The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast · Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, Rose de Castellane, Gregory Mill

Episode 144, Steven Pinker x Richard Dawkins: Live in London (Part I - The Future of Humanity)

June 15, 2025·1 hr 5 min·6 clips

Pinker explains the 'most depressing discovery about the brain' where numerate people misinterpret data to fit their politics.

The setting matters here. At London's Royal Institution Theatre, Richard Dawkins pulls Stephen Pinker through psychology, sociology, evolutionary theory, and the worries that gather around the future. The question is progress. Dawkins presses him on whether his work sounds too Panglossian, especially when daily intuition says the world is getting worse. Pinker does not preach optimism. He says he watches the data with apprehension because the answer is not tidy or soothing. Progress is not magic. Pinker pushes back against the grand story that nature carries humanity upward on its own. Things fall apart. Human nature has ugly parts, and the second law of thermodynamics is a dry way of saying decline does not need help. That is why the actual causes matter. Antibiotics, vaccines, democracy, the rule of law, and markets are not ornaments on history. They do work. Remove them, and reversal follows. The pandemic is the test case. Pinker says measures such as longevity, poverty, and other social goods moved backwards during that period. Then he adds the wrinkle. In the data he cites, lost ground has been recovered in areas including longevity, child mortality, and extreme poverty. So the optimism is conditional. It is not a mood or a creed. It is a claim that evidence can interrupt the gloomy drama our instincts prefer. The ending loosens up. Dawkins tells a story about asking a chatbot about Helen Spurway and getting a plausible but false claim involving him, then another involving Aldous Huxley. Pinker explains the trick neatly: each link sounds statistically reasonable, so the whole answer can still be wrong. The laugh comes with a warning tucked inside it.

As heard by us

A live conversation about progress and the future that stays sharp.

Richard Dawkins leads a live conversation with Stephen Pinker, and the exchange stays on track as he asks about Pinker's books and his work in psychology, sociology, and evolutionary theory. The episode moves from the past toward the future, and that gives it a clear shape.

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Why you'd press play

Press play for a live June 3, 2025 conversation at London's Royal Institution Theatre about whether human progress is holding up.

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