Michael Shermer to visit Lethbridge (very advance warning).
Posted on November 28, 2009 at 8:57 am by Dr. Jim
I got an email the other day from Paul Sparrow-Clarke who works in the mysterious reaches of the “7th floor” at the U. of L. (where the president’s offices are), letting me know that they have booked the speaker for the fall 2010 Owen G. Holmes lecture.
Mark Sept. 23 on your calendar!
Michael Shermer
Author of “Why People Believe Weird Things”.
Shermer is the e Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American.
Here is a cut and paste blurb about his books from his blog,
Dr. Shermer’s latest book is The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics. His last book was Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design, and he is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.
Whoot! When’s it gonna be September?
Here he is at a TED lecture. Its about 14 minutes long, but then, we’ve got time, haven’t we?
Anyway, in the video, Shermer mentions Katie Melua, so here is the video of the tune he mentions.
Technorati Tags: Michael+Shermer, Univerisity+of+Lethbridge, science, pseudoscience, skeptic, Katie+Melua
November 28, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Both good clips. Thanks for posting them. Shermer’s a good lecturer. I’d love to hear him in person.
November 28, 2009 at 9:14 pm
As I wrote on the LDS email list:
“Hmmm. Although he sports some skeptic’s credentials, Shermer is is also a raving libertarian politically, and becoming more and more of an accomodationist of late (I think he is angling for a shot at the Templeton prize).”
He responded to Jerry Coyne’s allegations of accommodationism with this:
Not one of his shining moments.
As with many now-atheistic, former fundamentalist christians, Shermer appears to profess that it is more important that we get religious people onside for some scientific issues (mostly evolution)—those that he once believed most contradicted his then christian doctrine—and ignore the fact that they are absolutely dotty on many of the others. But that makes no sense. Our concern with the religious belief is not just with one or two picayune details about the nature of the universe, but that the justification for those religious beliefs is anti-reason. The concern is NOT specific scientific statements, as Shermer seems to think, but rationality in general. For this and the fact that he is a flaming loony politically, I am not impressed that he has been invited for the 2010 Owen G. Holmes lecture.
November 28, 2009 at 9:15 pm
What happened to the link?
November 28, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Try again:
November 28, 2009 at 9:19 pm
One more time:
Here is the link to Shermer’s response to Jerry Coyne:
http://tinyurl.com/ygsvqmw
November 28, 2009 at 9:58 pm
Here is the link: http://tinyurl.com/ygsvqmw