Steven Pinker Meets Richard Dawkins | On Reason and Rationality

Video Description

Two of the world’s most renowned scientists join us to explore the nature of reason and rationality in the age of fake news and conspiracy theories. In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding – and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorising? From The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker to The Blank Slate and Enlightenment Now, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker have dedicated their lives to sharing their insights into what science and philosophy can tell us about human nature and the meaning and mystery of life. Now they join us to debunk the cynical cliché that humans are an irrational species. Together, Richard and Steven will explore the powerful tools of reasoning that we have built up over millennia – and consider how rationality can lead to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere. It’s an unmissable chance to hear from two of the most iconoclastic and distinguished thinkers of our time. Steven Pinker is an experimental cognitive scientist. Currently Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard, he has also taught at Stanford and MIT. He has won many prizes for his research, teaching, and his eleven books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and Enlightenment Now. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, one of Foreign Policy’s ‘World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals’ and Time’s ‘100 Most Influential People in the World Today’. Richard Dawkins is author of The Selfish Gene, voted The Royal Society’s Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time, and also the bestsellers The Blind Watchmaker, The Ancestor’s Tale, The God Delusion, and two volumes of autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford and both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.