#311 — Did SARS-CoV-2 Escape from a Lab?

Sam Harris speaks with Judea Pearl about causality, AI, and antisemitism. They discuss why LLMs won't spawn AGI, alignment concerns in the race for AGI, Pearl's public life after the murder of his son Daniel, the post-October 7th shift toward open anti-Zionism, the overlap betwee ...  Show more

Sam Harris speaks with John McWhorter about language, ideology, and moral certainty. They discuss the rise and persistence of "wokeness" and DEI, the legacy of George Floyd's death, the role of social media in amplifying moral panic, how identity shapes perceptions of Israel-Pale ...  Show more

Science writer Philip Ball has followed the relationship between government and its scientific advisors throughout the pandemic. He discusses the role of scientific advisors in the light of conflicting information following the leak of a number of former Health Minister Matt Hanc ...  Show more

An abolitionist approach to STS and the history of the life sciences: this is the model that Cristina Mejia Visperas offers in her book, Skin Theory: Visual Culture and the Postwar Prison Laboratory (NYU 2022). By now, scientists’ experiments on captive men at Philadelphia’s Holm ...  Show more

On this week’s show: A study suggests paleontological research has directly benefited from the conflict in Myanmar, and how dormant bacterial spores keep track of their environment First up on the podcast this week, Staff Writer Rodrigo Pérez Ortega joins host Sarah Crespi to dis ...  Show more

In the decade since the genome editing capabilities of CRISPR-Cas9 emerged, research into novel medicines has boomed – but alongside progress comes new ethical considerations. Controversy erupted in 2018, when Chinese scientist He Jiankui created the first babies with edited geno ...  Show more