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Oct. 13, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:01:36
Neil deGrasse Tyson | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 72
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As an academic, I care that I learn something every day.
If a day goes by and I don't learn something, that's a wasted day.
And ideally, you should get your mind blown at least once a week.
By just something, whoa, I never knew that.
And so for me, that is how I establish and derive meaning in my life.
Hey, hey, and welcome.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show, Sunday's special.
I'm excited to be joined today by Neil deGrasse Tyson.
His brand new book is Letters from an Astrophysicist.
He, of course, also hosts Star Radio, which is a podcast, and his famous show, Cosmos, on National Geographic.
Neil, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thanks for having me.
So, why don't we start with, for folks who don't actually know your background before you became a famous science person who talks science, what exactly is your background?
How did you get from where you were to being who you are?
I just liked learning about the universe ever since I was nine years old.
A first visit to my local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium, I grew up in New York City, and I had the advantage of Well, the city offers the advantage that for many of the cultural institutions, if you do sort of the exhibits and the frontline things, you can do a deep dive.
And at the American Museum of Natural History, which is the overarching institution that has the Hayden Planetarium, there were courses I could take.
There were special sessions I could attend.
And so it wasn't just the space show and an exhibit, I could continue to probe The structure and nature of the universe, right from middle school on through high school, and that served my interests, like, really, really well.
I went to the Bronx High School of Science, which, if I may, counts eight Nobel laureates among its graduates, which equals the country of Spain.
Which is just crazy.
To look that one up, that's kind of crazy.
And I went on to college, majored in physics.
I have a PhD in astrophysics.
And this public stuff is really, it just happened to me.
It's not like I was seeking it out.
I'm still not seeking it out.
I still just want to stay in the lab.
But what happens is, I realize that there's a hunger, there's an appetite for There's an appetite for people who are in search of meaning in their lives, and religion has served that role for so many.
Others who are not religious, or even if you are, people look up and just wonder, you know, where do we fit in this?
Everyone's looked up, right?
Maybe if you live in the city, and you look up, you just see buildings, but between the buildings, there's sky, and it's part of what we are as humans.
You know, we're one of the few animals that's completely comfortable sleeping on our backs.
Just think about that.
Maybe your dog can do it, right?
But the dog is completely domesticated, so they're not worried that some other animal's gonna eat their guts out while they're asleep.
So I wondered whether, in the earliest times, And we sleep at night.
So we sleep on your back and at night.
And if you wake up in the middle of the night, the sky is there.
Think about it.
If you're only facing down and you're asleep, you have no relationship with the sky.
So one night you see and the planets are in one configuration and later on they're in a different configuration and the moon moves.
So I just wonder whether curiosity about the night sky is something that runs deep in our DNA.
So in a second, I want to ask you about the quest for meaning, particularly using science, because I think that there's a rich conversation, obviously, to be had, and you talk about it a lot in your book Letters from an Astrophysicist.
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In your book, you deal a lot with the question of meaning.
And I have a lot of friends who are scientists ranging from the religious to the irreligious.
And I will say that my irreligious friends, agnostic or atheistic friends who are scientists, look for meaning in science itself.
And I've always found this a little bit puzzling on a materialistic level.
Why should there be meaning in agglomerations of atoms or in evolutionarily beneficial adaptations?
Well, where is the meaning to be found in that?
Yeah, so let me adjust something you said in your question.
You're saying that scientists are looking for meaning.
You're right.
On a personal level, on a personal level.
Sure, but it's the number of letters in this book, these are letters from people who wrote to me when...
Especially during a period of time when my email address was publicly accessible.
Not anymore.
But over that interval, people had access to me.
Typically in response to some appearance I made on TV or even in a public venue.
And I'm intrigued by how many people were in search of meaning.
And so it's not like I am putting that in this book.
No, not at all.
They are making that happen by their inquiries.
And personally, I don't look for meaning.
I think it's, maybe that's okay for some people, but those who look for meaning, typically it comes with some assumption.
That, oh, there's the meaning, it's behind the chair, okay, or under a rock, or behind a tree.
It implies that meaning is something out there that you search for and then may one day find.
And that's not, personally, it's not how I think of meaning.
And I capture this fact in my replies to so many of these letters.
For me, meaning is something you create.
You have the power to create meaning in your life and in the lives of others.
Can you lessen the suffering of another person?
That creates meaning.
It creates purpose.
It creates mission.
For who you are and what you might do in life.
So for me, meaning can involve other people.
Are you raising moral children?
Are you a good spouse?
This all creates meaning.
In addition, it's what you might do for yourself.
So for me, as an academic, I care that I learn something every day.
If a day goes by and I don't learn something, that's a wasted day.
I want to go back, recapture the day, and rummage through the books to find something.
And ideally, you should get your mind blown at least once a week.
By just something, whoa, I never knew that.
And so, for me, that is where I get, that is how I establish and derive meaning in my life.
So I mean, maybe I should redefine the term, meaning, I should be using the word purpose, which is a word I like to talk about a lot.
I mean, I totally agree.
In my book, I talk about the relationship between meaning and purpose, and I suggest that people do have to have purpose in order to find meaning.
I guess the question remains that when you look to finding a purpose, why should we be looking to the random assortment of guts or the evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons for purpose?
And how does that relate to questions like morality or the moral good?
What's interesting about your set of questions there is that There in at least half a dozen letters right written to me there there there You are not alone in that sentiment, so I think it's not obvious in just a cursory Review of science you think to yourself.
This is dispassionate cold facts about the universe The world nature that is not where I'm turning if I got to find meaning in life however Consider that the atoms in your body were manufactured in the cores of stars billions of years ago.
Stars that exploded.
If they didn't, these atoms would be locked away forever.
They exploded, scattering that enrichment across the galaxy.
And out of that enrichment forms planets, life, people.
And so, when you look up, In the night sky, if you feel small and lonely, the knowledge that you're connected in this way to the stars, that we are not just figuratively, we're literally stardust, can give you a sense of belonging in what might otherwise come across to you as a cold and heartless universe.
It is a beautiful idea and a beautiful sentiment.
I know Michael Shermer's written a lot about this sort of belief as well in your book and in your other writings.
You've talked about the application of science to questions of morality.
And I guess the question that I have when I hear something like that is, that's a romantic way of putting the idea that we're meatballs in space.
We're romantic meatballs.
Yeah, exactly.
We're Spinoza's stone that's sort of thrown, and then we have this bizarre awareness that we've been thrown, but there's nothing we can do about it.
By the way, you are the first ever talk show host to mention Spinoza.
Oh, well, thank you, I guess.
Famous Jewish philosopher.
Right, exactly, exactly.
And probably, you know, pantheist, maybe the first open atheist.
Yeah, exactly.
First atheist Jew.
Yeah, exactly.
It started a great long tradition of atheist Jews.
Yeah, I mean, we can argue about how great it is, but Marx was in that tradition, too.
It didn't end great.
But in any case, when we talk about that particular moral question or the purpose-driven question in your book, you talk about how you think a moral system can be derived from science.
And you sort of assume that moral systems, the thriving of humans, the same way that Sam Harris or Michael Shermer talks about it, that that is sort of a given and that we all define thriving in the same way.
And you're very critical, obviously, of Judeo-Christian Well, I wouldn't put it that way.
I would say, if you're trying to fight me using Judeo-Christian religious texts, if you're trying to fight me about the nature of the physical universe, No, that's idiotic.
No, that's idiotic.
Right, right.
But otherwise, I'm not gonna, if Jesus is your savior, if Moses is your man, I'm not taking that away from you.
I have no intentions on taking that away from you.
There are letters in here from Jews, from Muslims, of this Buddhist wrote in, and the corpus of those where people like to sort of tussle, with religion, tend to be fundamentalist Christians.
So there's a chunk of letters in there as well.
But each of them have a different reason for coming to me.
And so the conversation is different.
One of them says, "Is there any way "the universe can be 6,000 years old?" Just please, help me out here.
I want to try to give it.
And as you know, 6,000 years is the canonical biblical age, if you run through the begets of Genesis.
And the begets in Genesis?
Yes, they are.
Thank you.
So, I don't think science hands you morality, but I think science informs morality.
And that's an important connection that I don't think people commonly make today.
There's a lot to know about life, about, you know, people debating abortion, people debating issues related to human physiology and health.
What do you know about the nervous system?
What do we know about consciousness?
What do we know about, you know, in the brain, the neurological, neurosynaptic connections?
If a part of this brain gets damaged, you don't even know who you are.
If another part gets damaged, you can't speak.
Another gets damaged, you can't recognize a face.
And that's kind of important information about how we're going to handle What happens to people, right?
Now you can have your morality panels, or whatever they're called, you know, the people who advise politicians or whatever.
Ethics panels, they're called.
But don't believe that a scientist shouldn't be in that room.
No, I certainly believe that scientists should be in the room to provide the additional information necessary to fill out the application of moral principles.
Yes, I agree.
I guess that my question becomes, when we're talking about the original initiation of moral principle, why should we believe that science can do that?
Oh, I've never said that.
And I think that there's a very strong David Hume is-ought problem.
Well, yeah, except if you look at what we consider to be moral principles today, It is, especially in communities where they say we have Judeo-Christian foundations for society, there's a lot of editing out of what went on in the Bible versus what we value and judge today.
And so you can ask, what is the foundation of the editing?
And this really is traceable to secular discussion about our understanding about civilization, about people, about how we treat each other, one another.
You know, when you look at Darwin and learn, of course, there are people, social Darwinists, which fed Nazism, right, and eugenics, but you part through those curtains.
At the bottom of Darwin is the fact that we are all genetically connected.
That's profound.
It means we have different skin color, but we are Fundamentally identical as a species, okay?
And, you know, to a jellyfish, they will not be able to tell us apart.
If you're a jellyfish.
So the commonality of DNA among all humans, the commonality of DNA among all life on Earth, that is stupefying.
That has value.
And the is and the ought question?
I don't have a problem with that as a starting place, but generally people who come at it from an is and an ought, in other words, science can tell you what is true, but they can't tell you what should be.
Just to paraphrase, to condense.
Clarify, in case I understand, yeah, exactly.
To condense.
I think they both still have to happen together.
So we're talking about how to construct a morality or how to live within a moral system, and you've suggested, I think rightly, that the effect of reason on religious principle, as inherited over time, has purified many of those principles, made those principles better, made for a better world.
I totally agree with that, obviously.
I believe that the way that I've put it with regard to civilization myself, is that civilization is a suspension bridge, basically, between a pole that is certain fundamental assumed premises that can't be proved by science, and then science, And reason and the fact is that Where I start to get a little afraid is if the pull of science and reason begins to believe that it is self-perpetuating, and we lose some of the fundamental principles.
So, the example that I would give is, you mentioned Darwinism before.
It is perfectly plausible and, in fact, fairly easy to read social Darwinism into Darwinism, and people did for several generations.
And so now we say... That's two generations.
Exactly.
So now we say, okay, That never should have happened, obviously.
That's wrong.
That's a bad read of Darwinism.
There's no reason you have to read evolution to suggest that we should benefit certain people at the expense of other people.
But that is a moral reading of Darwin, not a reading of Darwin that is inherent in Darwin itself.
That is bringing premises that actually pre-exist Darwin to bear on that, if properly read.
It's bringing bias, which humans are highly susceptible to, and especially in the social sciences.
So there's less bias in the sciences that don't involve human behavior.
You can still have bias, it's just less of it.
And it has, and the consequences are less dire if anything that happens becomes policy.
And so that's the digested analysis of what came out of Darwinism.
But yeah.
Yeah, so I think the reason that this comes up is, there was one tweet that you sent, and of course I'm sure you know where I'm going with this.
There's one tweet that you sent that drew an enormous amount of ire on, particularly the right, about rationalia.
That you were looking forward to the- Oh, I remember rationalia.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
So, first of all, what would Rationalia—so this is the—for those who missed the tweet, the suggestion was— This was like four years, three years ago now.
Yeah, yeah.
But it was a fascinating conversation because it began this whole kind of discussion about what a well-governed system would look like or who would govern that system.
And so, I don't want to miss what exactly you were saying there.
Sure.
Why don't you suggest it so I don't misquote you?
To clarify, I was at a conference in the Canary Islands, and there was a conversation I walked into during the cocktail hour, and there was already buzz.
It involved a woman whose name I forgot, but I mentioned her name in my Facebook note.
That expands on the Rationalia tweet.
And she had the idea of having a place called Rational Land, OK?
And I said, no, we need a better name than Rational Land.
So Rationalia, right?
You have Somalia, Serbia, Rationalia.
And the premise in this room of people, this is a conference of scientists and artists, actually.
Was that, imagine a community, it could be virtual, doesn't have to have geographic boundaries, where all laws are created only on the strength of evidence in support of them.
Period.
All laws.
Now if you think about that, That has very sound principles, because, especially in America, Especially in America, we've got a diversity of cultures, religions, other kinds of belief systems, and we're technically supposed to celebrate that.
E pluribus unum, right?
Many is one, or one is many, right?
Out of many, one.
Thank you.
And so, you were polite to let me figure it out.
He's going to get it?
He's going to get it?
Okay, I'll help him out.
Very polite of you.
So, in such a place, if I had some belief system based on my religion or culture or whatever, and I rise to political power and I want to make a law, the laws apply to everyone in the land.
But if that law derives from my belief system, and now I force others into that law, that's a recipe for disaster.
That is how to guarantee an unstable culture, an unstable civilization, a destabilizing civilization.
So, the idea is, any law that applies to everybody needs to be based on some objective truths.
And how do you establish objective truths?
The best way we know is by the methods and tools of science.
And the strength of the law would be commensurate with the strength of the evidence to support it.
And if you don't have the evidence to support it, you have no business making a law for it.
So that would be the premise.
And then some people jumped in.
I don't read every one.
You probably don't either.
No.
Talk about pissing off the internet.
You're king of pissing off the internet.
You're trying to drag me into this!
Welcome to my lair!
You're trying to commiserate!
So how would this work?
So a lot of the debate centered on, well, who's going to decide what's true?
Enough to base a law on it.
And other people didn't see my actual words.
There's a lot of reading comprehension issues I've noticed.
I said, objective truth.
And people read that as absolute truth.
And that's not the word I used.
And people said, who's to decide what is absolute truth?
And there's no such thing as an absolute truth.
And I never said that.
Right.
And there's a difference.
I'm convinced there's an absolute truth.
Science establishes what is true based on evidence.
And that seems to work.
But there could be later evidence that gets to a deeper truth, and we're open to that.
That's how we went from Newton to Einstein.
Right.
Newton still works.
You took physics, for sure.
You still use Newton's equations, but there are situations where they don't apply.
They break down, and you need a bigger story.
So in comes Einstein, draws a bigger circle around the Newtonian physics, and so now Einstein has a deeper understanding of the universe, but it doesn't negate Newton in the regime in which it had previously applied, it still applies.
I was going to jump in and continue, but people, it got very angry.
Well, you have a life to live.
I got a wife, I got kids, I want to eat.
But I'm glad it introduced some kind of thinking about what role What kinds of forces should operate on laws that we all must obey?
So, I think that there were two well-founded criticisms.
There were a lot of poorly founded criticisms.
I think there were two well-founded critiques, I should say.
By the way, there are letters in this book that are asking about morality.
Right.
They come from a religious... They don't make a big deal of what religion they're from.
Generally, they're Christian.
They want to have a sort of secular conversation.
And they come to it from a religious background, but they just want to find out where science comes from.
And I want to hear the rest of your question, but I just want to say that these letters, these are people who want to have the conversation.
There are plenty who just don't.
I'd never see those letters.
Listen, as a religious person who is constantly discussing issues in the public eye, I won't cite the Bible as proof of positions.
I don't think that that is a valuable source in terms of being able to discuss with people.
It's an appeal to authority that a huge number of people don't accept.
I mean, it's no better than just citing any other random person on the street for a lot of folks.
What difference does that make?
But I think that when it came to the Rationalia tweet, there were two critiques that I saw that I thought were interesting.
So one was, That the question isn't should we bring the best data to bear when making a law.
Like everybody who has any shred of rationality should of course want the best data to be brought to bear.
The question when we make a law is one of competing values.
Meaning you're assuming that everybody has the same ends in mind and that isn't always the case.
So to take an obvious example, let's say that there were evidence that removing all guns in the United States would lower violent crime in the United States.
So do you remove all guns from people in the United States?
That is actually a question of values, not purely a question of whether a law would be effective in achieving a particular end, because the end itself is one of the questions.
Do you want a society where no one has the capacity to protect themselves against a tyrannical government, for example?
Right, so I would say that the... As posed, that makes complete sense.
That's not how I would have posed it.
The way you pose it is, Is there something you want, as a society, to turn into law?
What would that be?
Okay?
And then you would test to see whether that will fulfill your objectives.
If it will fulfill your objectives, then you put it into law.
That's how you do this.
You don't say, I want to get rid of all guns, let's make it a law.
No.
You ask, collectively, in a democracy, the republic in which we live, you ask, what are your goals?
Is your goal to have fewer people die from guns?
Is that the goal?
How would we accomplish this goal?
And then you do the research and you find out, oh, you can have biometric handles.
It reads my hand, my handprint, so my gun is my gun, you steal my gun, you can't use it.
That solves that problem, okay?
Unless you don't want that problem solved.
You have the right to do that as a citizen in a democracy.
You say, I don't want that, I don't think that's a problem, let's not bring that to a law.
That's the only point here.
The law is to capture To either support or deny something you want to put into effect as a law.
Okay, so then we're in agreement.
I think so.
The other question that I saw was the sort of application of this principle.
So this has been used over the course of the 20th century particularly to move the system of American government away from a legislative-led system of government toward a sort of bureaucratic system of government where an enormous amount of regulation and rulemaking is made by executive agencies purportedly by experts.
And one of the problems there is that A lot of these places become subject to regulatory capture.
There's an evolution. - What is regulatory capture? - Regulatory capture means that you have a lobbying group, for example, that get ahold of the EPA, and now the bureaucrats who are largely unassailable by the legislature and the executives pay attention to them.
- Yeah, so that sounds like it is things happening in the world that affect us all that are not derived from objectively researched conclusions.
Right.
I'm asking about the implementation of your principle on an actual particular level.
Meaning, were you just talking in a utopian world or is there a way to apply any of this sort of stuff?
No, no, no.
Actually, that's a great question then.
I didn't know where you were going to land on that.
Right?
So, we have agencies that are entirely tasked with finding out what is objectively true.
By the way, a lot of the cross-tweets were saying, yeah, this is the Department of Truth, or whatever, you know, in George Orwell or the... 1984.
Yeah, 1984, or in Nazi Germany.
Didn't they actually have a Bureau of Propaganda, literally called that?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think they even called it.
So, the National Academy of Sciences.
Which was signed into law, created under the leadership of America's first Republican president.
Who you know that is.
Who was that?
America's first Republican president was Lincoln.
Lincoln, exactly.
1863.
When he clearly had other things he needed to worry about in 1863.
There he signed the National Academy of Sciences.
Because Europe was riding high economically.
Scientifically, from an engineering point of view, they were fully exploiting the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, and they were kind of slowly working their way across the pond back here to the United States.
He said, we have to get into that.
So, the National Academy of Sciences has one job, one job, and that is to report on what is objectively true In the scientific fields in ways that can inform policy at the executive branch and in the legislative branch.
That's their job.
So when they come out with a report, they have reviewed all the evidence.
And if they can't arrive at a conclusion, they'll tell you that.
The evidence is inconclusive.
Evidence is conclusive.
This is where these, now, you can do whatever you want with your policy 'cause it's not rationalia.
You still have lawmakers who are responsive to a constituency, to lobbyists, and the like.
But don't tell me you don't have the evidence there to base it on.
And so you would glorify, you would enhance the importance and significance of a National Academy of Sciences so that you wouldn't have small groups with Non-representative belief systems taking over the whole country's conduct.
So let's talk about the scientific process as it's currently carried out in the United States.
One of the things that I'm afraid of, and I see it from the right on certain issues and from the left on certain issues, is a fear of actually investigating certain areas of science.
So on the right, obviously, people typically cite climate change here and say, well, you know, the right refuses to acknowledge that climate change is even happening, or at least so large swaths of the right refuse to acknowledge that climate change is even happening.
Or anthropically.
generated climate change.
So most radicals will say it's not even happening at all, that this is just part of a general warming trend or that it has stopped or any of that.
But why don't we start with that and then we'll get to sort of areas on the left where science has been politicized or where maybe inquiry has been limited or attempted to be limited.
So on the climate change issue.
Or hijacked.
Or hijacked.
So let's talk about the climate change issue for a second.
So what do we know and what is uncertain?
Because this seems to be, there are, it seems to me, gray areas, but the gray areas are baked into the science, meaning that according to the IPCC report, the climate could warm anywhere from two degrees Celsius to six degrees Celsius over the course of the next century or so.
We're still not sure exactly of the level of climate sensitivity to human activity.
You can acknowledge that human activity is responsible for the majority to the vast majority of climate change that has happened on Earth for the past century or so.
Industrial age.
Right, exactly.
But what is the range of outcomes and does that suggest that If you have a different point of view on the solutions, that this amounts to climate denial.
That's the part that I start to get dicey about.
I mean, professionally, I'm an astrophysicist, not a climate scientist, but I do read and I do recognize When a scientific consensus emerges, and I want to make it clear what I mean by the word consensus.
A scientific consensus is one, it's not where everyone gets in a room and says, hey, let's vote.
That's not how truth is established.
It's established by looking at peer-reviewed research and asking, in what direction is that taking us?
What is it saying?
And not any one research paper has all answers in it.
They're like pieces of answers.
And I looked at this ice core in this section of Greenland.
Well, I looked at an ice core in Antarctica going back 100,000 years.
Well, I looked at the migration patterns of this insect.
And you start piecing together the biology, the chemistry, the geology, the atmospheric science, and it's all pointing in the same direction.
When that happens, it's time to sit up and take notice.
What the hell is going on?
Okay?
And when we speak of a climate consensus, what we're saying is that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community has produced research evidence Citing that humans are responsible for climate changing in this world, leading to the warming of temperatures in the atmosphere.
Period.
If you want to deny that, you are denying it because it conflicts with your cultural or political principles.
Okay, it's a free country.
Go ahead and do so.
But if you now rise to power over legislation, that's dangerous.
It's irresponsible and dangerous.
So the challenges are modeling climate.
Oh my gosh.
It's like there's the heating of the oceans from the sun, and then the oceans keep some of the heat, and they trap it and put it low.
So then when the atmosphere cools, the ocean releases some of that heat back, and then the trees and the ice caps reflect.
There's a hundred stuff.
So that's why there's variance in the predictions that come from it.
But the predictions all point in the same general direction.
You will never have 100% of all scientists agreeing.
That's not how progress in science works.
It's the—what you're looking for is the overwhelming—if only half the scientific papers showed this, and the other half didn't, you got no result.
I guess the question that I have about climate change, and at least its public-facing sort of presentation, is the level of uncertainty when it comes to its effect.
So you can acknowledge that climate change is happening.
There are people who talk about catastrophic climate change, millions of migrants suddenly running around the world, Miami underwater.
Yeah.
We're all dead within a century and a half.
A certain catastrophic level.
That won't happen.
We will not all be dead in a century and a half.
No.
We'll just flood all our coastlines.
Well, and by flooding all our coastlines, it's not going to be immediate.
You mean that there will be a gradual increase in sea level.
However.
Which can be mitigated in certain ways, presumably.
However.
Consider that most of the world's most important cities are on the water's edge.
Historically, for transportation, for commerce, and the like.
The most important cities in the world are on the water.
Okay.
Most of the most important cities in the world are found in that way.
All right, so it's not like the water levels start to rise.
If you're following my tweets, I said if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, then all that water goes back into the ocean.
The ocean levels will rise.
It'll rise to the level of the Statue of Liberty's left elbow.
Yeah, what are the chances that the entire Greenland ice sheet or the entire Antarctic ice sheet will melt?
It's the limiting case.
Well, if an asteroid were to hit the Earth, we'd all be dead.
Yes, no, but if you want to ask how bad could it get, that's how bad it could get.
And just to get her elbows straight, she's holding the Declaration of Independence on the left hand.
It's that elbow.
Not this elbow.
Not this elbow.
Okay?
So if you're between them, you're good.
We're fine.
Get the elbows straight.
So, I mean, but this is one of the areas where I feel like, okay, so why are we talking about the limiting case as opposed to most likely case or the cases that are most likely to fall within the range of possibility?
And is that sort of alarmism generative of bad thinking about possible solutions?
Meaning that... During the dinosaurs, during periods of when the dinosaurs roamed, there was no ice on earth.
And so there was much less land.
When you enter an ice age, water evaporates from the oceans, it goes up to clouds, the clouds move over land, it snows.
But it's so cold the snow never melts.
It just stays there.
And this just keeps happening.
So you're systematically draining the ocean.
And you're building snow layers on the ground, on land masses.
These are glaciers.
Glaciers are slow moving, and they're very, they'll slowly go back to the ocean, but slower than the rate at which the oceans are being drained.
That's what revealed the Bering Strait land bridge to our nomadic ancestors.
Said, hey, let's keep walking.
They just keep walking, it's just land, let's keep walking.
And they walk into North America, the Ice Age ends, it melts, the water levels rise, the land bridge is broken, And never the twain would meet for tens of thousands of years, stranding an entire branch of the human species in North and South America.
By the way, which is why the Columbus voyage was, in my read of history, the single most important thing that ever happened in civilization.
If it wasn't him it would have been someone else, but it happened to be him.
He reconnected these two separate branches of the human species that had been separated for tens of thousands of years.
That's a profound fact for me.
So it's already been the case that the Earth had no ice, had a lot of ice.
Right.
We've already been hit by an asteroid.
Right.
You can say, oh, asteroid!
Tell that to the dinosaurs, right?
The dead dinosaurs who didn't have a space program or opposable thumbs.
You need both.
So the issue is not that the water level will rise and you can just walk away from it.
It rises this much and the next storm surge Combined with a high tide, which you almost always get with a hurricane, because it takes a long time for a hurricane to move up the coast.
It takes typically a couple of weeks.
Somewhere in there, there's going to be full moon or new moon high tide with a storm surge.
Suppose your jetties or levees or whatever it is that keeps your city safe from the water that's out right there in the river or in the bay or in the ocean, whatever that height is, is what you decided would protect the city.
Right.
The ocean goes up an inch.
That's all it takes.
One inch to breach your levees.
If you bleach it by one inch, your city is now connected to a semi-infinite amount of water for as long as that hurricane is sitting there.
And the water just pours in.
That's what happened here in Hurricane Sandy.
Katrina also breached all the levees.
The levees broke there.
Don't get me started.
That was like engineering.
I mean, Katrina was Category 3.
It already passed through New Orleans.
People were like sweeping up the branches.
Okay, we survived that.
Then the levees broke.
Okay?
So the broken levees flooded New Orleans, not Katrina.
We keep blaming Katrina without Putting the lens back on our own maintenance of our infrastructure and our anticipation of what could happen given certain forces of nature.
My point is, you're going to flood your city not because the water will slowly rise.
You're going to flood your city because the storm That has the benefit of that extra inch, plus a storm surge, plus a higher intensity of the storm.
Because if the atmosphere is warmer, it carries more moisture.
There's more heat driving the intensity of storms.
You'll breach that, you'll flood the city.
And there you have it.
Or you lose your beach house.
It happens in those storms.
That's your first indication that your coastline is at risk.
And not to mention those countries, island countries in the South Pacific, where the average elevation is a few feet above sea level.
So you talked about refugees.
You know who knows about global warming and who's preparing for it?
Insurance companies and the military.
The military cares.
Our military cares about where there is unrest in the world.
If people are displaced, that creates problems, because they've got to go somewhere.
And the borders are closed, unless you're near a nice country.
It affects more than just your beach house.
For sure.
I mean, the question becomes whether mitigation is the chief method of fighting this, or adaptation is the chief method of fighting this, or geoengineering.
Should we be building more levees?
I love geoengineering.
I mean, I'm a fan.
I like technology.
Technology is helpful.
It's in its infancy.
Geoengineering.
But for me, one pie in the sky thought I have is hurricanes coming and ready to destroy a city.
You put in some big anemometer.
inside the hurricane, right?
And it spins the anemometer.
But the anemometer is itself a turbine, right?
So it's sucking energy from the cyclonic motion of the hurricane, and you use that to drive the energy needs of the city that it might otherwise destroy.
You should propose that to President Trump.
He's going to nuke a hurricane then.
This sounds better than that.
So moving on from climate change, which is an area, as I said, where some people on the right are not particularly interested, to areas where it seems like the left is militating against the advent of science, one of those areas is the area of transgenderism, where the argument made— Curiously, there's no trans—I have no transgender letters.
It's true.
Nothing in the book.
We've strayed now far from the topic of your book, but since I have you here and you're a science person who knows science, I'm going to ask you to science for me a little bit.
Sure.
But when it comes to transgenderism, the argument that is typically made by gender theorists is that Gender is entirely separate from sex.
You've seen the argument made that it makes no difference on average if men are stronger than women are, and that if we were to allow transgender women to compete with non-transgender women, then this would somehow not disadvantage biological women.
And this seems to me Absolutely a scientific that if we're actually gonna have a discussion about gender and sex that that should be based in data Which suggests that mammals are in fact binary in terms of their sex unless you have intersex Birth defects typically or genetic defects.
I'm happy to opine on this This only matters Because today we segregate Most, nearly all sports by gender.
Otherwise, why do we even give a shit?
What someone identifies with.
We live in a free country, and with consenting adults, and people's free expression of who and what they are.
Yeah, on an adult level I agree with you.
I think it does matter what you teach your children.
That's what I'm saying.
And so there's the matrix of You know, what you are biologically, how you express yourself, who you choose as a sexual partner.
If we actually live in a free country, as we tell ourselves, people's freedom to behave in any of those ways should not concern you at all.
Nor are they requiring that you behave that way.
Okay?
This is for their own freedoms.
Because we live in a free country.
What is unresolved here is what do you do with sports?
It's unresolved.
And I follow that closely and I don't see any...
I don't see any meaningful solutions to come down off of that.
We know that hormones manifest differently in different people.
Just the whole thing with steroids.
Steroids are hormones, right?
And we rallied against steroids in professional sports because it gives you an undue advantage.
So I've tried to think of what the future of sports would be in the world of a gender spectrum.
And it may be, you don't specify whether it's a male or female sport.
You just take measurements of what your hormonal balances are.
And so you compete based on your hormonal balance.
I mean, this is fun I had.
I don't know.
I don't know where it's going to land.
The WNBA won't be in business for very long if that's the case.
It would just be, you'd have to find some way to compete people against each other.
If you still care that sports is an interesting activity.
I guess the area where it does come up in a non-sports area.
Yeah, tell me, because I don't know.
So it would be, you talk in your book about the education of children and teaching children about science.
And right now, children are being taught about the quote-unquote gender spectrum, which is not scientifically based.
That is a theory-based idea.
No, no, wait, wait, hold on.
People express themselves on a spectrum.
So you learn that.
That's a social point, not a scientific point.
Meaning we express ourselves based in different languages.
Is that something you teach in science class or is that something that you teach when you're teaching language?
So whether the fact that people want to express themselves on a spectrum, on a gender spectrum, whether that fact Is something you want to put in a sociology class or in a science class.
Maybe that remains to be determined.
But it is a real fact about real society.
Well, of course, nobody's denying that people identify how they want to identify.
The question is, what is the relationship of that to biology?
Meaning that the argument is made that trans women are women, for example.
And what that seems to mean is that trans women are identical to women.
Now, if people want to say trans women are not biological women, obviously that is the case.
But people don't seem to want to say that.
Although that is obviously scientifically true.
Trans women are not biological women.
Biological women are biological women.
But where are you going with this?
What are you trying to accomplish?
By asking yourself, is it science or is it not science?
It's people in society.
But this is a perfect example of an area where suddenly it doesn't matter to say things that are just true.
Why is it bad or wrong, to point out?
I have another way to approach this.
I care what is objectively true in the world, as a scientist.
But let me not say even as a scientist.
I just simply care what is objectively true.
And science happens to be a pretty potent path to invoke, to find out what is true.
And so, if people express themselves on a gender spectrum, and that is an actual thing in an actual society, If we have not fully explained that scientifically, that's an interesting frontier to study.
If you want to say it's only sociological, then it's the purview of the social sciences.
I don't care who studies it.
It's an interesting fact about society that's worth learning about.
To make it, to fight someone and say, it's not biological, it's just your this and It's real and it's there.
It's real because it manifests.
It is real because it manifests, but the question of how to classify manifestation is a scientific question.
Meaning that, for example, there was a woman over at Brown University, she came out with a study that suggested that there was a phenomenon called rapid onset gender dysphoria in which That's a different question.
of a particular group would suffer from gender dysphoria and this person's immediate peer group would suddenly have an onset of gender dysphoria.
This paper was so controversial that Brown tried to pull it and then was forced to reassign it later.
You see this sort of treatment-- - That's a different question.
What you're asking now is, are there some topics that should not be studied Right.
And is there some taboo?
Sam Harris speaks a lot about this.
Yes.
And I think the concern is if you study some topic that's a hot-button topic and you bring scientific methods and tools to it, we don't trust, I'm interpreting here, I think we as a society don't trust
That people in charge in a free country won't try to legislate something that will constrict people's freedoms in the face of that information.
I think that's the fear.
Well, isn't that... It's a fear.
I mean, and isn't that... We don't trust our own ability to govern ourselves in the face of what could be some information relative to other kinds of information.
Isn't that a bit of a problem?
Yes!
Yeah.
Yeah, it means it's not a free society.
It's not a society of free inquiry.
Which I think you need, ultimately.
But, yeah.
My general take on all of this stuff, from climate change to gender dysphoria to all these issues is bring out the science and then let's hash it out.
I think that the problem I'm seeing on a lot of sides is... Yeah, but the question is, what is your motivation?
Why?
Why does that matter?
It matters because if you have political power, you could end up creating legislation that subtracts freedoms from people who previously were enjoying the same freedoms as you.
The history of that exercise— Then make a better argument.
—doesn't end well.
But the history of which exercise?
Bring out all the science and let's hash it out?
I'm saying if you bring out all the science and the politicians hash it out, the history of that exercise is a recipe for disaster if it involves Discoveries that put people's freedom, as defined in our Constitution, at risk.
But now you're arguing for limitations on areas of particular study.
No, I'm arguing on, we need a way to shield, we need a way to protect people's freedoms in the face of whatever gets discovered scientifically.
I mean, I agree.
I think that's what the Constitution is for.
Of course.
It's to guard rights from... But we're always fighting... People who want rights are always fighting others who are saying they don't get the rights from the Constitution.
This is a daily challenge on the progressive left.
It is a daily challenge, right?
Here's an example.
I forgot how I ended up getting this phone call.
It was some magazine that serves the gay community.
I don't remember why, because they wanted my opinion on whether being gay was biological or mental.
Right, there's that new study that came out.
Or psychological.
Right, right, right.
And I said, I don't care which it is.
Find out what it is, fine.
But the answer to that question should have no consequence on legislations or laws.
Because, for example, suppose it said it's purely biological, okay?
Then you say, oh, that explains it.
Suppose it says it's purely psychological.
What are you going to do now?
You're going to go to the reorientation camps, or whatever those are called, where they realign you because they say it's psychological rather than biological.
All of a sudden, people start behaving in ways, in society, that want to constrict the freedom of expression of who and what people are.
And that is a danger.
So, maybe there needs to be a line in the sand.
Let science do what it does, but politicians keep us free.
Yet there's so many politicians that are doing the opposite of that.
So why aren't you a libertarian?
I'm a libertarian.
Come over here.
The line is right here.
Just join me over here.
I've read a lot about libertarianism.
There's some fascinating strong points within it, but I would say that I have too much of me wants to help others.
to possibly cross over the line to libertarians.
Libertarians, I got mine, you get yours, that's your problem.
You know, I'm paraphrasing, of course.
But my parents were, my father was active in the civil rights movement.
My mother went back to school when we were empty nest, and she became a gerontologist.
These are two fields that are deeply concerned with the health and well-being of fellow members of our society.
I grew up in that.
I'm their kid, the astrophysicist.
So I grew up in that, but my feet were grounded.
And in fact, how do you like this pivot?
You ready?
In fact, I wrote a letter to my parents for their 30th wedding anniversary, where I thanked them for keeping me grounded.
And I reproduced that letter.
Oh yeah, no, it's beautiful.
The book really is fantastic.
I'm not just saying that.
It really is a beautiful book.
So if you read that, you will know I could never be full-up libertarian.
See, just because my fans will murder me if I don't just point out, libertarians don't actually just want people to starve in the streets.
Really?
Yeah, we are big believers.
You do want to feed people.
Social fabric.
Very important.
Taking care of people.
Giving charity.
Very, very important.
So, final scientific question for you.
Obviously, we're doing hot buttons here.
We have to make sure that our click count is high, obviously.
Meanwhile, at the House, we're going to write a headline here and sell your book.
So let's talk about abortion for a second.
So when it comes to the scientific study of fetal development, there are people who are militating against, for example, the use of ultrasound techniques in pregnancy clinics.
So Planned Parenthood famously objects to People using or government-funded 3D ultrasounds before an abortion.
And their suggestion is that this is a violation of the freedom of women.
Now, on an abortion level, what pro-lifers say is the science is fairly clear that the inception of life happens at conception and then there's fetal development all the way Continuously from point A, basically, to death.
And so the attempts to draw particular lines, you can create... Fetal development until birth.
Fetal development, and then you continue to develop as a human until you die.
But it's not fetal.
Right, correct.
Fair enough.
So the question becomes, on the abortion case, how much of that do you think is values-driven, and how much of that debate do you think is scientifically driven?
So, let me... I think we would all welcome a world Where abortions are not necessary.
And so everyone's focusing on abortion and not focusing on contraception, for example.
And that, to me, that's an imbalanced debate.
I totally agree with this.
And you also know there are people who are anti-abortion and anti-contraception.
And that's, I don't think the history of our understanding of what it is to be human can ever be reconciled with that fact, right?
Sex is fundamental to sexual reproducing animals.
Sex predates humans by half a billion years.
So to try to legislate people to not have sex may be simply unrealistic.
So you want laws that reflect what is possible.
Rather than to force what may be impossible, culturally impossible.
So, if you want to have the abortion debate, I would ask, how many people who are anti-abortion are anti-abortion and are not simultaneously deeply religious?
Right?
So, if there's a strong religious component of those who want to ban abortion, That's an interesting fact about the demographics of what's going on out there.
And so, that's one interesting fact.
If you're concerned about what is alive...
Or what constitutes a human life?
I mean, that really is the question.
What constitutes a human life?
Because, obviously, if it's just what's alive, then save the flies, right?
Yeah, or sperm is alive.
It swims!
It swims with a mission, right?
So somebody has to say, Okay, I care when it's a human life, alright?
So then we have to, what makes it human?
Is it just genetically human, or is it, do you need a certain minimum neuron count to judge, well now it is... So, I think that can be debated, just debate that, and I don't have opinions that I require other people agree with, alright?
If you look carefully at my Twitter stream, Rarely is there an opinion.
The last time I remember posting an opinion, it was the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon, okay?
And I pointed to a video where we tussled it out.
What was the outcome of that video?
Oh, definitely Enterprise.
No question about it.
But also, I said, BB-8 is way cuter than R2-D2.
That is an objective fact.
I just want you to know.
I agree.
See?
He's designed to be cute.
Designed to be cute.
And R2-D2 was cute in 1975.
You need a modern, updated version of what cute is.
So is whether abortions are legal or not just a matter of majority vote in a society?
Is it, you know, these are questions that people Are debating.
I was content with whether a fetus is sustainable outside of the womb as a sort of a... Dividing line.
That made sense to me when that was put forth.
To say that it's a human when it's just a fertilized embryo, I think most people don't know, particularly if they're religious.
Most, last I checked these numbers, most fertilized eggs in a woman are spontaneously aborted.
The body rejects most of the times there is conception.
And so...
So what do you do about that?
Do you want to create an incubation chamber so that every spontaneously aborted fertilized egg gets put in there and grows to a human?
Otherwise, you'll get arrested for murder?
By the way, this is science informing the debate, right?
So I don't know where this is going to land, and I don't have opinions that I require other people agree with.
Okay, so I do have one final question for Neil deGrasse Tyson, and that is I'm going to ask him for his favorite science fiction movies and also the ones that are the worst when it comes to the science.
But if you actually want to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber, so we can make money off of you.
To subscribe, go to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, his book is Letters from an Astrophysicist.
Go pick it up right now.
It really is fantastic.
Neil, thank you so much for your time.
I really appreciate it.
Delighted.
Thanks for having me.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is directed by Mathis Glover and produced by Jonathan Hay.
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Associate producer, Colton Haas.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Post-production is supervised by Alex Zingara.
Editing by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Mike Caromino.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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