The Hampshire Skeptics Society

The evolution of human morality

Human morality developed in small face-to-face groups in which humans lived for the last hundreds of thousands of years. In these environments those who succeeded protected themselves against hostile out-groups, butchered animals, prioritized the welfare of themselves and their kin and managed to maintain a moral reputation while finding available opportunities for cheating.

Human moral limitation are plain in a world that is so different compared to the environment in which we evolved. Now we are aware of the suffering of billions of strangers and trillions of animals, our moral inconsistencies are magnified by surveillance, and we must prevent artificial agents developing a morality completely antithetical to our survival.

How does our evolved morality cope with this novel ethical landscape and will we allow ourselves moral enhancement?

Diana Fleischman grew up in in the Southern United States in a religious and conservative area where evolution was not taught in school. At 12 Diana earned the moniker “monkey girl” for fervently endorsing evolution to teachers and peers. Attending both Catholic church and synagogue further formed the foundation of a sceptical perspective on religion. During a formative year at the LSE shortly after the September 11th attacks, Diana read Dawkins and other evolutionists extensively, kindling an obsession with atheism and evolutionary psychology.

As an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Portsmouth, Diana teaches and researches many different topics including disgust, human sexuality and biological bases of behaviour. Involvement with effective altruism, a movement that aims to use evidence to accomplish the most good in terms of human and non-human wellbeing, prompted Diana to more deeply consider human morality its evolution and shortcomings, the topic of this Darwin Day talk.

Diana is a sentientist, someone who prioritizes the capacity to suffer as the basis for moral consideration.

Find her on Twitter @Sentientist.

Gin, bunting and bloody railways: Why everything you thought you knew about the British Empire is Wrong.

The British Empire was the largest empire in modern history. At its height, it covered a quarter of the world’s surface and encompassed a fifth of the world’s population. For centuries, Britannia ruled the waves; from Ireland to India, from Ghana to Guiana, the union flag flew high over British territory.

Britain tells this story as a story of triumphs: a small island coming proudly to dominate the world, with the empire cast both as a sign of military might and as a humanitarian mission, bringing peace and civilisation to the wider world. But the reality was very different; the British empire was built on violence and exploitation, the populations under British rule rejected and resisted imperialism, and the British at home had a very ambivalent relationship to ‘their’ empire.

This talk will look at some of the key myths of empire, and will explore why the British still have such a complicated understanding of their imperial past, and how the popular memory of empire still influences culture, politics and society today.

Bio

Charlotte Lydia Riley is a lecturer in twentieth century British history at the University of Southampton. She writes about the British empire and decolonization, aid and humanitarianism, and the Labour Party; her book explores all of these things to examine the connections between empire and the British metropole in the late twentieth century. She lives in east London and spends a lot of time on trains.

Aliens among us

Aliens: supremely adaptable, successful and dangerous. A tagline for a sci-fi horror? No, it’s the reality around us. Invasive alien species – species that have come, or been brought, from one part of the world to another – can pose a huge threat to our health, finances and biodiversity. However, we can also learn a lot from them. How do we study them? What do we know about them? Can we stop the invasions? Come to the talk to find out!

Bio

Dr Joanna Bagniewska is a zoologist, specialising in behavioural ecology and marking undergraduate essays. In her spare time, she does science stand-up comedy, which really isn’t that different from her academic teaching at the University of Reading. She comes from Poland, is part of the Oxfordshire Mammal Group and has a soft spot for hedgehogs.

(Joanna has asked us if we would prefer something a bit more serious. We thinks this is fine!)

Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry St. 7.00 for 7.30pm

Activism often conjures up quick transactional signing of petitions, clicktivism, loud and aggressive ways to demand justice. But if we want a world that is beautiful, kind and fair, shouldn’t our activism be beautiful, kind and fair? Award-winning campaigner and Founder of the global Craftivist Collective Sarah Corbett shows how to respond to injustice not with apathy or aggression, but with gentle, effective protest.  Sarah Corbett set up the Craftivist Collective to facilitate and encourage this form of activism across the UK and around the world. She will be talking about her book ‘How To Be A Craftivist: the art of gentle protest’ a manifesto for a more respectful and contemplative activism; for conversation and collaboration where too often there is division and conflict; for using craft to engage, empower and encourage us all to be the change we wish to see in the world. She will explain her gentle protest principles with practical examples of her campaigns (including campaigns she’s won!) and stories as a burnout, introverted activist.

Sarah’s Bio

Sarah Corbett is an award-winning campaigner. She grew up in a low-income area of the UK into an activist family and has worked as a professional campaigner for a decade most recently with Oxfam GB. She set up the global and award-winning Craftivist Collective in 2009 providing products and services to do craftivism using her ‘gentle protest’ approach. She works with arts institutions, the charity sector, academic as well as unexpected collaborations such as with organisations Tatty Devine & Secret Cinema and regularly gives talks around the world. Her book “A Little Book of Craftivism’” was released October 2013 and is on it’s second print run. Her book “How To Be A Craftivist: the art of gentle protest” was out October 2017. 

Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry St. 7.00 for 7.30pm

Most of us weren’t born reasonable. We were born into a superstitious culture with only our ramshackle primate brains to try and figure out what’s going on. Reason, an appreciation for evidence and critical thinking skills are virtues that most of us had to fight for and that we have to work hard to keep up in difficult situations.

Rebecca Fox is no exception. She grew up believing many strange things and has had to train herself to think critically. Instead of being embarrassed by our former beliefs Rebecca thinks it is important to have compassion for and interest in what we used to believe and why we believed it. Instead of feeling shame for having been wrong, we should be proud that we had the courage to overturn beliefs that proved to be wrong.

In this talk Rebecca will discuss who she was before, and after she ‘became reasonable’ and overturn the myth that there is such a thing as ‘perfectly reasonable’ we are all, after all, a work in progress.

Rebecca is passionate about skeptical education because she has found the tools of skepticism to be profoundly empowering. Learning to think clearly has made her safer, more confident and happier. Drawing on her experience as a skeptical educator and comic book artist she will present some ideas that will help you improve your critical thinking skills and the way you think about how you think.

Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry St. 7.00 for 7.30pm

Cryogenics typically works with liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees C or 77 K) and liquid helium (-268.8 degrees C or 4.2 K). Down at these temperatures, all sorts of unusual things can happen – electrical resistance can disappear, almost anything, from frogs to surfers, can levitate, liquid can climb out of its container, biological processes can be slowed almost to a halt.

With some deft application of science, some clever calculations and some ingenious engineering, all of this is possible and more – yet for some reason, whenever you say you work in cryogenics, the first thing people ask is, “Do you freeze dead people? Or aliens?”

Join us to uncover some of the incredible things that cryogenics can do – and already has done – for you. We won’t be freezing any dead people but we will explain why it’s currently not a particularly sensible idea – and we may freeze an alien or two…

About Jess

Jess Spurrell has a PhD in Cryogenic Engineering & Superconductivity which is almost entirely unrelated to her MEng degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering with European Studies (when studying rocket science, why not do it in French for a year!).

She has given over 40 talks, workshops and demonstrations around the UK in schools and colleges plus at Winchester and Brighton Science festivals, Science Show-off, Bright Club Southampton, Researchers’ Café, The Science Room @ the Art House, Pint of Science, U3A, Café Scis, Skeptics and more.

Since April 2016 she was also managing the RCUK-funded Talk to US! school-university partnership initiative and since January 2017 this role has morphed into the university’s first School-University Partnership Officer.

About Kat

Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry St. 7.00 for 7.30pm

Michael Brooks resurrects the extraordinary story of Jerome Cardano. This 16th century Renaissance Italian was a gambler who invented the theory of probability, an astrologer to popes and emperors who taught the public how to map the heavens, a doctor consulted by kings, archbishops and senators, a mathematician who discovered the secrets of imaginary numbers – and a victim of the Inquisition whose punishment was to disappear from history.

In this talk, Brooks will tell the forgotten story of Cardano’s life, and trace the astrologer’s legacy all the way to the frontiers of modern physics, uncovering some extraordinary insights along the way.

Michael Brooks, who holds a PhD in quantum physics, is an author, journalist and broadcaster. He is a consultant at New Scientist, a magazine with over three quarters of a million readers worldwide,and writes a weekly column for the New Statesman. He is the author of At The Edge of Uncertainty, The Secret Anarchy of Science and the bestselling non-fiction title 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense. His writing has also appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, the Observer, the Times Higher Education, the Philadelphia Inquirer and many other newspapers and magazines. He has lectured at various places, including New York University, The American Museum of Natural History and Cambridge University.

His website is here.

Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry St. 7.00 for 7.30pm

Hardly a day goes by without the publication of a story in the press informing us that by 2030 over 30% of UK jobs could be replaced by robotic systems. Historically the introduction of technology has enhanced the experience of the workforce. The introduction of advanced robotics however is associated with the workforce polarization into either high-skilled, highly-paid or low-skilled, poorly-paid employment with the loss of mid-skilled jobs. The presentation will go behind the hype and look at the current state of robotic systems, and how its integration with artificial intelligence has led to this situation.

In the presentation Dr Crowder will discuss the social, ethical and technical challenges of current work in robotics, illustrated by systems that he has developed.

Richard’s Bio

Richard Crowder was born in Macclesfield Cheshire and received his BSc and PhD in Engineering from the University of Leicester. He joined the academic staff of the University of Southampton in 1982, and following retirement in 2017, he is currently a visiting fellow. During his time at Southampton he was in the Department of Electronics and Computer Science, undertaking research into robotics and the sociotechnical aspects of engineering design. He is the author of over 140 academic papers and two books in these field.

Winchester Discovery Centre, Jewry St. 7.00 for 7.30pm

Secularism is an increasingly hot topic in public, political, and religious debate across the globe. It is embodied in the conflict between secular republics – from the US to India – and the challenges they face from resurgent religious identity politics; in the challenges faced by religious states like those of the Arab world from insurgent secularists; and in states like China where calls for freedom of belief are challenging a state-imposed non-religious worldview.

In his new book, Andrew tells the story of secularism, taking in momentous episodes in world history, such as the great transition of Europe from religious orthodoxy to pluralism, the global struggle for human rights and democracy, and the origins of modernity.

Andrew’s bio

Andrew is Chief Executive of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). He became Chief Executive in 2010 after five years coordinating Humanists UK’s education and public affairs work. Andrew is also President of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU).

Together with A C Grayling, Andrew edited the Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism (2015). His new book, Secularism: Politics, Religion, and Freedom, was published in September 2017 by Oxford University Press. His writing on humanist and secularist issues has appeared in The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, and New Statesman as well as in various journals.

Andrew has represented Humanists UK and the humanist movement extensively in national news including on BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as on programmes such as Newsnight, The Daily Politics, the Today programme, Sunday Morning Live, and The Big Questions.

Andrew’s website can be found here.