrils are absent The country will be in affliction and the house of the man will be ruined
That has no tongue The house of the man will be ruined
That has no right hand The country will be convulsed by an earthquake
That has no fingers The town will have no births
That has the heart open with no skin The country will suffer from calamities
That has no penis The master of the house shall be enriched by the harvest of his field
Whose anus is closed The country shall suffer from want of nourishment
Whose right foot is absent His house will be ruined and there will be abundance in that of the neighbor
That has no feet The canals of the country will be cut and the house ruined
If a queen gives birth to:
An infant with teeth already cut The days of the king will be prolonged
A son and a daughter at the same time The land will be enlarged
An infant with the face of a lion The king will not have a rival
An infant with 6 toes on both feet The king shall rule the enemies’ country

Nowadays we’re more interested in causes than imagined consequences, I hope.

Christina Lamb

HowTheLightGetsIn is the world’s largest ideas and music festival, taking place from 24-27 May in Hay-on-Wye. As a long-standing festival partner, we’ve curated a series of interviews and articles with some of the fascinating expert speakers.

We’re also offering an exclusive 20% discount on tickets to all of our readers, with the code NEWHUM24. Don't miss out on discounted tickets here.

Christina Lamb is chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times and a bestselling author of books including "Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does To Women" and "The Girl from Aleppo". She will be speaking at HowTheLightGetsIn 2024 on "Navigating the new world order".

Your panel is about the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world and the dangers that come with that. You've reported globally throughout that shift. How have you seen it play out?

When I started out, which was the late 80s, it was a very different world. It was the end of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall was just coming down, lots of dictatorships in Latin America had just ended, Apartheid was ending in South Africa. So it felt like everything was going in a good direction. Of course, there were bad things happening still but the general direction was towards more democracy, more freedom of expression, freedom of press. And it was a world where there was one superpower basically, which was United States.

Of course things are very different now because we're very much in a multipolar world. The United States no longer has that hegemony. We see that play out very much in the war in Ukraine, where I think the United States and the west in general expected a lot of countries to support them that didn't. There's a feeling of not wanting to be taken for granted anymore in a lot of those countries that might have old colonial relations, or trade or aid relations, but we're also seeing new players emerge. Not only do you have China and Russia as powers vying in many places – even in very remote parts of Africa I see Chinese projects – but also regional blocs, so Turkey, India, South Africa, Brazil. It's a very different world.

Is this new world inclined towards more conflict and division?

According to United Nations there is more conflict than at any time since the Second World War. I certainly don't remember a time like this. There's so many wars going on and a lot of them unfortunately get forgotten because there's so much focus on Ukraine. I never imagined that I would see a land war in Europe...

It is a much more complicated situation [than two decades ago] and at the same time we're seeing more and more authoritarianism. Every year for the last 10 years, the indices have gone in the wrong direction and we're seeing less freedom of press, of expression, more authoritarian regimes and more populist leaders. Even in some of the world's biggest democracies we've seen that you can't take democracy for granted anymore.

There's been criticism of the media for giving more attention to some of those conflicts at the expense of others. Why does that happen and what are the consequences?

It's something that worries me and it's not just the media. It's also international leadership. We are in a moment of great complexity ... but it's also at a time where we have probably the worst international leadership that I remember ... [which] just doesn't seem to have the bandwidth to deal with more than one or two conflicts at a time.

The fact is we have limited resources in the media. Of course, in Europe, Ukraine has really dominated the news because ... it's very near and it feels to people that if Putin is not defeated there that he will then move westwards. So of course, you're going to be more interested in something that seems to affect you more directly...

And we have limited numbers of people, we have limited space. At the Sunday Times 10 years ago, we used to have 10 pages of foreign news, now we have two or three ... We also have far fewer correspondents. Sometimes people think there's some kind of conspiracy that we're deliberately not covering certain things, maybe because of the colour of people's skin or their ethnicity. Honestly, it's not that ... Most of us are very conscious that there are other things going on.

A place that is extremely close to my heart is Afghanistan. It's almost three years since the Taliban took over, and when they started all these terrible restrictions on girls and women, there was international outrage ... Now, I fear that people have moved on.

Is there a challenge with so many conflicts going on in the world that there's a limit to readers' attention or capacity to absorb it all?

I often worry that it's not just the number of conflicts [but also that] these are terrible stories. We're talking about atrocities, women and children being killed, rape, torture, horrendous things that are happening.

And after a while, it's too much for people. I think that people become inured to it. I grew up at a time where there was a lot of peace, so when these things happened, it was really shocking. Now, these things are happening all the time...

So I always try, and always have tried, to find positive stories in these bad places ... You always find people doing remarkable things. It may be on a very small scale, but you always find people that are somehow trying to keep life together.

You've written a book about the impact of war on women. If we are living through a period of increased conflict and division, what does that mean for women?

Unfortunately, as we see over and over again, women and children are the main victims ... One of the ways war has changed is that in most of these conflicts we're covering now, the majority of victims are civilians. Whereas, if you go back to the First World War or some of these big wars between states, the majority of victims were soldiers. But now, these wars are often fought in civilian areas, they might not be between armies, they might be between terrorist or militia groups. Also the kind of weaponry that is being used – airstrikes, drones, things like that – means that a lot of civilians are being killed...

There's also this dark side of sexual violence against women and girls, which unfortunately seems to just go up and up ... People often ask me "why is there so much rape in war?" And partly, it's because it's cheap. As one militia man said to me: "It's cheaper than a Kalashnikov bullet". It's effective, if you want to drive people out of an area and terrorise them. But nobody pays for it, except for the victims – the perpetrators almost always go free. Accountability is the exception, not the rule ... I wrote this book [about sexual violence in conflict] which came out four years ago and I've had to update it twice already because it's happening so much...

Sadly, we're [also] at a time with very few women in leadership ... There isn't a single peace process led by a woman. Most peace processes don't even have women sitting round the table. And I think that makes a difference because those people who are trying to negotiate an end to a conflict are not really thinking about what's happening to the women.

In the context of all of this, how significant is the outcome of this year's US election?

Massive. It's the dark cloud hanging over everything. First of all, with Ukraine, it's quite clear that Putin is waiting for that. That's why it's so important that Europe really steps up and gives Ukraine what it needs to actually win the war...

If you have somebody in the White House who thinks it's perfectly OK to have thugs invading Congress, who thinks it's OK to speak of women the way he does, to trample over people's rights, that sets such a bad example for the rest of the world.

Don’t miss out on Christina Lamb's full talk at HowTheLightGetsIn on 26 May at 10.30am. Get your special offer of 20% off full tickets using the discount code NEWHUM24 when prompted.

In the meantime, check out previous festival debates and talks on IAI.TV to get excited for the big event.

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Rethinking science

"Humanism” in the modern sense was fleshed out as a worldview in the 20th century, although its roots go deeper. The idea originated in a desire to find a philosophical approach to life that would provide a basis for morality, meaning and hope in the world we live in, without having to resort to religious authority or supernatural explanations.

From its origins to the present, humanist thinkers have had to confront the apparent opposition between the sciences on the one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. This is partly because humanism itself has a foot in both camps. Several of humanism’s leading figures have been scientists, from Julian Huxley to Richard Dawkins, while other humanists, such as the philosopher AJ Ayer, have “put their trust in scientific method” as opposed to religious authority. At the same time, “humanistic” learning – poetry, rhetoric, philosophy, history – has been seen by some, such as the writer Sarah Bakewell, as part of the same tradition as modern humanism.

In its search for ethical principles and a deeper understanding of humanity, the humanist tradition has also looked in both directions: to sciences such as biology and psychology, as well as to imaginative literature and other “humane studies”. The relationship between these different intellectual traditions and practices has been of particular interest to humanists, and therefore humanism has much to teach us about the possible tensions between the two.

This is an important time to pause and reflect. In recent years in Britain, as also in western countries more generally, there has been much soul-searching in humanities
departments and among the literati in the media about their subjects’ raison d’être. In the university and cultural sectors, the arts and humanities seem to be experiencing ever more funding cuts, while STEM subjects are frequently privileged, because of their perceived greater utility, economic value and sheer power. Artificial intelligence, for example, can now help to diagnose illnesses and even create “art”.

This is a dramatic reversal from the respective positions of the sciences and humanities a mere 150 years ago. At the same time, there is a battle over how far ethical and policy considerations should influence scientific research, and who exactly should set the rules.

Complimentary, or in competition?

Scientific ideas and discoveries have fired the imaginations of poets for centuries. However, it has only been in the last 200 years or so that the successes of science have allowed it to exert a tangible influence over wider culture in a way it never could have done before. The term “scientist” was probably coined in 1834, analogous with “artist”. The English word “science”, deriving from the Latin for “knowledge”, took on specific connotations of knowledge in the natural sciences – excluding non-experimental, non-empirical “sciences” like theology. By the 1880s, the Royal Academy of Arts was toasting “science and literature” as two opposite and complementary fields.

It was in this context that Matthew Arnold conducted a debate over several years with his friend, Thomas Henry Huxley, who is also known for coining the term “agnostic”. The essence of the debate was the relative value of “science and literature” in society and particularly in education. Arnold’s name was almost synonymous with the study of Literae Humaniores (“more humane letters”, now Classics). Since the Renaissance and before, classical literature had been associated with a deeper humanity and more refined cultural outlook, both connoted by the Latin humanitas. In all these senses, Arnold – a poet, critic and schools inspector – was a “humanist”. In his 1882 Rede Lecture, he argued that it would be better for people to study both science and “humane letters” – in other words, primarily classical literature. However, if it was necessary to choose, the latter was preferable because it would make students “live more,” in the sense of becoming fully rounded and reflective characters.

T. H. Huxley, in contrast, was an evolutionary biologist and comparative anatomist. His nickname “Darwin’s bulldog” came from his public championing of Darwinism, which he used as part of a campaign to increase the status of science in an education system that still considered Classics a more “gentlemanly” discipline, and less of a threat to established religion. In his 1880 speech “Science and Culture”, he argued that “the free employment of reason, in accordance with scientific method, is the sole method of reaching truth”. In a later speech, he implied that Arnold felt threatened by the “invading and aggressive force” of science – which was probably true.

A symbolic moment in this ongoing debate came in 1956, when this magazine changed its name from the Literary Guide to The Humanist (it became New Humanist in 1972). This act was hailed by Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and the first president of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK), as signifying the importance of “all essential human attributes and values, morality as well as science, art as well as reason”. This approach was embodied in Huxley himself, who was the grandson of T. H. Huxley on his father’s side, and the great-nephew of Matthew Arnold on his mother’s.

This open-minded spirit of intellectual curiosity and an appetite for learning of all kinds, epitomised in figures like the polymath Bertrand Russell, was and continues to be a thread in modern humanism. Despite this, in humanism as in wider society, tensions between proponents of “science and literature” still flared up from time to time.

C.P. Snow and the "Two Cultures" debate

The next round in the wider debate took place in the 1960s. It was kicked off by C. P. Snow. Born into a working-class family in Leicester, Snow began his career as a researcher in infrared spectroscopy at Cambridge. After a purported discovery about Vitamin A turned out to be based on miscalculations, he switched to administration and novel writing – ultimately becoming, in literary critic Stefan Collini’s words, a “public figure, controversial lecturer, and pundit”.

In 1959, Snow gave the Rede Lecture, which he published as “The Two Cultures”. Despite having been out of academic research for many years, he gave an idealised portrait of scientists as “very intelligent men. Their culture is in many ways an exciting and admirable one. It doesn’t contain much art, with the exception ... of music. Verbal exchange, insistent argument ... Of books, though, very little.” Scientists were also, in his view, more likely to be “unbelievers” and on the political left, and to obtain better-paid jobs.

At the opposite end of the spectrum were the “literary intellectuals”, guardians of the “traditional culture”, whom he portrayed as out of touch and “natural Luddites”. When he asked one to describe the second law of thermodynamics, “the response was cold: it was also negative”. In other words, Snow implied, the literary intellectual neither knew nor cared about this fundamental physical principle. He argued that the division between the two cultures needed to be overcome in order for the world to prosper in the long term.

Snow’s lecture ignited a debate which also had its impact on humanist thought of the period, challenging humanists to position themselves in relation to both “cultures”, and goading some of them to take sides. It is perhaps unsurprising that Julian Huxley, the heir of “science and literature”, took it upon himself to articulate the importance of both. He did this in The Humanist Frame (1961), one of the first collections of essays on 20th-century humanism in English, which he edited.

Huxley himself used the opening chapter to argue that the “three great activities of man” beyond the business of earning a living were “art, science and religion”. All of them, he argued, properly understood (and separated from superstition) had their place in a model of “evolutionary humanism”. In contrast to science, which is about knowledge and control, art qualitatively enriches life by allowing us “to escape from the material world” into a higher realm of experience and emotional insight. The artist can use “intellectual ideas and moral concepts” as raw material, “thus transmuting reason and morality into art”.

This generous-spirited attitude, which assigned to art and science more or less equal importance in the life of the mind, arguably helped to set a standard for the attitudes of more recent humanists.

Not long after The Humanist Frame came out, the literary critic F. R. Leavis published a blistering response to Snow’s “Two Cultures”. Snow, he argued dismissively, was a poor novelist, had forgotten any appreciation of science he might have once had – a huge insult for someone who had been a scientific research fellow at Cambridge – and spoke in clichés. At the same time, Leavis rejected the world of Snow’s “literary intellectual”, by which he meant, in Leavis’s view, only “the modish literary world … [of] the Sunday papers” – for which Leavis himself had “contempt and resolute hostility”. While his ad hominem attack was considered in bad taste, the underlying argument struck a chord with many, no doubt “literary”, commentators.

Humanism and "creative living"

The debate was still raging when, in 1968, The Humanist Outlook was published under the editorship of A. J. Ayer. This second volume of essays shows how humanist thinkers were increasingly refining their views about the place of the sciences, arts and humanities against the “two cultures” debate and within humanism more broadly. The teacher Cyril Bibby inclined towards the science pole of Snow’s spectrum. He argued that the real distinction was between scientists and creative artists on the one hand, and “purely verbal” scholars on the other. “Both working artist and working scientist explore the properties of the universe” and are “always producers”, he claimed, while the “cultural mandarins”, using nothing but “pen and paper”, kept all too aloof from messy reality.

Closer to the literary pole were two novelists, Kathleen Nott and Brigid Brophy. Nott argued that, for all Julian Huxley’s stress on the importance of the arts in The Humanist Frame, it was questionable whether he had brought them any closer to humanism. In her view, imaginative literature was needed to serve as a brake on the excessive utopian optimism of the scientific humanists, discouraging any “hubris”. Brophy argued that literature should take the place of religion as a liberating imaginative experience, but without being tied down to literal belief.

Today, the relationship between modern and earlier types of “humanism”, as well as between humanism and the sciences, is still being explored. In Humanly Possible (2023), Sarah Bakewell argues that classical and Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment, humanitarian and non-religious humanism all have in common a focus on “the human dimension of life”, which together enables a “coherent, shared humanist tradition” to be traced from ancient thinkers like Protagoras or Confucius, via the Renaissance, all the way down to our own times. When I asked her how humanists could reconcile the literary and scientific approaches to life, her response was that “the two cultures are connected ... not contradictory”.

At some level Bakewell may be right about this. However, as the “two cultures” debate suggests, the methods and perspectives of the sciences and humanities, as well as the creative arts, can differ from each other both in content and in the way in which they are perceived.

For example, in the third Amsterdam Declaration of modern humanism agreed by Humanists International in 2022, science is explicitly mentioned in the section on rationality, while “artistic creativity and imagination” are slotted into the section on human fulfilment. The humanities are not specifically mentioned at all, but presumably implied by references to the imagination, literature, sympathy and so forth. In contrast, in the first Amsterdam Declaration of 1952, the focus was on democracy, science, education and personal and intellectual liberty; only the last paragraph finally mentioned “fulfilment” through “ethical and creative living”.

In the 2020s, perhaps, modern humanism can afford to be more welcoming to the arts and humanities. More-over, beyond fulfilment, they also have a place in humanist ethics. As Andrew Copson, head of Humanists UK, put it in an interview for the Freethinker, “Go to your novels for humanism.”

Between Snow’s lecture in 1959 and the present, the number of academic disciplines has multiplied. Yet the old antithesis between sciences and humanities and their associated “cultures” is still resuscitated from time to time, usually in a polemical context. In Enlightenment Now (2018), for instance, Steven Pinker takes issue, not with humanities scholars or artists, but with the “literary intellectuals, cultural critics and erudite essayists” who still form part of the chattering – or perhaps the pontificating – classes. Such types are mere “specialists in generalisations”, according to Pinker, and continue to display a hostile and ignorant attitude to science.

Pinker gives as an example the article written by the literary critic Leon Wieseltier for New Republic in 2013 entitled “Crimes Against Humanities”, in which the latter argued, also from a “humanist” perspective, that scientists should effectively keep out of morality, politics, philosophy and art. Pinker responded in the same year with an article entitled “Science is Not Your Enemy”, in which he argued eloquently that “science is of a piece with philosophy, reason, and Enlightenment humanism”. In Enlightenment Now he criticises Wieseltier’s “bunker mentality”.

Pinker also argues that critical theory and postmodernism – the latter a “disaster” from which the humanities “have yet to recover” – have led to the widespread “demonisation of science” on humanities courses, with science “commonly blamed for intellectual movements that had a pseudoscientific patina”, such as “scientific racism” and “eugenics”. In fact, he argues, while the role of scientists in these movements must be acknowledged, the “intellectualised racism” of the 19th century, which was a precursor of Nazism, “was the brainchild not of science but of the humanities”; and the term “eugenics” has been used to stigmatise legitimate practices in medical and behavioural genetics.

Polarisation and making peace

This leads us into the “culture wars”, which it might provocatively be suggested represent a sort of “two cultures” debate for our times. A caricature of the situation might represent the humanities as trying to take a last-ditch revenge on science by using their “theories”, such as postmodernism, to exert control and censorship over it.

In November 2023, a paper entitled “Prosocial motives underlie scientific censorship by scientists: A perspective and research agenda” was published in the American journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by 39 co-authors, including Pinker. It presents a wealth of evidence that “scientific censorship appears to be increasing”. For instance, in a survey of US, UK and Canadian academics, “From 9 to 25% of academics and 43% of PhD students supported dismissal campaigns for scholars who report controversial findings.” A 2022 survey by C. J. Clark and others found that, as reported in the “Prosocial” paper, “468 US psychology professors reported that some empirically supported conclusions cannot be mentioned without punishment.”

The reasons for these types of censorship are as yet to be firmly established, but those which the paper gives as possibilities are “expanding definitions of harm”, “increasing concerns about equity and inclusion in higher education”, “cohort effects,” “the growing proportion of women in science,” “increasing ideological homogeneity” and “direct and frequent interaction between scientists and the public on social media”.

The paper does not comment further on these possible factors, but it is clear that most of them involve the aims of social justice, such as equality and reducing harm against minorities, as well as the peer pressure and conformity induced by social media. In other words, it looks as though any moral or political ideology – however well-intentioned – may have a deleterious effect upon scientists’ research if it gains too much influence over them, especially if they are bombarded with constant publicity online.

One example of a “culture wars” debate exerting a direct impact on humanism came in 2021, when the American Humanist Association stripped Richard Dawkins of his accolade of “Humanist of the Year”, claiming he had “accumulated a history of making statements that use the guise of scientific discourse to demean marginalised groups”. In a response published in Areo, Dawkins argued, “Gender theorists bypass the annoying problem of reality by decreeing that you are what you feel, regardless of biology.” According to this view, there is a clash of disciplines – not just over interpretation or feeling, but over fact.

The probable negative impact of current ideologies on scientific research provides a striking contrast with public attitudes towards science during the pandemic. The journalist Janan Ganesh has argued persuasively in the Financial Times that after Covid, “an ignorance of science will no longer be viable in polite company”, and it will not be enough for either journalists or ministers to be trained in the humanities if they remain “innumerate”.

On the other hand, there are dangers in overcompensating. During the lockdowns, the injunction to “follow the science” started to sound like a religious mantra intended to discourage debate. In the recent Covid Inquiry, Chris Whitty himself – England’s chief medical officer – described the phrase as “a millstone round our necks”. As Pinker points out in Enlightenment Now, scientific practices such as open debate and peer review are designed to compensate for the inevitable shortcomings of scientists as human beings and for differences of opinion. And scientific expertise has its limitations: “many scientists are naïfs when it comes to policy and law.”

Far better, as Pinker argues, is when adepts in the humanities, arts and sciences can learn from each other. For instance, the application of data science to printed matter has given rise to a new “digital humanities” in which scholars can trace ideas and other patterns through vast swathes of material. Pinker is himself an intellectual who straddles the disciplines: in addition to books on linguistics and cognitive psychology, he has written one on literary style, which takes Dawkins’s prose as a paradigm.

Communication between the “two cultures” is also important. Collini describes it as a sort of “bilingualism, a capacity ... to attend to, learn from, and eventually contribute to, wider cultural conversations”. In 1972, the novelist Iris Murdoch attempted to resolve the debate by claiming that “there is only one culture and words are its basis”. This view, however, is now out of date. There are natural, verbal languages, the basis of the humanities, literature and everyday communication. But there is also the language of mathematics, the basis of science and information technology. These days, a reasonable competence in both is surely to be preferred.

Through communication, those on both sides of the divide need to appreciate the different perspectives which their disciplines can bring to an understanding of our common humanity, whether seen from the point of view of the subjective individual or from that of the impersonal universe. While humanities scholars are often (not without justification) accused of being Luddites, those on the science and technology side could also benefit from the knowledge that the humanities have accumulated over the centuries, such as a historical perspective, philosophical reasoning, the judicious and artful use of language, and close textual analysis. Finally, no intellectual activity worth the name can flourish in a politically repressive environment: freedom of expression and enquiry should be an issue to unite artists, scholars, scientists – and humanists.

One final, speculative point: as we approach the middle of the 2020s, the explosion of artificial intelligence and the prospect of humankind being surpassed or even threatened by artificial general intelligence (AGI) poses new challenges for all intellectual activities. Perhaps particularly for the arts and humanities. Increasingly, novelists may have to compete with ChatGPT, visual artists with Midjourney. The futurist James Lovelock has anticipated a world in which humans will be ruled by benign “cyborgs”.

In the race to develop AGI and the metaverse, it would be a shame if the perspective of the embodied, subjective, unique individual – our distinct and shared humanity – were forgotten.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

Rush hour in Bangkok, Thailand.

Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What To Do About It (Abrams Press) by Daniel Knowles

At the Conservative party conference last year, our prime minister chose to talk about “a war on motorists”, claiming to be on the side of the driver. If there is such a war, it is one that the motorists seem to be winning. The number of cars on the roads in the UK grows every year, as it does globally. Carmageddon is an authoritative, exhaustive account of how these machines came to dominate almost every aspect of our lives and the damage they have done on the way. It also attempts to take some steam out of an increasingly polarised debate. Driving (or not driving) is increasingly becoming a political identity, but the key culprits in Daniel Knowles’s account are the planners and politicians, whose decisions have shaped the options available to the rest of us. This is also where he sees hope for the future: better planning, more liveable cities, more enlightened policymakers.

Perhaps the most striking lesson in the book is that it didn’t have to be like this. In 1903, when the speed limit was raised to 20mph, opposition to the prioritisation of the motor vehicle over pedestrians was framed as a simple matter of justice – these “slaughtering stinking engines of iniquity”, one MP complained, “were monopolising the whole of the public roads”. The car was a threat to “the common rights of citizens”, like the right to take your family for a walk on country roads in “comfort and safety”. In the US, there were huge public demonstrations. In 1922, 1,054 children marched through the streets of New York, one for every child killed in the previous year.

Our current consensus, Knowles argues, is partly the result of lobbying from car manufacturers and the wealthy motorists who first took to driving, which remained a minority pursuit well into the 20th century. Pedestrians, cyclists and even trams were cleared off the road, supposedly for our safety and convenience, while accidents were blamed on “bad” drivers, rather than recognised as the inevitable result of planning that put humans second. After the Second World War, cities like Birmingham and Coventry were choked with ring roads. Suburbs sprawled.

In the US, in particular, the process of suburbanisation was bound up with racism: historic black neighbourhoods were cleared out to make space for freeways, their residents dumped on estates in the middle of nowhere.

A lot of this story is deeply depressing. We continue to build new roads and widen existing ones, though we have known for decades that the space is quickly filled by more vehicles. The international picture Knowles paints is, if anything, bleaker still, with more and more people around the world living in traffic-clogged cities like Mumbai and Nairobi. Car manufacturers have reinvented themselves as leaders in the fight against climate change, while at the same time flooding the roads with SUVs.

Knowles doesn’t dismiss the difference that replacing an individual petrol car with an electric vehicle makes to emissions, but suggests that powering them sustainably would require “investment in a green electric grid on a scale which dwarfs what we are doing now”. It would also require huge quantities of cobalt, the majority of which is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the rush for minerals has mired the country in corruption and led to significant human rights abuses.

For those of us that grew up in places where driving was more or less inevitable, cars come with all kinds of associations that go to the heart of who we are – from family and work to friends, holidays and even music. They are, in short, perfectly designed for the culture wars. Knowles is clear that he doesn’t think individual drivers are the problem. The issue is that our cities and towns have been designed for cars instead of people. Though it is also, he says, an issue of justice: we do not have the resources for everyone to own a vehicle; and every car, by reshaping public space, imposes costs on the people who don’t use them.

The solutions offered here are mostly technical: shifting incentives in favour of other forms of transport, whether through taxes which recognise the costs that cars impose on other people or planning which puts people, bicycles and public transport first. Knowles is cautiously optimistic that more people are beginning to recognise the benefits of living in places like Amsterdam and Copenhagen, where cars are a luxury.

But the biggest challenge, as he concedes in the conclusion (but surely understates) is cultural. For many people, living in the suburbs and towns which cars created, the idea of a future with less driving isn’t simply undesirable – it is hard to comprehend. Since the pandemic, the very idea of the “15-minute” (i.e. walkable) city has become the inspiration for bizarre conspiracy theories. The more we remake the world in the car’s image, the harder it is to imagine a world without them.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

Still from '3 Body Problem'

Rarely has there been a television project that looked so good on paper. 3 Body Problem, which will be released on Netflix on 21 March, is an adaptation of a critically acclaimed Chinese science fiction trilogy by Liu Cixin. Since its first appearance in English translation in 2014, the trilogy has sold over nine million copies around the world. Among its fans are Barack Obama, Mark Zuckerberg and George R. R. Martin, who recommended the first of the books on his influential blog back in 2015, describing it as “very unusual” and praising the work of translator Ken Liu.

Perhaps it was thanks to Martin that the showrunners of the Netflix series first came across the book. At the time of his recommendation, David Benioff and D. B. Weiss were several seasons deep into their work on Game of Thrones, the HBO series based on Martin’s own A Song of Ice and Fire books that dominated the prestige television landscape of the 2010s. Add to that the fact that this show boasts executive producers like Brad Pitt, Rosamund Pike and Knives Out creator Rian Johnson, and it’s easy to see why 3 Body Problem was topping lots of “most anticipated TV of 2024” lists at the start of the year.

Look a little closer, though, and the cracks begin to show. Benioff and Weiss did helm one of the big TV hits of the last decade, but they also steered Game of Thrones from being appointment viewing in 2011 to a frustrating, lacklustre 2019 finale that resulted in 1.8 million people signing an online petition to remake the show’s last series “with competent writers”. One critic, including it on a list of worst TV endings of all time, wrote that the duo had “turned a series once considered the greatest of all time into a hollow mess”. The follow-up project to a such a hit-turned-flop needed to be first-rate, but when Benioff and Weiss announced in 2017 that they were working on an “alternate history” series for HBO called Confederate, in which the American Civil War ended in stalemate and slavery continued, it prompted widespread fury and condemnation that such “slavery fan fiction” should get screen time. In 2019, the pair left HBO for Netflix, with Confederate humiliatingly cancelled before it was even filmed. The pressure is on, then, for 3 Body Problem, reportedly worth $250 million.

The source material is rich, complex and nuanced. A time-hopping trilogy that reaches back to China’s Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and then forward many centuries into an imagined future, Liu Cixin’s novels are tightly plotted pieces that have deftly explained scientific concepts woven through them. Liu’s overarching subject is humanity’s possible contact with extraterrestrial life. The English version of the first book opens with a compelling sequence in which Ye Wenjie, an astrophysicist, witnesses her father being beaten to death by Mao’s Red Guards after he has been branded a traitor. She is sent to prison, and while there is forcibly recruited into a scientific taskforce that is trying to use radio waves to search for life elsewhere in the universe. Certain there can be no positive future for a human society that would kill her family and destroy her hoped-for life of science, Ye responds to contact from an alien civilisation and so causes an invasion force to be dispatched for Earth. We then travel to the present day, where scientists are racing to discover the meaning of a mysterious virtual-reality-style game that may or may not be part of the alien invasion. The rest of the series deals with the fallout from Ye’s decision, skipping forward in time to show different stages in humanity’s preparations for the coming alien colonisers.

Ye’s story is partially based on events from the author’s own life, which perhaps explains why some of the scenes pack such an emotional punch. When Liu was a small child his parents, who worked in a coal mine, split up their family and sent him to live with relatives hundreds of miles away to keep him safe from the armed patrols enforcing the Cultural Revolution in their home city.

When the trilogy was first serialised in the influential Chinese magazine Science Fiction World in 2006, the section set during this time was buried in the middle of the story as a flashback. His Chinese publisher feared attracting negative attention from government censors by putting such openly political material so prominently at the start of the book, and persuaded him to hide it deeper in the text. When the Chinese-American writer and translator Ken Liu proposed that the flashback be moved to the beginning for the English version, Liu Cixin was delighted. In a 2019 interview, he told the New York Times that he recommends Chinese readers who speak English to read the translation, rather than the original version. “The protagonist needs to have total despair in humanity,” he said, emphasising the centrality of the Cultural Revolution to his trilogy.

Political controversy continues to surround the book series, though, almost two decades after it was first published. In a move that seemed to many commentators to be blatantly political, in January 2023 a Chinese television adaptation was released – beating Benioff and Weiss’s big budget Netflix offering to the screen by over a year. The 30-episode series was titled Three-Body and is available to watch with English subtitles on Amazon Prime. It follows the book very faithfully, to the extent that some of the scientific material that characters describe is reproduced in the dialogue almost identically. The computer-generated sequences are not quite up to the standard that Hollywood has trained us to expect, but it is overall an able take on the source material that also makes some prudent changes (such as the weaving of the “present day” scenes into the preparations for the Beijing Olympics).

More concerningly than a bit of China–US one-upmanship, in 2020 a group of US senators wrote a letter to Netflix raising concerns about their involvement with Liu Cixin – who is also a consulting producer on 3 Body Problem – due to his apparent use of a Chinese government talking point when asked about the internment of Uighur people in Xinjiang province in a 2019 interview. “Would you rather that they be hacking away at bodies at train stations and schools in terrorist attacks? If anything, the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty,” he told Jiayang Fan of the New Yorker, a statement that she noted closely followed the line promoted by government-controlled media in China. The senators’ letter criticised Netflix’s decision to work with Liu as a “normalisation” of these views.

The adaptation will be released into the febrile atmosphere of US–China relations, and no doubt greater political scrutiny will be given to this unusual pop cultural partnership. The fact that Benioff and Weiss’s take on Liu’s story seems to remove some of its Chinese context is also worthy of note. Whereas all the protagonists of the original trilogy are Chinese, and Chinese history is key to the plot, the Netflix version has British or American actors, many of them white, in major roles – continuing America’s long history of “remaking” stories from other countries in its own image.

Still, the platform and reach that Netflix gives this tale of scientific discovery and political division are unrivalled. The universe, in Liu’s telling, is a complex place full of both wonder and despair. Whether 3 Body Problem proves to be a TV hit for the ages or just another mediocre streaming series, it will have a cultural impact, and the ideas at the heart of the story are worth taking seriously.

This article is from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

Drawing of Plesiosaurus and Ichthyosaurus, 1913. Image: Science History Institute

Many adults can still name a favourite dinosaur. From the bunting-like triangles along the back of a stegosaurus, to the mace-like balled tail of the ankylosaurus, to the armour-plated horns and collar of a triceratops, there is something impossibly thrilling about their wildly ranging scale and fantastical features. My favourite, as a child, was the archaeopteryx, a giant flying reptile. Even the name was complex and mysterious. More than the painting of what the living creature might have looked like, it was the photographs of fossilised remains that captivated me: the contorted, impossible wingspan, seemingly trapped in rocks, like an insect in amber.

Some of that early fascination has stayed with me. During the Covid-19 lockdowns, I recall how much comfort I found in the number of unearthed discoveries, made as scientists and amateurs alike spent more time walking in quiet isolation, stumbling across potentially new species of fossils.

But it was in December that one of the most thrilling prehistoric finds of them all made international headlines. An almost complete skull of a 12-metre long pliosaur: a giant marine predator that lived at the time of the dinosaurs. This ferocious creature, with 130 giant curved teeth, emerged from the crumbling limestone cliffs of England’s famous Jurassic coast in Dorset. The skull alone was two metres long, drawing Sir David Attenborough to make a special documentary about the find.

The skull looked much as it would have in life: the ebony-dark teeth, pitted with long grooves, revealing the refined biology of a powerful carnivore. Even BBC News couldn’t resist describing the pliosaur as the “ultimate killing machine”. Perhaps that’s the key to our enduring obsession: a human attempt to make sense of the pure efficiency of something that seems to have emerged from our most terrible nightmares.

Our fascination with dinosaurs has deep roots, going back to the 19th century, when European and North American science elites tried to absorb the shattering implications of the fossils’ existence. How did these demon-like beasts fit with the Christian belief in God’s benign creation and the story of a Planet Earth that was less than 7,000 years old?

It both pleases and saddens me that the pliosaur was discovered in Dorset. Pleasing because it was here, in around 1811, that a young local girl – 12-year-old Mary Anning – together with her younger brother Joseph, discovered the first skull of another marine reptile, the ichthyosaurus. As one of the first such discoveries, it helped to transform our understanding of evolutionary theory. But Anning was mostly ignored and erased from accounts of early palaeontology. I was fortunate to be taught about her at school, more than 150 years later, when I was first falling in love with dinosaurs – yet even today she is hardly a household name.

It’s not surprising that Anning was written out of palaeontology by the men who went on to establish our national history museums. Victorian science, fascinated by dinosaurs, was also obsessed with pathologising the female condition. Women’s brains were smaller; their wombs might be damaged by too much intellectual stimulation. Even as discoveries enabled new understandings about the world, they were often used to reinforce old prejudices. Charles Darwin, while proposing his theory of evolution, was also among the respected thinkers of the time who promoted the idea of inferior races. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the word “dinosaur” has become a derogatory label for people (usually men) deemed to hold outdated views.

But there is another gripping element to the story of the Dorset Pliosaur. Part of the drama was the “race against time” to rescue the skeleton before the cliff crumbled. Climate-change-accelerated coastal erosion has brought more and more of these lost beasts to the surface. I think again of why dinosaurs enthrall us. Surely it is also because of the vastly contradictory timescale of how long they thrived (180 million years), only to be suddenly wiped out in the aftermath of an asteroid impact, according to the widely accepted Alvarez extinction theory.

Victorian writers Edgar Rice Burroughs and Arthur Conan Doyle imagined the nightmare of bringing them back to life; a fear still evident today in the Jurassic Park film franchise. But the real nightmare lurking in dinosaur fossils is the brutal totality of their extinction. Not a symbol of a lost past, but of a possible human future.

This article is a preview from New Humanist's spring 2024 issue. Subscribe now.

From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science has always been two-fold. We work to promote scientific literacy and a secular worldview. The stories we’ll look at this month illustrate how and why those two goals are inextricable and why it’s important to employ …
This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the most …
From the Richard Dawkins Foundation Newsletter. Subscribe here. Hello! As any good skeptic or scientist will tell you, the details always matter. No matter how exciting or alarming or enticing the headline may be, it’s almost inevitably the fine-grain details that matter most. I was reminded of this by two recent stories that we’ll explore in …
This thread has been created for thoughtful, rational discussion on subjects for which there are not currently any dedicated threads. Please note that our Comment Policy applies as usual. There is a link to this at the foot of the page. If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the most …
This is the 2024 follow-on from the 2023 BOOK CLUB thread, which is now closed, though you can easily refer back to earlier discussions by clicking on the link. BOOK CLUB 2024 has been created to provide a dedicated space for the discussion of books. Pretty much any kind of book – it doesn’t have …

Hi there,

I am delighted to say that I am back performing at the Edinburgh Magic Festival this year.

First, on the 28th December I will be exploring the strange world of illusion, mystery and magic in a show called MIND MAGIC. This will involve showing some of the best optical illusions in the world, revealing whether paranormal phenomena really exist, showing how we can all achieve the impossible, explaining how to transform a tea towel into a chicken, and much more. All the info is here.

Then, on the 28th and 29th December, I am presenting a new and experimental show about the invention of magic. This will be an intimate affair for a small number of people. It will examine how magicians create magic, and explore the mind and work of a magical genius who created the world’s greatest card trick. Info here.

So, if you are around, please come along, and fun will be had!

Some exciting news from me! I have just written my first book for children.

It uses magic to teach youngsters a range of essential life skills, including social skills, confidence, creativity, lateral thinking and much much more. Readers will learn how to perform lots of seemingly impossible feats, including how to defy gravity, read minds, pluck coins from thin air, and predict the future. Most important of all, these tricks have been carefully chosen to help boost mental wellbeing and resilience. It’s fun, it’s easy, it’s magic!

I am delighted to say that Magic Your Mind Happy will be published by Wren and Rook in May 2024, and is available to preorder now here.


check, 1, 2…is this thing on? hi everyone! it’s been a while.

CoverHigh

Two quick bits of news.

First, The Royal Society have kindly given me the prestigious David Attenborough Award. This is a lifetime achievement award for my work promoting psychology and critical thinking, and focuses on my research combatting pseudo-science and examining the psychology of magic. Previous recipients include Professor Sir Jonathan Van-Tam and Professor Alice Roberts, and I will give an award lecture about my work in August 2024.

Second, I have a new academic magic book out! It is part of the well-known Arts For Health series and reviews work examining how watching and learning magic is good for your wellbeing, including how it boosts confidence, social skills, dexterity, curiosity and much more. It was lots of fun to write and also includes interviews key practitioners, including Richard McDougall (Breathe Magic), Julie Eng (Magicana), Mario the Maker Magician (USA), David Brookhouse (UK), David Gore and Marian Williamson (College of Magic), and Tom Verner (Magicians Without Borders).  More details here.

Richard-Wisemans-On-Your-Mind-1080x1080

I am delighted to say that the second series of our On Your Mind podcast has launched today!!

Each week, science journalist Marnie Chesterton and I will explore aspects of the human psyche, including astrology, how the clothes we wear influence our thoughts, attraction, friendship, dreaming, mind control and much much more.  We will also be joined by some special guests as we attempt to answer all of your questions about psychology. The first series reached No.1 in Apple Podcast’s Science charts, and so we hope that you can join us. 

Our first episode looks at creativity and explores how to have good ideas and whether children are more creative than adults. You can listen here.

everybodys-magic-1I am excited to launch a new fund raising initiative for the amazing College of Magic in South Africa. The College is a non-profit community youth development organisation that uses magic to offer hope to young people in and around Cape Town.  They do incredible work and for the past two years I have been working with them and Vanishing Inc (the largest magic retailer in the world ) to produce a unique  magic booklet and custom deck of cards for budding magicians. 

everybodys-magic-11This gorgeous full-colour booklet involves students from the College teaching magical illusions, and tells inspirational stories of diverse historical magicians. Both the booklet and cards showcase great artwork by South African illustrator, Ndumiso Nyoni, and readers have special access to videos of the students teaching the tricks and offering top tips.

everybodys-magic-4All the profits raised from the sale of the booklet and deck of cards will go towards furthering the important and wonderful work of the College. It’s a lovely gift for friends and family and it would be great if you can support the project.

To find out more, please click here

Someone contacted me hoping to find young atheists who might be interested in being part of a new series. I’m not particularly interested in having my mug on TV, but I would love to have some great personalities represent atheism on the show, so I offered to repost his email on my blog: My name […]
All throughout my youth, I dreamed of becoming a writer. I wrote all the time, about everything. I watched TV shows and ranted along with the curmudgeons on Television Without Pity about what each show did wrong, convincing myself that I could do a better job. I flew to America with a dream in my […]
A friend linked me to this. I was a sobbing mess within the first minute. I sometimes wonder why I feel such a strong kinship to the LGBT community, and I think it’s because I’ve been through the same thing that many of them have. So I watched this video and I cried, because, as […]
UPDATE #1: I got my domain back! Many thanks to Kurtis for the pleasant surprise: So I stumbled upon your blog, really liked what I saw, read that you had drama with the domain name owner, bought it, and forwarded it here. It should work again in a matter of seconds. I am an atheist […]
@davorg / Thursday 28 March 2024 06:06 UTC