Climate change, space travel, evolution and extinction were among the many topics discussed at the Arizona State University Origins Project panel on Wednesday night at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Phoenix.
The panel, dubbed Inconvenient Truths: From Love to Extinctions, moderated by Lawrence Krauss, utilized Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, for which she earned the Pulitzer Prize as a diving board into deeper discussion regarding scientific inquiry.
“I often get asked ‘why should we care about extinction?’” Kolbert said after showing pictures of a multitude of endangered animals. “I‘m going to be frank that that strikes me as a weird question. I hope that strikes you as a weird question.”
“We are also losing our very closest relatives: the orangutans,” Kolbert said, adding that the detriment of marine ecosystems such as coral reefs has been incredibly significant.
The conversation shifted to Michael Shermer, writer and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, who spoke of making fact-based arguments toward the obdurate.
“Facts are largely secondary to moral foundational beliefs and world views,” Shermer said of those who deny scientific fact. “The details are there to then fill in a deeper world view.”
Shermer explained that cognitive dissonance, when empirical fact differs from one’s world belief, and the “backfire effect,” the idea that people “double down” on false beliefs after the facts are presented, are powerful psychological phenomena that affect those unwilling to accept scientific fact.
Ultimately, Shermer said, it is important to make people think critically about their beliefs.
“If we can do that, that’s good enough.”
The spotlight then shifted to Curtis Marean, a professor and archeologist at ASU. His presentation focused on the evolution of human beings through time, how humans today evolved along other species of humans until about 40,000 years ago.
“What would it be like to share this stage with other species of human?” Marean asked. “It would be incredible.”
Marean utilized a hypothetical anecdote in which an alien came to earth over the course of the last few hundred thousand years and watched humanity evolve, develop language and social structures and spread across the world, until only one species of human was left about 40,000 years ago.
“The one [humans] has now spread all over the planet, it has wiped out all its competitors, it has killed off all the other species of humans, it’s destroying its biosphere and even scarier it’s coming into space,” Marean said. “If I was that alien I would dial my particle beam up to 11 and fry it.”
Marean continued to explain the importance of social interaction and projectiles to human evolution. He explained that the cooperative efforts of the modern species of humans led to the murder of the other species.
“These things go together: cooperation and conflict,” Marean said. “Smarter species can lose out to more cooperative species.”
The panel then moved to an open discussion, chiefly on climate change.
The panel speculated on some potential solutions including policy and new political leadership, but was curtailed by an idea proposed by Shermer, that there must be an economic incentive to fixing the problem.
“You can’t just do the intrinsic thing, it’s how you make money,” Shermer said.
Krauss said that climate change had not been mentioned in any of the presidential debates to that point.
“It is something politicians could actually do something about if they were actually pressed,” Krauss said.
During the question and answer segment, the panel discussed the feasibility of going to Mars as a potential solution if Earth is uninhabitable.
“I find it ludicrous, the idea that going to Mars is going to solve our problems… that that is our insurance policy,” Kolbert said. “At that point, we’re really messed up.”
The only reason to go to Mars, Marean said, is for experimentation and discovery.
As for when “doomsday” will come, the panel was inconclusive.
“There’s still a lot of room to prevent a mass extinction,” Kolbert said. “Although maybe not as much time as we might hope.”
Contact the reporter at shane.crowe@asu.edu
