The East Side Brights Meetup Group Monthly Meetup

Join us at Tuesday evening’s East Side Brights Meetup at the Redmond Pancake House, beginning at 07:00 pm. You are encouraged to bring one or more friends.

In accordance with the East Side Brights Meetup Group’s plan to offer more formal, prepared presentations, I am pleased to announce that our own Candice Bradley, PhD, will be presenting a lecture entitled: Self-deception, Evolutionary Biology and the Scientific Method: A Core Concept for a Skeptical Worldview

Lecturer: Candice Bradley, a member of the East Side Brights, is a quantitative anthropologist who received her Ph.D. from UC Irvine. For a more extensive curriculum vitae, please read the final paragraph of this announcement.

Lecture Abstract: The skeptical literature has focused quite a bit on lying and deception, particularly as components of magical worldviews. Self-deception however, although a central concept in social and evolutionary biology -- and an issue at the very heart of skeptical inquiry -- has received significantly less attention.

Self-deception may be defined as "any mental process or behavior the function of which is to conceal information from one's own conscious mind" (Smith:21). We find deception throughout nature, but self-deception is a particularly human problem. It is why scientists set up double-blinds, the very force behind the human pair-bond, and the reason we fail to perceive the politician's lie, despite the give-away body language. In fact, we "know" a heck of a lot more that we allow ourselves to recognize, and there is a heck of a lot our brains don't allow us to know. Self-deception has made it possible for us to live amongst each other as social beings, while simultaneously mucking up our ability to perceive what is "real" without the rigorous tools of the scientific method.

This talk explores the social biology of self-deception and why understanding self-deception is important to science and skepticism alike.

Recommended Reading: Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind, by David Livingstone Smith (2004, NY: St. Martin's Press)

About the Lecturer: Candice Bradley is a quantitative anthropologist who received her Ph.D. from UC Irvine. She has conducted field research on fertility decline in Africa with grants from Fulbright, Rockefeller and the National Science Foundation. She was a tenured associate professor and department chair at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, and has done post-doctoral research and teaching at the University of Nairobi, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Zimbabwe. Evolution was one of the first things she remembers being taught as a preschooler. While in graduate school, she worked as a research assistant for a UCLA sociobiologist studying self-deception, and has continuing lifelong interests in genetics, evolutionary biology and the scientific method. Dr. Bradley has numerous scholarly publications as well as an edited book. She currently works as a freelance grantwriter and is a part-time instructor at Bellevue College.