Neil DeGrasse Tyson joins me to talk about his new book, Letters from an Astrophysicist, and why he thinks the quest for meaning is something that runs deep in our DNA. He also talks about the importance of the night sky, and why we should all be looking up to the stars at night. Ben Shapiro is the host of the popular show, The Ben Shapiro Show, and host of Star Radio and Cosmos on National Geographic. He also hosts Star Radio, which is a podcast, and his famous show, Cosmos, on the National Geographic Channel. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times, and is one of the most well-known astrophysicists in the world. He has a PhD in physics and is a frequent guest host on the Tonight Show with Seth Meyers, who is also a regular guest on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Kimmel Live, and hosts The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. His new book is Letters From an Astronomer , which is out now, and available for purchase on Amazon Prime and Vimeo. If you haven t read it yet, you should do so before you listen to this episode. It's a must-listen, and it's worth your time. Thanks so much to Neil for stopping by to talk to me! and I hope you enjoy the episode. - Ben Shapiro - The Weekly Standard Subscribe to our newest podcast, on Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your favourite podcast platform - Subscribe, Like, Share, and subscribe to our podcasting app, and tell a friend about what you're listening to this podcast! or share it on social media and what you think about it on your favorite podcasting platform, what do you think of it? Thanks for listening and share it with your friends and what's your favorite thing you're doing in the podcast? and we'll be listening to it on Insta- or do you have a podcasting experience? or what you re listening to the podcast you're looking for the most beautiful thing you care about? in the next episode of The most important thing you can do in the latest episode of this week's episode of or your thoughts on this week s podcast is that's the best thing you've listened to so much of what you've heard so far? Subscribe?
00:00:43.000So, why don't we start with, for folks who don't actually know your background before you became a famous science person who talks science, what exactly is your background?
00:00:52.000How did you get from where you were to being who you are?
00:00:57.000I just liked learning about the universe ever since I was nine years old.
00:01:01.000A first visit to my local planetarium, the Hayden Planetarium, I grew up in New York City, and I had the advantage of Well, the city offers the advantage that for many of the cultural institutions, if you do sort of the exhibits and the frontline things, you can do a deep dive.
00:01:21.000And at the American Museum of Natural History, which is the overarching institution that has the Hayden Planetarium, there were courses I could take.
00:01:31.000There were special sessions I could attend.
00:01:34.000And so it wasn't just the space show and an exhibit, I could continue to probe The structure and nature of the universe, right from middle school on through high school, and that served my interests, like, really, really well.
00:01:50.000I went to the Bronx High School of Science, which, if I may, counts eight Nobel laureates among its graduates, which equals the country of Spain.
00:02:22.000But what happens is, I realize that there's a hunger, there's an appetite for There's an appetite for people who are in search of meaning in their lives, and religion has served that role for so many.
00:02:41.000Others who are not religious, or even if you are, people look up and just wonder, you know, where do we fit in this?
00:02:50.000Maybe if you live in the city, and you look up, you just see buildings, but between the buildings, there's sky, and it's part of what we are as humans.
00:03:00.000You know, we're one of the few animals that's completely comfortable sleeping on our backs.
00:03:28.000If you're only facing down and you're asleep, you have no relationship with the sky.
00:03:33.000So one night you see and the planets are in one configuration and later on they're in a different configuration and the moon moves.
00:03:40.000So I just wonder whether curiosity about the night sky is something that runs deep in our DNA.
00:03:45.000So in a second, I want to ask you about the quest for meaning, particularly using science, because I think that there's a rich conversation, obviously, to be had, and you talk about it a lot in your book Letters from an Astrophysicist.
00:03:54.000But first, ExpressVPN is an app I use to stay secure online.
00:03:58.000Why should you care about encrypting your data?
00:04:00.000Well, It's often easy for a hacker to bypass Wi-Fi security and steal your information.
00:04:06.000That'd be crack with a K, in case you want to Google it and check it out.
00:04:08.000It's hard to know whether your device or network is vulnerable.
00:04:11.000If you ever use Wi-Fi at a hotel or a shopping mall, you are sending data over an open network, meaning no encryption at all, which is not bad.
00:08:21.000In my book, I talk about the relationship between meaning and purpose, and I suggest that people do have to have purpose in order to find meaning.
00:08:27.000I guess the question remains that when you look to finding a purpose, why should we be looking to the random assortment of guts or the evolutionarily beneficial firing of neurons for purpose?
00:08:40.000And how does that relate to questions like morality or the moral good?
00:08:46.000What's interesting about your set of questions there is that There in at least half a dozen letters right written to me there there there You are not alone in that sentiment, so I think it's not obvious in just a cursory Review of science you think to yourself.
00:09:05.000This is dispassionate cold facts about the universe The world nature that is not where I'm turning if I got to find meaning in life however Consider that the atoms in your body were manufactured in the cores of stars billions of years ago.
00:09:32.000If they didn't, these atoms would be locked away forever.
00:09:35.000They exploded, scattering that enrichment across the galaxy.
00:09:38.000And out of that enrichment forms planets, life, people.
00:09:46.000And so, when you look up, In the night sky, if you feel small and lonely, the knowledge that you're connected in this way to the stars, that we are not just figuratively, we're literally stardust, can give you a sense of belonging in what might otherwise come across to you as a cold and heartless universe.
00:10:11.000It is a beautiful idea and a beautiful sentiment.
00:10:13.000I know Michael Shermer's written a lot about this sort of belief as well in your book and in your other writings.
00:10:19.000You've talked about the application of science to questions of morality.
00:10:24.000And I guess the question that I have when I hear something like that is, that's a romantic way of putting the idea that we're meatballs in space.
00:10:36.000We're Spinoza's stone that's sort of thrown, and then we have this bizarre awareness that we've been thrown, but there's nothing we can do about it.
00:10:42.000By the way, you are the first ever talk show host to mention Spinoza.
00:11:07.000But in any case, when we talk about that particular moral question or the purpose-driven question in your book, you talk about how you think a moral system can be derived from science.
00:11:20.000And you sort of assume that moral systems, the thriving of humans, the same way that Sam Harris or Michael Shermer talks about it, that that is sort of a given and that we all define thriving in the same way.
00:11:30.000And you're very critical, obviously, of Judeo-Christian Well, I wouldn't put it that way.
00:11:36.000I would say, if you're trying to fight me using Judeo-Christian religious texts, if you're trying to fight me about the nature of the physical universe, No, that's idiotic.
00:11:55.000But otherwise, I'm not gonna, if Jesus is your savior, if Moses is your man, I'm not taking that away from you.
00:12:02.000I have no intentions on taking that away from you.
00:12:06.000There are letters in here from Jews, from Muslims, of this Buddhist wrote in, and the corpus of those where people like to sort of tussle, with religion, tend to be fundamentalist Christians.
00:12:20.000So there's a chunk of letters in there as well.
00:12:23.000But each of them have a different reason for coming to me.
00:12:51.000So, I don't think science hands you morality, but I think science informs morality.
00:13:00.000And that's an important connection that I don't think people commonly make today.
00:13:07.000There's a lot to know about life, about, you know, people debating abortion, people debating issues related to human physiology and health.
00:13:21.000What do you know about the nervous system?
00:14:05.000But don't believe that a scientist shouldn't be in that room.
00:14:09.000No, I certainly believe that scientists should be in the room to provide the additional information necessary to fill out the application of moral principles.
00:14:18.000I guess that my question becomes, when we're talking about the original initiation of moral principle, why should we believe that science can do that?
00:14:26.000And I think that there's a very strong David Hume is-ought problem.
00:14:30.000Well, yeah, except if you look at what we consider to be moral principles today, It is, especially in communities where they say we have Judeo-Christian foundations for society, there's a lot of editing out of what went on in the Bible versus what we value and judge today.
00:14:51.000And so you can ask, what is the foundation of the editing?
00:14:56.000And this really is traceable to secular discussion about our understanding about civilization, about people, about how we treat each other, one another.
00:15:08.000You know, when you look at Darwin and learn, of course, there are people, social Darwinists, which fed Nazism, right, and eugenics, but you part through those curtains.
00:15:22.000At the bottom of Darwin is the fact that we are all genetically connected.
00:16:04.000I don't have a problem with that as a starting place, but generally people who come at it from an is and an ought, in other words, science can tell you what is true, but they can't tell you what should be.
00:16:24.000I think they both still have to happen together.
00:16:28.000So we're talking about how to construct a morality or how to live within a moral system, and you've suggested, I think rightly, that the effect of reason on religious principle, as inherited over time, has purified many of those principles, made those principles better, made for a better world.
00:16:42.000I believe that the way that I've put it with regard to civilization myself, is that civilization is a suspension bridge, basically, between a pole that is certain fundamental assumed premises that can't be proved by science, and then science, And reason and the fact is that Where I start to get a little afraid is if the pull of science and reason begins to believe that it is self-perpetuating, and we lose some of the fundamental principles.
00:17:08.000So, the example that I would give is, you mentioned Darwinism before.
00:17:12.000It is perfectly plausible and, in fact, fairly easy to read social Darwinism into Darwinism, and people did for several generations.
00:17:20.000And so now we say... That's two generations.
00:18:15.000Yeah, so I think the reason that this comes up is, there was one tweet that you sent, and of course I'm sure you know where I'm going with this.
00:18:20.000There's one tweet that you sent that drew an enormous amount of ire on, particularly the right, about rationalia.
00:18:27.000That you were looking forward to the- Oh, I remember rationalia.
00:18:31.000So, first of all, what would Rationalia—so this is the—for those who missed the tweet, the suggestion was— This was like four years, three years ago now.
00:18:38.000But it was a fascinating conversation because it began this whole kind of discussion about what a well-governed system would look like or who would govern that system.
00:18:46.000And so, I don't want to miss what exactly you were saying there.
00:18:49.000Why don't you suggest it so I don't misquote you?
00:18:52.000To clarify, I was at a conference in the Canary Islands, and there was a conversation I walked into during the cocktail hour, and there was already buzz.
00:19:05.000It involved a woman whose name I forgot, but I mentioned her name in my Facebook note.
00:19:26.000And the premise in this room of people, this is a conference of scientists and artists, actually.
00:19:32.000Was that, imagine a community, it could be virtual, doesn't have to have geographic boundaries, where all laws are created only on the strength of evidence in support of them.
00:19:56.000Now if you think about that, That has very sound principles, because, especially in America, Especially in America, we've got a diversity of cultures, religions, other kinds of belief systems, and we're technically supposed to celebrate that.
00:20:36.000So, in such a place, if I had some belief system based on my religion or culture or whatever, and I rise to political power and I want to make a law, the laws apply to everyone in the land.
00:20:52.000But if that law derives from my belief system, and now I force others into that law, that's a recipe for disaster.
00:21:01.000That is how to guarantee an unstable culture, an unstable civilization, a destabilizing civilization.
00:21:09.000So, the idea is, any law that applies to everybody needs to be based on some objective truths.
00:21:16.000And how do you establish objective truths?
00:21:18.000The best way we know is by the methods and tools of science.
00:21:22.000And the strength of the law would be commensurate with the strength of the evidence to support it.
00:21:26.000And if you don't have the evidence to support it, you have no business making a law for it.
00:22:49.000You still use Newton's equations, but there are situations where they don't apply.
00:22:53.000They break down, and you need a bigger story.
00:22:55.000So in comes Einstein, draws a bigger circle around the Newtonian physics, and so now Einstein has a deeper understanding of the universe, but it doesn't negate Newton in the regime in which it had previously applied, it still applies.
00:23:09.000I was going to jump in and continue, but people, it got very angry.
00:23:50.000They want to have a sort of secular conversation.
00:23:52.000And they come to it from a religious background, but they just want to find out where science comes from.
00:24:00.000And I want to hear the rest of your question, but I just want to say that these letters, these are people who want to have the conversation.
00:24:30.000But I think that when it came to the Rationalia tweet, there were two critiques that I saw that I thought were interesting.
00:24:37.000So one was, That the question isn't should we bring the best data to bear when making a law.
00:24:42.000Like everybody who has any shred of rationality should of course want the best data to be brought to bear.
00:24:47.000The question when we make a law is one of competing values.
00:24:49.000Meaning you're assuming that everybody has the same ends in mind and that isn't always the case.
00:24:54.000So to take an obvious example, let's say that there were evidence that removing all guns in the United States would lower violent crime in the United States.
00:25:01.000So do you remove all guns from people in the United States?
00:25:05.000That is actually a question of values, not purely a question of whether a law would be effective in achieving a particular end, because the end itself is one of the questions.
00:25:15.000Do you want a society where no one has the capacity to protect themselves against a tyrannical government, for example?
00:25:21.000Right, so I would say that the... As posed, that makes complete sense.
00:27:04.000The other question that I saw was the sort of application of this principle.
00:27:07.000So this has been used over the course of the 20th century particularly to move the system of American government away from a legislative-led system of government toward a sort of bureaucratic system of government where an enormous amount of regulation and rulemaking is made by executive agencies purportedly by experts.
00:27:24.000And one of the problems there is that A lot of these places become subject to regulatory capture.
00:27:28.000There's an evolution. - What is regulatory capture? - Regulatory capture means that you have a lobbying group, for example, that get ahold of the EPA, and now the bureaucrats who are largely unassailable by the legislature and the executives pay attention to them.
00:27:42.000- Yeah, so that sounds like it is things happening in the world that affect us all that are not derived from objectively researched conclusions.
00:28:02.000So, we have agencies that are entirely tasked with finding out what is objectively true.
00:28:10.000By the way, a lot of the cross-tweets were saying, yeah, this is the Department of Truth, or whatever, you know, in George Orwell or the... 1984.
00:28:50.000When he clearly had other things he needed to worry about in 1863.
00:28:55.000There he signed the National Academy of Sciences.
00:28:58.000Because Europe was riding high economically.
00:29:04.000Scientifically, from an engineering point of view, they were fully exploiting the fruits of the Industrial Revolution, and they were kind of slowly working their way across the pond back here to the United States.
00:29:18.000So, the National Academy of Sciences has one job, one job, and that is to report on what is objectively true In the scientific fields in ways that can inform policy at the executive branch and in the legislative branch.
00:29:51.000This is where these, now, you can do whatever you want with your policy 'cause it's not rationalia.
00:29:58.000You still have lawmakers who are responsive to a constituency, to lobbyists, and the like.
00:30:05.000But don't tell me you don't have the evidence there to base it on.
00:30:07.000And so you would glorify, you would enhance the importance and significance of a National Academy of Sciences so that you wouldn't have small groups with Non-representative belief systems taking over the whole country's conduct.
00:30:27.000So let's talk about the scientific process as it's currently carried out in the United States.
00:30:30.000One of the things that I'm afraid of, and I see it from the right on certain issues and from the left on certain issues, is a fear of actually investigating certain areas of science.
00:30:38.000So on the right, obviously, people typically cite climate change here and say, well, you know, the right refuses to acknowledge that climate change is even happening, or at least so large swaths of the right refuse to acknowledge that climate change is even happening.
00:30:54.000So most radicals will say it's not even happening at all, that this is just part of a general warming trend or that it has stopped or any of that.
00:31:02.000But why don't we start with that and then we'll get to sort of areas on the left where science has been politicized or where maybe inquiry has been limited or attempted to be limited.
00:31:14.000So let's talk about the climate change issue for a second.
00:31:17.000So what do we know and what is uncertain?
00:31:19.000Because this seems to be, there are, it seems to me, gray areas, but the gray areas are baked into the science, meaning that according to the IPCC report, the climate could warm anywhere from two degrees Celsius to six degrees Celsius over the course of the next century or so.
00:31:33.000We're still not sure exactly of the level of climate sensitivity to human activity.
00:31:36.000You can acknowledge that human activity is responsible for the majority to the vast majority of climate change that has happened on Earth for the past century or so.
00:31:47.000But what is the range of outcomes and does that suggest that If you have a different point of view on the solutions, that this amounts to climate denial.
00:31:56.000That's the part that I start to get dicey about.
00:31:58.000I mean, professionally, I'm an astrophysicist, not a climate scientist, but I do read and I do recognize When a scientific consensus emerges, and I want to make it clear what I mean by the word consensus.
00:32:13.000A scientific consensus is one, it's not where everyone gets in a room and says, hey, let's vote.
00:32:38.000And I looked at this ice core in this section of Greenland.
00:32:43.000Well, I looked at an ice core in Antarctica going back 100,000 years.
00:32:47.000Well, I looked at the migration patterns of this insect.
00:32:54.000And you start piecing together the biology, the chemistry, the geology, the atmospheric science, and it's all pointing in the same direction.
00:33:05.000When that happens, it's time to sit up and take notice.
00:33:13.000And when we speak of a climate consensus, what we're saying is that the overwhelming majority of the scientific community has produced research evidence Citing that humans are responsible for climate changing in this world, leading to the warming of temperatures in the atmosphere.
00:34:21.000So that's why there's variance in the predictions that come from it.
00:34:27.000But the predictions all point in the same general direction.
00:34:32.000You will never have 100% of all scientists agreeing.
00:34:36.000That's not how progress in science works.
00:34:40.000It's the—what you're looking for is the overwhelming—if only half the scientific papers showed this, and the other half didn't, you got no result.
00:34:48.000I guess the question that I have about climate change, and at least its public-facing sort of presentation, is the level of uncertainty when it comes to its effect.
00:34:57.000So you can acknowledge that climate change is happening.
00:35:01.000There are people who talk about catastrophic climate change, millions of migrants suddenly running around the world, Miami underwater.
00:35:44.000Most of the most important cities in the world are found in that way.
00:35:47.000All right, so it's not like the water levels start to rise.
00:35:52.000If you're following my tweets, I said if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet, then all that water goes back into the ocean.
00:36:31.000So, I mean, but this is one of the areas where I feel like, okay, so why are we talking about the limiting case as opposed to most likely case or the cases that are most likely to fall within the range of possibility?
00:36:43.000And is that sort of alarmism generative of bad thinking about possible solutions?
00:36:49.000Meaning that... During the dinosaurs, during periods of when the dinosaurs roamed, there was no ice on earth.
00:37:22.000Glaciers are slow moving, and they're very, they'll slowly go back to the ocean, but slower than the rate at which the oceans are being drained.
00:37:32.000That's what revealed the Bering Strait land bridge to our nomadic ancestors.
00:37:40.000They just keep walking, it's just land, let's keep walking.
00:37:42.000And they walk into North America, the Ice Age ends, it melts, the water levels rise, the land bridge is broken, And never the twain would meet for tens of thousands of years, stranding an entire branch of the human species in North and South America.
00:38:02.000By the way, which is why the Columbus voyage was, in my read of history, the single most important thing that ever happened in civilization.
00:38:10.000If it wasn't him it would have been someone else, but it happened to be him.
00:38:14.000He reconnected these two separate branches of the human species that had been separated for tens of thousands of years.
00:38:44.000So the issue is not that the water level will rise and you can just walk away from it.
00:38:50.000It rises this much and the next storm surge Combined with a high tide, which you almost always get with a hurricane, because it takes a long time for a hurricane to move up the coast.
00:39:05.000Somewhere in there, there's going to be full moon or new moon high tide with a storm surge.
00:39:10.000Suppose your jetties or levees or whatever it is that keeps your city safe from the water that's out right there in the river or in the bay or in the ocean, whatever that height is, is what you decided would protect the city.
00:39:34.000If you bleach it by one inch, your city is now connected to a semi-infinite amount of water for as long as that hurricane is sitting there.
00:40:06.000So the broken levees flooded New Orleans, not Katrina.
00:40:09.000We keep blaming Katrina without Putting the lens back on our own maintenance of our infrastructure and our anticipation of what could happen given certain forces of nature.
00:40:23.000My point is, you're going to flood your city not because the water will slowly rise.
00:40:28.000You're going to flood your city because the storm That has the benefit of that extra inch, plus a storm surge, plus a higher intensity of the storm.
00:40:39.000Because if the atmosphere is warmer, it carries more moisture.
00:40:42.000There's more heat driving the intensity of storms.
00:40:47.000You'll breach that, you'll flood the city.
00:41:34.000I mean, the question becomes whether mitigation is the chief method of fighting this, or adaptation is the chief method of fighting this, or geoengineering.
00:42:06.000But the anemometer is itself a turbine, right?
00:42:09.000So it's sucking energy from the cyclonic motion of the hurricane, and you use that to drive the energy needs of the city that it might otherwise destroy.
00:42:17.000You should propose that to President Trump.
00:42:23.000So moving on from climate change, which is an area, as I said, where some people on the right are not particularly interested, to areas where it seems like the left is militating against the advent of science, one of those areas is the area of transgenderism, where the argument made— Curiously, there's no trans—I have no transgender letters.
00:42:46.000We've strayed now far from the topic of your book, but since I have you here and you're a science person who knows science, I'm going to ask you to science for me a little bit.
00:42:53.000But when it comes to transgenderism, the argument that is typically made by gender theorists is that Gender is entirely separate from sex.
00:43:05.000You've seen the argument made that it makes no difference on average if men are stronger than women are, and that if we were to allow transgender women to compete with non-transgender women, then this would somehow not disadvantage biological women.
00:43:20.000And this seems to me Absolutely a scientific that if we're actually gonna have a discussion about gender and sex that that should be based in data Which suggests that mammals are in fact binary in terms of their sex unless you have intersex Birth defects typically or genetic defects.
00:43:37.000I'm happy to opine on this This only matters Because today we segregate Most, nearly all sports by gender.
00:43:56.000Otherwise, why do we even give a shit?
00:44:14.000And so there's the matrix of You know, what you are biologically, how you express yourself, who you choose as a sexual partner.
00:44:24.000If we actually live in a free country, as we tell ourselves, people's freedom to behave in any of those ways should not concern you at all.
00:44:38.000Nor are they requiring that you behave that way.
00:46:14.000That's a social point, not a scientific point.
00:46:20.000Meaning we express ourselves based in different languages.
00:46:23.000Is that something you teach in science class or is that something that you teach when you're teaching language?
00:46:27.000So whether the fact that people want to express themselves on a spectrum, on a gender spectrum, whether that fact Is something you want to put in a sociology class or in a science class.
00:47:45.000I care what is objectively true in the world, as a scientist.
00:47:50.000But let me not say even as a scientist.
00:47:52.000I just simply care what is objectively true.
00:47:54.000And science happens to be a pretty potent path to invoke, to find out what is true.
00:48:04.000And so, if people express themselves on a gender spectrum, and that is an actual thing in an actual society, If we have not fully explained that scientifically, that's an interesting frontier to study.
00:48:20.000If you want to say it's only sociological, then it's the purview of the social sciences.
00:48:44.000It is real because it manifests, but the question of how to classify manifestation is a scientific question.
00:48:51.000Meaning that, for example, there was a woman over at Brown University, she came out with a study that suggested that there was a phenomenon called rapid onset gender dysphoria in which That's a different question.
00:49:00.000of a particular group would suffer from gender dysphoria and this person's immediate peer group would suddenly have an onset of gender dysphoria.
00:49:07.000This paper was so controversial that Brown tried to pull it and then was forced to reassign it later.
00:49:13.000You see this sort of treatment-- - That's a different question.
00:49:16.000What you're asking now is, are there some topics that should not be studied Right.
00:49:29.000And I think the concern is if you study some topic that's a hot-button topic and you bring scientific methods and tools to it, we don't trust, I'm interpreting here, I think we as a society don't trust
00:49:50.000That people in charge in a free country won't try to legislate something that will constrict people's freedoms in the face of that information.
00:50:05.000I mean, and isn't that... We don't trust our own ability to govern ourselves in the face of what could be some information relative to other kinds of information.
00:50:27.000My general take on all of this stuff, from climate change to gender dysphoria to all these issues is bring out the science and then let's hash it out.
00:50:34.000I think that the problem I'm seeing on a lot of sides is... Yeah, but the question is, what is your motivation?
00:50:38.000It matters because if you have political power, you could end up creating legislation that subtracts freedoms from people who previously were enjoying the same freedoms as you.
00:50:50.000The history of that exercise— Then make a better argument.
00:50:55.000Bring out all the science and let's hash it out?
00:50:57.000I'm saying if you bring out all the science and the politicians hash it out, the history of that exercise is a recipe for disaster if it involves Discoveries that put people's freedom, as defined in our Constitution, at risk.
00:51:14.000But now you're arguing for limitations on areas of particular study.
00:51:18.000No, I'm arguing on, we need a way to shield, we need a way to protect people's freedoms in the face of whatever gets discovered scientifically.
00:51:33.000It's to guard rights from... But we're always fighting... People who want rights are always fighting others who are saying they don't get the rights from the Constitution.
00:51:45.000This is a daily challenge on the progressive left.
00:52:47.000You're going to go to the reorientation camps, or whatever those are called, where they realign you because they say it's psychological rather than biological.
00:52:56.000All of a sudden, people start behaving in ways, in society, that want to constrict the freedom of expression of who and what people are.
00:54:53.000So, final scientific question for you.
00:54:54.000Obviously, we're doing hot buttons here.
00:54:57.000We have to make sure that our click count is high, obviously.
00:54:59.000Meanwhile, at the House, we're going to write a headline here and sell your book.
00:55:02.000So let's talk about abortion for a second.
00:55:03.000So when it comes to the scientific study of fetal development, there are people who are militating against, for example, the use of ultrasound techniques in pregnancy clinics.
00:55:15.000So Planned Parenthood famously objects to People using or government-funded 3D ultrasounds before an abortion.
00:55:23.000And their suggestion is that this is a violation of the freedom of women.
00:55:29.000Now, on an abortion level, what pro-lifers say is the science is fairly clear that the inception of life happens at conception and then there's fetal development all the way Continuously from point A, basically, to death.
00:55:43.000And so the attempts to draw particular lines, you can create... Fetal development until birth.
00:55:49.000Fetal development, and then you continue to develop as a human until you die.
00:55:54.000So the question becomes, on the abortion case, how much of that do you think is values-driven, and how much of that debate do you think is scientifically driven?
00:56:03.000So, let me... I think we would all welcome a world Where abortions are not necessary.
00:56:11.000And so everyone's focusing on abortion and not focusing on contraception, for example.
00:56:18.000And that, to me, that's an imbalanced debate.
00:56:22.000And you also know there are people who are anti-abortion and anti-contraception.
00:56:27.000And that's, I don't think the history of our understanding of what it is to be human can ever be reconciled with that fact, right?
00:56:38.000Sex is fundamental to sexual reproducing animals.
00:56:45.000Sex predates humans by half a billion years.
00:56:49.000So to try to legislate people to not have sex may be simply unrealistic.
00:56:59.000So you want laws that reflect what is possible.
00:57:05.000Rather than to force what may be impossible, culturally impossible.
00:57:10.000So, if you want to have the abortion debate, I would ask, how many people who are anti-abortion are anti-abortion and are not simultaneously deeply religious?
00:57:27.000So, if there's a strong religious component of those who want to ban abortion, That's an interesting fact about the demographics of what's going on out there.
00:58:05.000So somebody has to say, Okay, I care when it's a human life, alright?
00:58:11.000So then we have to, what makes it human?
00:58:13.000Is it just genetically human, or is it, do you need a certain minimum neuron count to judge, well now it is... So, I think that can be debated, just debate that, and I don't have opinions that I require other people agree with, alright?
00:58:31.000If you look carefully at my Twitter stream, Rarely is there an opinion.
00:58:37.000The last time I remember posting an opinion, it was the Enterprise or the Millennium Falcon, okay?
00:58:48.000And I pointed to a video where we tussled it out.
01:00:14.000Do you want to create an incubation chamber so that every spontaneously aborted fertilized egg gets put in there and grows to a human?
01:00:25.000Otherwise, you'll get arrested for murder?
01:00:29.000By the way, this is science informing the debate, right?
01:00:35.000So I don't know where this is going to land, and I don't have opinions that I require other people agree with.
01:00:42.000Okay, so I do have one final question for Neil deGrasse Tyson, and that is I'm going to ask him for his favorite science fiction movies and also the ones that are the worst when it comes to the science.
01:00:50.000But if you actually want to hear Neil deGrasse Tyson's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber, so we can make money off of you.
01:00:55.000To subscribe, go to dailywire.com and click subscribe.
01:00:58.000Neil deGrasse Tyson, his book is Letters from an Astrophysicist.