Curiosity Connections

This week's podcast is Converging Dialogs, with host Xavier Bonilla and guest Dalton Conley, the Henry Putnam University Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and a faculty affiliate at the Office of Population Research and the Center for Health and Wellbeing. Conley is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and faculty affiliate at the New York Genome Center. He earned a M.P.A. in Public Policy and Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia U. and a Ph.D. in Biology from NYU. Further, he has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation fellowships as well as a CAREER Award and the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. Conley is the author of eight books, and his most recent is The Social Genome: The New Science of Nature and Nurture, which is the subject of this podcast.

PLEASE NOTE: We require that attendees listen to the podcast below before attending the meeting to optimize discussion.

https://convergingdialogues.substack.com/p/410-the-social-genome-a-dialogue

or

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/410-the-social-genome-a-dialogue-with-dalton-conley/id1538513554?i=1000701484562

(1 hr., 25 min.)

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What's this podcast about?
One of the biggest questions in the human sciences for over 150 years has been how much of who we are is determined by nature versus nurture. In this episode, guest Dalton Conley asserts that this question is incorrectly framed because nature and nurture actually interact to make us who we are. As a pioneer in the field of sociogenomics or social genomics, Conley looks at how genetic predispositions interact with social environments to shape human behavior and outcomes, including things like educational attainment, risk-taking, and other sociological phenomena. In the podcast, he discusses the potential uses and ethics of the polygenic index (PGI), which allows us to analyze DNA to measure/predict a person’s genetic potential. Conley talks about the different ways genes and the environment interact, epigenetics, and much more. While the podcast is somewhat technical, it's also fairly accessible and (to me) surprising in many ways by revealing how much our behavior is affected by others (like the people we went to high school with, even if those classmates weren't friends) and how similar we are to those we choose to be with. The podcast raises a number of interesting thoughts in the nascent field of social genomics.

What's a podcast club?
It's like a book club for podcasts. Each week we discuss an interesting and currently-relevant episode from podcasters like Ezra Klein, Michael Shermer, or Russ Roberts. We start off as a large group and spend most of the time talking in small break-out groups, which we remix 3 times over the course of the evening. Our conversations are casual and open. We ask that everyone speak respectfully at all times, and we encourage free and concise discussion relevant to the week's podcast topic. To do this, we try to adhere to Grice's Maxims: https://bit.ly/2p4uSQm

Ultimately, the idea is to help each other think a little differently, learn a thing or two and have some fun.

Join us as we begin our online book club discussion of The Big Picture: On the Origins of LIFE, MEANING, and the UNIVERSE ITSELF, by Sean Carroll.

Assigned reading for this week: Part 1: Cosmos - (Chapters 1 -8, 66 pages.) Please Note: Completion of the assigned reading is a prerequisite for attending. If you did not have the chance to do the reading, please join us another time.

What's this book about?
Already internationally acclaimed for his elegant, lucid writing on the most challenging notions in modern physics, Sean Carroll is emerging as one of the greatest humanist thinkers of his generation as he brings his extraordinary intellect to bear not only on Higgs bosons and extra dimensions but now also on our deepest personal questions: Where are we? Who are we? Are our emotions, our beliefs, and our hopes and dreams ultimately meaningless out there in the void? Do human purpose and meaning fit into a scientific worldview?

In short chapters filled with intriguing historical anecdotes, personal asides, and rigorous exposition, readers learn the difference between how the world works at the quantum level, the cosmic level, and the human level—and then how each connects to the other. Carroll's presentation of the principles that have guided the scientific revolution from Darwin and Einstein to the origins of life, consciousness, and the universe is dazzlingly unique.

Carroll shows how an avalanche of discoveries in the past few hundred years has changed our world and what really matters to us. Our lives are dwarfed like never before by the immensity of space and time, but they are redeemed by our capacity to comprehend it and give it meaning.

The Big Picture is an unprecedented scientific worldview, a tour de force that will sit on shelves alongside the works of Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, Daniel Dennett, and E. O. Wilson for years to come.

About the author.
Sean Carroll is Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and Fractal Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. His research focuses on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics, gravitation, statistical mechanics, and cosmology. He has wide-ranging interests, including in philosophy, complexity theory, and information.
Carroll is an active science communicator, and has been blogging regularly since 2004. His textbook "Spacetime and Geometry" has been adopted by a number of universities for their graduate courses in general relativity. He is a frequent public speaker, and has appeared on TV shows such as The Colbert Report and Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. He has produced a set of lectures for The Teaching Company on dark matter and dark energy, and another on the nature of time. He has served as a science consultant for films such as Thor and TRON: Legacy, as well as for TV shows such as Fringe and Bones.

How this book club works.
Our book discussion will be spread out over several consecutive weeks, with two-hour meetings every Tuesday evening. This gives us time to explore the readings with the depth and care they deserve. Please bring your own thought-provoking questions and insights from the reading to share with the group. We like lively discussions that challenge our own ideas and allow us to learn from each other -- while enjoying camaraderie! All we ask is that everyone be treated as co-equals, both in respect and approximate speaking time. Feel free to post (in the Comments below) any additional resources you find -- including ones that challenge the author. We hope to see you at our Tuesday meetings!