Show notes
Michael Shermer and Alex Buxeda get into where morality actually comes from, and why "God did it" doesn't explain a thing.
From the Bible and abortion to evolution, markets, tolerance and demographic collapse, they make the case that ethics comes from human nature, not sacred books.
Skeptic Magazine: https://www.skeptic.com/
Michael Shermer's books: https://michaelshermer.com/books/
00:00 – Teaser: "God did it" isn't an explanation
00:51 – Can you identify as a horse? The borders of sex & species
01:50 – The Bible's morality vs. the morality we actually live by
04:23 – Abortion isn't actually in the Bible
06:59 – The Bible as a "wiki" & why Shermer quit theology
09:43 – Scripture that evolved: variation, selection & the roots of charity
13:24 – The ultimate decentering: from Copernicus to Darwin
15:09 – Religion got there first: morality as game theory
16:11 – The Leviathan, the eye in the sky & the Wild West
18:45 – Deriving an "ought" from an "is" & the naturalistic fallacy
21:49 – Hitting rock bottom: Gödel & the universe that just exists
23:41 – Stephen Meyer & why theology always chases the science
26:00 – God of the gaps: dark matter, James Webb & bad explanations
30:35 – Wokeness as a Trojan horse of the Enlightenment
32:47 – Trans rights, conflicting rights & classical liberalism
34:36 – You can't change sex: gametes, biology & six fingers
36:49 – Does fitness decide morality? "What if the Nazis won?"
39:52 – The march to democracy & the invention of "genocide"
42:44 – Stein's Law & the great fertility reversal
45:27 – Polygamy, the spandrel of male desire & memes vs. genes
47:01 – Bottom-up innovation, broken windows & time preference
49:56 – Trust, the marshmallow test & the roots of GDP
51:37 – Gold, Bitcoin & liquidity across time
53:58 – Stocks: a bet on human ingenuity
54:55 – The Mag Seven & what comes after the iPhone
57:14 – David Deutsch: to predict the future is to build it
58:14 – Nothing is impossible except what physics forbids
1:01:29 – The darkness: is the Enlightenment even fit to survive?
1:06:06 – Leaving Spain for Switzerland & the "effective" fertility rate
1:09:05 – Butterfly or cockroach? Entropy vs. the Enlightenment
1:11:24 – Immigration done right & "A Few Good Men"
1:15:23 – The welfare state & why bureaucracies never shrink
1:18:30 – Status, not money, is what drives people to have kids
1:20:29 – "Collapsing Is A Not": the essay & morality as fitness
1:23:36 – Trust is a Law of Nature
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