SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: I'm an astrophysicist with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where I also serve as director of the Hayden Planetarium.
SPEAKER_1: My co-host in studio in Manhattan this week is my friend and colleague, David Grinspoon.
SPEAKER_1: He's an astrobiologist.
SPEAKER_1: I don't think he was that his whole life.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, he started out as like a legitimate scientist.
SPEAKER_1: He later turned to thinking about, I knew him as like a planetary scientist and an astrophysicist, but lately, he's like thinking about life in the universe.
SPEAKER_1: That's legitimate, of course, except you don't have any data, right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, we have data about what the planets are like and data that we're learning about what life needs and has needed in the past, which at least allows us to, in an informed way, surmise where else in the universe there may be life.
SPEAKER_2: But we haven't found it yet.
SPEAKER_1: Using Earth as a foundation for those ideas.
SPEAKER_2: We pretty much have to.
SPEAKER_2: We're stuck here as of now, mostly.
SPEAKER_1: So in these two hours, and this is the final hour of today's show, I have an interview with Bill Maher.
SPEAKER_1: My last trip to LA, he agreed to do a sit-down interview from his offices.
SPEAKER_1: And we talked about everything under the sun.
SPEAKER_1: And it's very Bill Maherian in the way the information flowed.
SPEAKER_1: We talked about science, science literacy.
SPEAKER_1: We talked about religion.
SPEAKER_1: And then I have more clips to put in here.
SPEAKER_1: We talked about politics and how they all intersect.
SPEAKER_1: And David, I know you've done a lot of public speaking and you've written books.
SPEAKER_1: And so I bring you into studio just to sort of help me explore where the science is in the debates between scientists and politicians and those who are religious.
SPEAKER_1: And you have some exposure there, right?
SPEAKER_1: I presume this is...
SPEAKER_2: Well, yeah, I work in a museum, as you do.
SPEAKER_2: And we're out west, we're of the slightly different population.
SPEAKER_2: So encounter a wide...
SPEAKER_1: Like a slightly different population, where everyone has a gun.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, not everyone.
SPEAKER_2: It's not mandatory yet that you must carry a gun, as far as I know.
SPEAKER_2: That's probably coming soon.
SPEAKER_2: But no, we encounter a wide range of views and that's sort of part of our job is to be able to talk to a lot of different kinds of people.
SPEAKER_1: And at the basis of all of this is kind of what is your science education as a kid, right?
SPEAKER_1: Growing up and what were your teachers like?
SPEAKER_1: What was the culture of your family like?
SPEAKER_1: And so I chatted with Bill Maher about his own sort of upbringing and what influence that might have had on him, let's check it out.
SPEAKER_1: So Bill, where'd you grow up?
SPEAKER_3: That's a little personal, doc.
SPEAKER_1: I didn't mean to get that personal on you.
SPEAKER_3: I thought this was about science.
SPEAKER_3: Now I grew up in New Jersey.
SPEAKER_1: What exit?
SPEAKER_3: The most made fun of state, so that's why I always like to say it with pride.
SPEAKER_1: Did you go to public schools there?
SPEAKER_3: Oh yes, I had a very leave it to beaver upbringing, but it really bothers me that the current governor of New Jersey, Governor Fat Fatty, was asked recently what he thought of evolution and his answer was, that's none of your business, which really bothered me because, you know, as I say, we were so made fun of New Jersey, you know, what exit, and it stinks, all that stuff, but the one thing we had was that, hey, we're one of the smarter states, I thought.
SPEAKER_1: In fact, New Jersey had the highest per capita number of PhDs.
SPEAKER_1: We didn't have all the universities there, and they had all the think tanks and all the pharmaceutical companies, so you're right, it was one of the smartest states.
SPEAKER_3: Right, well, I didn't know that, but I did know that we were in Kansas or Alabama, and we had that to, you know, at least wear as a badge of pride, and so to find out that the governor of this state, where I got a pretty good public school education, was telling people, none of your business, when they ask them about evolution, that's what you say when they ask if you made a baby with a maid for crying out loud.
SPEAKER_3: So that did not sit well with me.
SPEAKER_1: But you turned out okay, so you clearly were under the leadership of a previous governor.
SPEAKER_3: Well, it wasn't the governor, it was a different world back then when the Republicans weren't crazy and anti-intellectual.
SPEAKER_3: But yeah, I think New Jersey was a pretty darn good place to grow up.
SPEAKER_1: Just a couple of points there.
SPEAKER_1: When people joke about the exit, the New Jersey turnpike goes the entire length of New Jersey and it's got like 18 or 20 exits to it.
SPEAKER_1: And so people joke about what exit are you from and also about whether New Jersey stinks.
SPEAKER_1: It's not just a sentimental argument against it, it's that there are oil refineries not far from New York City in New Jersey and you drive through there and everyone says, roll down the window, who just cut the cheese?
SPEAKER_1: It's actually the window is the problem because everything smells like rotten eggs in that section.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know if you knew that, David.
SPEAKER_2: I've been to New Jersey.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I saw the Grateful Dead there when I was in college.
SPEAKER_1: Oh yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: And they've got some points of pride.
SPEAKER_1: You know, the boss is from Jersey.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: We all know about Jersey from Springsteen, Linux.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, yeah, so, but the theme here is what does your upbringing do for you and what's taught in the schools?
SPEAKER_1: So do you have strong opinions about this across the country?
SPEAKER_1: You know, our Constitution does not specify how you educate people, and you're about to spend a year in Washington at the Library of Congress, where you have this new chair of astrobiology, the first occupant, and I don't think you are without influence as to how you can convince people of what should happen in the elementary schools.
SPEAKER_2: Well, I do have strong opinions in that, you know, I absolutely think science should be taught in science class, and religion shouldn't be taught in science class.
SPEAKER_2: Although it's funny, you know, when you hear this debate, and you hear some of these bills about multiple views and the evidence for them should be presented in science class, and people rail against that because they think, oh, that's a secret plan to get religion in science class.
SPEAKER_2: Well, if they're really gonna honestly talk about multiple views and really honestly talk about the evidence, then I'm all in favor of that.
SPEAKER_2: So it depends if you're really gonna do that or use that as a subterfuge to start denying evolution.
SPEAKER_1: Well, of course, the difference is there are debatable topics on the frontier of science that scientists talk about all the time.
SPEAKER_1: And then there are issues in politics and religion that people bring to the science table, and then they wanna assert that these are legitimate controversies in science, when in fact, they're just not.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I mean, science thrives on controversy.
SPEAKER_2: If we didn't have different views, we wouldn't be making progress.
SPEAKER_2: That's what we do.
SPEAKER_2: You put forward ideas and you shoot them down.
SPEAKER_2: But there's also sort of fake controversy that gets promoted sometimes by people with an interest in sort of muddying the waters.
SPEAKER_2: And then you can get into the whole climate question, which is a great example of that.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but what you have are politicians and media bringing the cultural dissension towards scientific views and then asserting that as the actual controversy.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I mean, that's a problem because again, scientists have to disagree with each other, but people can use that disagreement and say, aha, you don't agree, nobody knows anything and therefore we don't have to act.
SPEAKER_2: And you have to be able to have uncertainty and yet have an opinion about what's likely.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, so when we come back in our next segment, more with my interview with Bill Maher and we start to, we talk about how funding has influenced politics and what gets taught in schools.
SPEAKER_1: We're back on StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, a natural physicist at New York City's American Museum of Natural History.
SPEAKER_1: I also serve as the director of the Hayden Planetarium there and I've got in studio as my guest co-host, my friend and colleague, David Grinspoon, of recent months has been benighted, the Bloomberg Astrobiologist Chair.
SPEAKER_1: Is that right?
SPEAKER_1: Do I get that right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress.
SPEAKER_1: That's just so cool.
SPEAKER_1: It sounds so lofty and that's like a really awesome business card that when you get those made, I want one of those.
SPEAKER_2: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: So we've been listening to my interview with Bill Maher and Bill Maher, the always guaranteed controversial Bill Maher who speaks his mind which is actually quite refreshing if you like that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_1: I happen to love that sort of thing and he's a political commentator and a comedian, host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher and I interviewed him from his offices in Los Angeles in my last trip out there and we were talking about how sort of politics and religion might influence science education, in particular how religion and their forces might try to get religious agendas in the school.
SPEAKER_1: But religion is not the only force out there.
SPEAKER_1: There's politics, right?
SPEAKER_1: There can be politics without religion that's trying to change agendas.
SPEAKER_1: And so I've been intrigued by that.
SPEAKER_1: How would you assess the political climate at your home base in Colorado and Denver?
SPEAKER_2: Well, it's mixed.
SPEAKER_2: It's Colorado's traditionally sort of red state, whatever Republican state, but there are these hotbeds of liberalism in more of the urbanized areas, Denver, Boulder, Aspen, and-
SPEAKER_1: That's a general truth, that the closer you live to a city, the more liberal your views become.
SPEAKER_1: I've always found that to be an interesting demographic statistic.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it is interesting.
SPEAKER_2: And there have been some battles about education in the schools.
SPEAKER_2: For the most part, I think that has not been a huge problem, that science is still taught in science classes.
SPEAKER_2: And we have problems with our schools as far as I'm not having resources and the same kind of things I have everywhere.
SPEAKER_2: But it's not religious incursion, it's not really our biggest problem that we're having in the schools.
SPEAKER_1: So of course, there's what forced religion either does or doesn't have in trying to shape the agenda.
SPEAKER_1: There's also the notions particularly emergent in recent times that there's a Republican war on science.
SPEAKER_1: And I never fully agreed with all of those claims that were made, because when I think of a war, I think of someone trying to withdraw funding.
SPEAKER_1: That's kind of what matters in Washington.
SPEAKER_1: What you say is irrelevant, it's what do you do about budget?
SPEAKER_1: Does your budget go up?
SPEAKER_1: Does it go down?
SPEAKER_1: And I noted that in most of the 20th century that funding for science has been higher under Republican presidents than it has been under Democratic presidents.
SPEAKER_1: And that's sort of what I cue on, because that's what drives things.
SPEAKER_1: And in my interview with Bill Maher, I posed this to him, because he's very anti-Republican, especially of late, and I just was curious what his views were.
SPEAKER_1: Let's check that out.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't know if you know this, but over the last 50 years, funding for science in the country has been higher under Republican presidents than under Democratic presidents.
SPEAKER_1: And so the argument there is, well, because they're just funding their, like, Star Wars and all this other stuff.
SPEAKER_1: But it's just a fact.
SPEAKER_1: And so how would you work with that information?
SPEAKER_3: Well, first of all, if you're going back 50 years, the Republican Party was very different 50 years ago.
SPEAKER_3: It was very different 20 years ago.
SPEAKER_3: 50 years ago, there was such a thing as a liberal Republican, actual liberals who were Republicans.
SPEAKER_3: Nelson Rockefeller, John Lindsay, Everett Dirksen, Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, lots of liberal Republicans.
SPEAKER_1: That's a good list.
SPEAKER_3: It was a completely different party.
SPEAKER_3: 20 years ago, there were moderate Republicans.
SPEAKER_3: So, you know, in that environment, I'm not surprised yet Republican Nixon started the EPA.
SPEAKER_3: Republicans, you know, before this recent era of insane Republicans, before this time, when the left moved to the center and the right moved to the mental ward, yeah, Republicans did a lot of good things and they were not a party that you simply sneered at because there was no one in that party who was a weirdo.
SPEAKER_3: I keep calling them mental and crazy.
SPEAKER_3: I'm trying to find another way around it that seems more genteel, but I can't.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, there's nobody left in that party.
SPEAKER_3: There's no such thing anymore.
SPEAKER_1: Who do you blame, the candidates?
SPEAKER_3: As a moderate Republican?
SPEAKER_1: The candidates or the people who elect the candidates?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, these are our fellow countrymen.
SPEAKER_3: Absolutely, I always blame the people.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, it always goes back to the people.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, obviously, politicians leave a lot to be desired, but they go where the votes are.
SPEAKER_3: That's why this is a representative democracy.
SPEAKER_3: So yeah, if they are us, that's what you're saying.
SPEAKER_3: They are us.
SPEAKER_3: If the Tea Party didn't exist, if the Tea Party, the base of the Republican Party, which is the Tea Party, didn't believe what it believed, you would not hear politicians pander to that.
SPEAKER_3: And yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, so okay, so I didn't know he was not always anti-Republican.
SPEAKER_1: That's an emergent, he might have always voted Democrat, but the vehemence is particularly strong in recent years.
SPEAKER_1: What I'm interested, though, is if you look at the split of who is generally liberal and who is generally conservative, and you look at scientists, in my experience, and scientists, particularly Astro folk, are like 95% liberal Democrat anti-war.
SPEAKER_1: Is that consistent with your data, too?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I would say so.
SPEAKER_2: And part of that is just, I think, academics and intellectuals are typically more sort of progressive lefty or whatever.
SPEAKER_2: And I consider myself that, although hopefully not knee-jerk lefty.
SPEAKER_1: What's your insight into what stimulates that?
SPEAKER_2: Well, that's an interesting question.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, as a progressive lefty, I would say it's because those are enlightened positions.
SPEAKER_2: But I actually agree with what Bill Maher said, is that the Republican Party has a history of enlightened positions that are just different from the Democratic Party.
SPEAKER_2: And unfortunately, there are some very loud voices today which do not represent the whole Republican Party but are extremely visible, which are clearly anti-science.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, there are people saying that all of climate science is some crazy conspiracy, which it's not.
SPEAKER_2: And unfortunately, those tend to be Republican Tea Party type people.
SPEAKER_2: That's not the entire Republican Party.
SPEAKER_2: It certainly doesn't represent the history of the Republican Party, but it's very loud right now, and that leads to some of this concept of a Republican war on science, which may be unfair.
SPEAKER_1: Right, especially since Abraham Lincoln was Republican.
SPEAKER_1: And in fact, he founded the National Academy of Sciences as an advising body to Congress.
SPEAKER_1: So there's interesting legacies there.
SPEAKER_1: But what of the one in a hundred or ten in a hundred, perhaps, scientists who you can see being marched forward with views that are just counter to what the emergent consensus had been?
SPEAKER_1: What's your view of that?
SPEAKER_1: Because they become very useful political pawns.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Right?
SPEAKER_1: If you've got somebody who's denying climate change and they're scientists and they're pedigreed and they come from a fancy institution, they get they are found, they are marched forward.
SPEAKER_1: And it's like, see, we got our guy and you got your guy.
SPEAKER_1: So therefore, it's a controversy.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah.
SPEAKER_2: Well, first of all, if you remove it from just the politics, we need those guys.
SPEAKER_2: Science needs its dissenters.
SPEAKER_2: You know, it's not science.
SPEAKER_2: If everybody agrees, we need scientists to our dissenters.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly.
SPEAKER_2: But what gets complicated is when people bring agendas to it, political agendas.
SPEAKER_2: And then some of these guys get put on pedestals and they say, aha, they don't agree.
SPEAKER_2: And then some of them, there's some dishonesty.
SPEAKER_2: You look at the agendas, and some of these people are under the payroll of some company that maybe is going to benefit if we don't change our policy in a way that might be guided by the science.
SPEAKER_2: Certainly not all of them.
SPEAKER_2: But that's where it gets complicated, is that there are these agendas that get brought into that arena.
SPEAKER_1: Well, that's because scientists are human beings, right?
SPEAKER_1: And we speak of the word agenda as though it's bad, but everybody's got an agenda.
SPEAKER_1: I've got an agenda.
SPEAKER_1: I want to sort of spread the love of science literacy.
SPEAKER_1: And so, is that bad?
SPEAKER_2: Well, it's bad when the science is skewed in a way that is not made clear.
SPEAKER_2: Like, say somebody's...
SPEAKER_1: Oh, I see.
SPEAKER_1: So it influences the interpretation of the science.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, I mean, a classic example, there's a study of a drug that gets published showing that this drug really works and somebody's making a profit from that.
SPEAKER_2: And it turns out that that study was funded by the company that's making a profit.
SPEAKER_2: If that's not revealed, you've got a problem.
SPEAKER_2: If there's an agenda that is not just seeking the truth, which is ultimately what science is about.
SPEAKER_1: So, in fact, we're quite...
SPEAKER_1: you and I are quite insulated from this as astro-folk because...
SPEAKER_2: Because there's no way anybody could make a profit doing what we do.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, it is true I wrote a book on Pluto about that controversy, but that book was not a bestseller, I'll have you know.
SPEAKER_2: We can write books, and if they're good, then people ought to buy them and we ought to make money.
SPEAKER_2: But for actually doing our research and publishing papers, basically government funding is really the only game for that.
SPEAKER_2: It's hard to imagine why somebody would have a strong agenda for one answer or another if that's your source of funding.
SPEAKER_1: It's funny, at my first political appointment, it actually turned out to be under George Bush, I had this long interview and testing my worthiness of such a post, and I was asked, have I ever been involved in any controversial issues?
SPEAKER_1: So I said, yes, the demotion of Pluto?
SPEAKER_1: They're ready for me to reveal some politically deep political issue here.
SPEAKER_1: When we come back more with my interview with Bill Maher and my in-studio guest, friend and colleague David Hainspoon.
SPEAKER_1: He's a comedian, of course.
SPEAKER_1: We're a political commentator, host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.
SPEAKER_1: He's sort of a rabid leftist commentator, yet on every one of his shows, he's got a guest who's definitely from the right, unimpeachably from the right.
SPEAKER_1: So he loves hearing your views and then making fun of them.
SPEAKER_1: And, you know, politics can be an issue of life or death, not only, of course, in warfare, but in other elements of modern life.
SPEAKER_1: Like the death penalty, abortion, these issues come up, and they're not completely intractable to scientific analysis.
SPEAKER_1: And I just wanted to explore what Bill Maher had to say on these topics.
SPEAKER_1: Check it out.
SPEAKER_1: You support the death penalty, according to my note.
SPEAKER_1: Isn't it largely Republican?
SPEAKER_3: I don't, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: You might not have birthed the idea, but...
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I have a lot of ideas that you might consider conservative, but I feel like on that, I'm just consistent, like the Pope is consistently pro-life, I'm consistently pro-death.
SPEAKER_3: I'm for the death penalty, although I do believe in more DNA testing.
SPEAKER_3: My motto is let's kill the right people.
SPEAKER_3: I'm pro-choice.
SPEAKER_3: I'm for assisted suicide.
SPEAKER_3: I'm for regular suicide.
SPEAKER_3: I'm for whatever gets the freeway moving.
SPEAKER_3: That's what I'm for.
SPEAKER_1: All right, wait, wait.
SPEAKER_3: It's too crowded.
SPEAKER_3: The planet is too crowded and we need to promote death.
SPEAKER_1: When I look at the Venn diagram of people who are pro-death penalty and pro-choice, I don't think they intersect.
SPEAKER_1: You may be the lone person in the world at that intersection.
SPEAKER_3: Absolutely not.
SPEAKER_3: I've met plenty of people who have the same feelings.
SPEAKER_1: Pro-choice and.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I mean, well, I'm not randomly going around in the street saying, hey, we're gonna kill you.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, we're talking about people who've earned it.
SPEAKER_3: But as I say, you know.
SPEAKER_1: Kill the right people.
SPEAKER_3: Kill the right people.
SPEAKER_3: You know, there probably should be a moratorium on it until they can get it right.
SPEAKER_3: Because certainly you don't want more situations like they had down in Texas.
SPEAKER_3: And I'm sure other states where, you know, the guys with lawyers who fell asleep and wound up being on death row and prejudice and lots of other ridiculous.
SPEAKER_3: But nowadays, I think it is possible.
SPEAKER_1: In principle, to get that right.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, to get that right.
SPEAKER_3: And some of the heinous crimes people commit.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know what is more humane actually to warehouse someone in prison for their entire life.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, some lives, you know, if that's what the rest of your life is going to be, you have no possibility of parole.
SPEAKER_3: I think it's actually more humane to just snuff it out.
SPEAKER_1: I heard they got rid of the final dinner.
SPEAKER_1: You have to eat the prison food.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, now that's cruel and unusual.
SPEAKER_3: That's a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
SPEAKER_3: But I'm just not one of those people who thinks all life is precious, you know?
SPEAKER_3: I bet you a lot of people wouldn't say that, but if you're pro-choice, maybe that's really what you're thinking anyway.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, this is the big controversy that Rick Santorum brought up.
SPEAKER_3: He does not like prenatal testing because he says that leads to abortion, because people find out that they're gonna have a child who is not normal in some way, and they have an abortion because they don't wanna raise a child with severe challenges.
SPEAKER_3: I don't think there's anything wrong with that, to not bring someone in the world whose life is gonna be so miserable in so many ways and so severely compromised.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, it's not that hard to create life.
SPEAKER_3: It's teeming everywhere.
SPEAKER_3: It's something a dog can do.
SPEAKER_1: It's in case you didn't know, dogs can create life.
SPEAKER_1: In studio with me is David Grinspoon.
SPEAKER_1: He's an astrobiologist, so you spend quite a bit of time thinking about life and possibly the value of life.
SPEAKER_2: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: Where do those thoughts lead you?
SPEAKER_2: Well, this isn't a scientific thought.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe it's a scientific.
SPEAKER_1: You're allowed to not have to have.
SPEAKER_2: Informed thought, but I think life is precious and partly why I'm interested in finding life elsewhere is I would love to find a universe full of life.
SPEAKER_1: Well, I have to interject.
SPEAKER_1: Earth does not think life is precious because it's responsible for rendering extinct, 95% of all life that ever was.
SPEAKER_2: Ah, but yet the biosphere itself looked at as a global kind of organism has persisted for four billion years.
SPEAKER_1: That's very new age of you.
SPEAKER_1: Thank you.
SPEAKER_2: It's also very Gaian of me.
SPEAKER_1: Gaian, where Earth is an organism unto itself.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, but Earth does have this biosphere that has persisted.
SPEAKER_2: Species come and go, individuals come and go, and yet the stream of life that we're part of continues.
SPEAKER_2: And I think that if for some reason we find out that the rest of the universe is barren, then I think there's an argument that we should spread life to other places.
SPEAKER_2: So I do hold that life itself is a value, that life is better than non-life.
SPEAKER_1: Well, you raise an important branch point for me, because when you see people who are sort of anti-abortion and then you part the curtains, in almost every case, they are deeply religious.
SPEAKER_1: And so it's, I think one can argue without much debate that religion is informing their motives for being anti-abortion.
SPEAKER_1: Are there ways that you think issues of science and science analysis can inform these issues?
SPEAKER_1: So then you have a basis, a political basis that has objectively verifiable foundations.
SPEAKER_2: Well, absolutely.
SPEAKER_2: It can shed light on it.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, people are very black and white about this.
SPEAKER_2: They're pro or anti.
SPEAKER_2: Well, nobody's pro-abortion, I hope, but a lot of us are pro-choice.
SPEAKER_2: And the question is unwanted pregnancies.
SPEAKER_2: And science, of course, can add to the biological technology that can help us avoid more pregnancies, like if we came up with a good male pill, that would be great.
SPEAKER_2: But it can also inform...
SPEAKER_1: You take that along with the Viagra, right?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, the combination would be wonderful.
SPEAKER_2: No, but the day after conception, is that a human being?
SPEAKER_2: It's a few cells, a blastula.
SPEAKER_1: We have words for it, a blastula.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, it's like eight cells, that's not a human being.
SPEAKER_2: But the day before birth, that is a human being.
SPEAKER_2: So, I mean, science can tell us more about that developmental process and at least inform.
SPEAKER_1: And then influence how you then might vote.
SPEAKER_1: When we come back more, my interview with Bill Maher and my in-studio guest.
SPEAKER_1: We're back on Star Talk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil Dress Tyson and this week I've got David Goodespoon, an astrobiologist, and together we've been reacting to my interview with Bill Maher that I conducted with him in his Los Angeles offices.
SPEAKER_1: He's, of course, a political commentator and host of HBO's Real Time.
SPEAKER_1: Politics, David, can have a strong influence on people's lives, and a political stance can include opinions about homosexuality, gambling, marijuana, drugs in general, just the sort of the morality of your community.
SPEAKER_1: And I asked Bill Maher, just what are his viewpoints on morality laws?
SPEAKER_1: Let's see what he said.
SPEAKER_1: You wanna legalize gambling, prostitution, marijuana.
SPEAKER_1: Is that the Trinity there?
SPEAKER_3: I think your notes are a little behind.
SPEAKER_3: I think gambling is pretty much legal since every state in the nation funds.
SPEAKER_1: That's a lottery.
SPEAKER_3: Funds higher education.
SPEAKER_3: How perverse is that through a lottery system which is mostly patronized by poor people.
SPEAKER_3: But we also have casinos all over.
SPEAKER_3: We have Indian gizzitos.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, you cannot swing a dead cat without hitting gambling in this country.
SPEAKER_3: Now, the other ones you mentioned were what, marijuana?
SPEAKER_1: Prostitution.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I mean, this is standard libertarian stuff.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, there's nothing complicated about the old theory that anything should be legal as long as it doesn't hurt another person.
SPEAKER_3: Now, you can always say, as the arguers on the other side say, well, marijuana, you could get high and get in a car and kill somebody.
SPEAKER_3: Of course you could.
SPEAKER_3: You could all do that with liquor.
SPEAKER_3: You could do it talking on a cell phone.
SPEAKER_3: Lots of other things, some prescription, talking on a cell phone, putting on makeup.
SPEAKER_3: Prostitution, they exploit people.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, of course, we should stop that.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, but we have laws against that anyway.
SPEAKER_3: But let's not forget that there's just a lot of hoes in this country who are not being exploited.
SPEAKER_3: They just is hoes.
SPEAKER_1: Bill Maher, the guy is funny, crazy.
SPEAKER_1: And so I wanna get an astrobiologist's view on this.
SPEAKER_1: Is there, when we think of morality, one of them is, thou shalt not kill, all right?
SPEAKER_1: We're all there.
SPEAKER_1: If an alien landed on earth and they're clearly intelligent and you kill them, there's actually no law against killing an alien from another planet.
SPEAKER_2: I don't believe we have anything on the books about that.
SPEAKER_1: So you're gonna work to make that happen?
SPEAKER_1: And how about microbes?
SPEAKER_1: At what point are you saying this life, you know, we've all, well, some of us perhaps have, the first act of violence you ever did with a magnifying glass was like burn an ant on the sidewalk, right?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, so there's certain lives that we care much less about, but you're an astrobiologist and you have to care about every single kind of life.
SPEAKER_1: Especially since, correct me if I'm wrong, the first life we are likely to find anywhere is probably microbial.
SPEAKER_1: So that's gonna be a very cherished discovery for you.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, and we do actually have some laws or regulations that guide the way we treat potential alien microbes.
SPEAKER_2: So we have-
SPEAKER_2: The astrobiology community, NASA, has planetary protection policies by which-
SPEAKER_1: Are we protecting Earth or protecting where we're going?
SPEAKER_2: Well, both.
SPEAKER_2: Protecting Martians is the policy about what we call forward contamination, and protecting Earth is the policy about what we call back contamination, not accidentally bringing something back.
SPEAKER_1: Like in the Andromeda Stream.
SPEAKER_2: For instance, yeah.
SPEAKER_2: But I mean, we don't wanna inadvertently kill microbes on Mars for two reasons.
SPEAKER_2: The one reason is just science.
SPEAKER_2: If we perturb the environment before we get a chance to study it-
SPEAKER_1: On Mars.
SPEAKER_2: On Mars, say.
SPEAKER_2: Then we've committed a crime against science.
SPEAKER_2: But then there's also these crimes against nature, if you will, the possibility that we will be inadvertently destroying a biosphere, a Martian biosphere that might be just valuable intrinsically, and that's more of an ethical issue.
SPEAKER_1: Is there any way you can bring your scientific training in astrobiology to bear on morality here on Earth?
SPEAKER_1: Morality relates to the conduct of life in a society.
SPEAKER_2: I think we can bring it to bear in indirect ways.
SPEAKER_2: I mean, Bill Maher mentioned the drug laws, and for instance, we can study the health effects and the risks of different drugs, and he mentioned marijuana.
SPEAKER_2: Well, marijuana is incontrovertibly much safer than alcohol.
SPEAKER_2: Alcohol leads to so many deaths and so much disease and so forth, and marijuana just-
SPEAKER_2: And addiction.
SPEAKER_2: And addiction, and marijuana just doesn't, and yet we have this prohibition.
SPEAKER_2: We tried prohibition with alcohol.
SPEAKER_2: It led to a lot of violence and crime.
SPEAKER_2: It didn't work.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so these are non-evidence-based laws.
SPEAKER_2: Exactly, so we can try to make our laws about moral issues evidence-based.
SPEAKER_1: And what are you doing in your part to make that happen?
SPEAKER_2: Well, you know, I'm trying to educate the public to use science and reason in general, and so I would argue that in some way that helps with these issues.
SPEAKER_2: I'm not going out and telling people what their moral beliefs should be.
SPEAKER_1: But if you get them from the beginning thinking rationally, maybe that'll just follow.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, one would hope.
SPEAKER_1: When we come back on StarTalk Radio, there'll be more with my interview with Bill Maher, and I'm going to ask him why is it that sort of comedians are primarily liberal sorts?
SPEAKER_1: I mean, there's some who are conservative, but mostly they're liberal.
SPEAKER_1: You're listening to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: And by the way, we're on the web at startalkradio.com.
SPEAKER_1: Check us out.
SPEAKER_1: We're back on StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm an astrophysicist, by the way.
SPEAKER_1: And with me in studio is David Grinspoon.
SPEAKER_1: He's an astrobiologist.
SPEAKER_1: And we've been listening to my interview with Bill Maher.
SPEAKER_1: Of course, you know, he's a comedian, political commentator, host of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher.
SPEAKER_1: And today, it seems that people are more divided than ever.
SPEAKER_1: I don't know if everyone of every age says that about the age in which they live, but it kind of feels more that way now.
SPEAKER_1: And I talk with Bill Maher about why so many artists and comedians tend to take a liberal stand on the political spectrum.
SPEAKER_1: And by the way, David, you and I discussed this about scientists earlier, but I wanna bring it all together in this segment and just see where it takes us.
SPEAKER_1: Let's check out what Bill Maher's reaction to this fact.
SPEAKER_1: Check it out.
SPEAKER_3: Most people in the arts, not just comedians, are liberal.
SPEAKER_3: It goes with the territory.
SPEAKER_1: Why?
SPEAKER_3: Well, because I would like to think as we're smarter.
SPEAKER_3: There was a reason.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, that's the answer.
SPEAKER_3: And we're creative and we're open-minded and we're just better people.
SPEAKER_3: There was a study recently out of Canada.
SPEAKER_3: They tracked people for, I'm sure you saw this, it was about two or three weeks ago.
SPEAKER_3: They tracked people for a long period of time and they came out with the finding that lower IQs tend to produce people who are conservative in their beliefs.
SPEAKER_3: They're more close-minded, they're more racist.
SPEAKER_3: You know, I would file this under a top duh.
SPEAKER_1: I think I remember the study.
SPEAKER_1: There's an IQ difference, I thought.
SPEAKER_1: Is that the study that you're referencing?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, lower IQs equal more conservative.
SPEAKER_3: Liberal means comes from the root, as we all know, for free, free thinking.
SPEAKER_1: I've forgotten that.
SPEAKER_1: Thanks for reminding me.
SPEAKER_3: Same root as Libra, liberated.
SPEAKER_3: Liberal is not a dirty word.
SPEAKER_3: It certainly didn't used to be.
SPEAKER_3: It became one, and it shouldn't be.
SPEAKER_3: But most people in the arts, I mean, it's very hard to find in this town, the conservatives.
SPEAKER_3: The conservatives in this town would say that there is a whitelist, the opposite of a blacklist.
SPEAKER_3: They'd say it's very hard to get work in this town when you're a conservative.
SPEAKER_1: This town is LA.
SPEAKER_3: This town being LA, of course, Hollywood, because they say it's run by a bunch of liberals and it's obviously a large Jewish community.
SPEAKER_1: The same thing is said in academia.
SPEAKER_3: A large gay community, right, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I don't know if there's no whitelisting or whitelist that's BS.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, if Clint Eastwood, who's a conservative, makes a good movie as he has for 30 years, they hire him.
SPEAKER_3: Bruce Willis doesn't seem to have any trouble working.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, the reason why Scott Baio doesn't work that much is they don't want to hire him that much.
SPEAKER_3: It's not because he's conservative.
SPEAKER_1: There's also Charlton Heston.
SPEAKER_1: Charlton come up too.
SPEAKER_3: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: The honorary head of the NRA.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, there's been plenty of conservatives, absolutely.
SPEAKER_3: And they certainly aren't prejudiced against the Scientologists, I'll tell you that.
SPEAKER_1: So it is, I think it's a fascinating sociocultural point that artists, creative types, just simply tend to be more liberal and scientists tend to be more liberal.
SPEAKER_1: David, do you see any common denominator there?
SPEAKER_2: Well, you know, it's strange.
SPEAKER_2: You know, you think of the word, he mentioned the origin of the word liberal.
SPEAKER_2: What's the origin of the word conservative?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, you think about conserving things and preserving the natural world would seem to be a part of that.
SPEAKER_2: And therefore, you know, a lot of what science leads a lot of us to think about, one would think these are conservative values, trying to understand what's happening to climate and conserve our ability to have a civilization on this planet.
SPEAKER_2: Why is that liberal?
SPEAKER_1: Conservation is not the same thing as preservation.
SPEAKER_1: It's not, it's really not.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, so conservation, a conservative outlook can be, I don't want my way of life to change, no matter what else is going on with the birds and the bees.
SPEAKER_1: So, but go on.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, well, okay, that's an interesting point.
SPEAKER_2: But you know, also conservatives, I think, talk a lot about freedom, right?
SPEAKER_2: And freedom also is something that is very precious to academics and scientists, you know, being able to think about what we want and talk about what we want.
SPEAKER_1: Without anybody looking over your shoulder.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, so why isn't that, I mean, you think about the founding fathers and their notion of the kind of nation we were gonna have.
SPEAKER_2: And to me, that's very consistent with what I think about as sort of liberal values.
SPEAKER_2: So I don't completely understand some of these schisms.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, so they're just artificial then on some level.
SPEAKER_2: To some degree.
SPEAKER_1: They're not really analytically explored to their natural conclusions.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, so when I think of a nation divided, I think of it as one where everybody wants everybody to think just like they do.
SPEAKER_1: But if everybody were sort of rabid liberal and wanted just, I wonder if a country can actually function that way.
SPEAKER_1: What a country might need to be is to have that tension between these two extremes, because each extreme taken alone would destroy the country, but the combination of the two allow the country to function, not move to any whim that occurs, so you have some restoring force, but you need also someone to reach out and go where others hadn't been before.
SPEAKER_1: And so I see it kind of like as oil and vinegar as in your salad dressing.
SPEAKER_1: You would never make a salad with just oil or just vinegar.
SPEAKER_1: Do you agree with that?
SPEAKER_2: Well, yeah, I think there's a model there also, about the scientific process.
SPEAKER_2: Again, you really need these different viewpoints and the balance between them ultimately is what keeps us going forward.
SPEAKER_1: We gotta end on that.
SPEAKER_1: David, thanks for being in studio with me on StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, I gotta do a tweet.
SPEAKER_1: I got one.
SPEAKER_1: How about, odd that most people want everyone else to be just like them, but the best of all worlds, I think, is when we can all just be ourselves.
SPEAKER_1: You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, funded in part by the National Science Foundation.
SPEAKER_1: As always, keep looking up.
SPEAKER_1: We'll see you next time.