Origins Project Conversation: Inconvenient Truths

Join us for an evening with Pulitzer Prize winning author Elizabeth Kolbert, accomplished writer, columnist and publisher of Skeptic Magazine; Michael Shermer, professor and archeologist Curtis Marean; Origins Project director Lawrence Krauss and more for a revealing evening of inconvenient truths, from love to extinctions.

This on stage unscripted and candid discussion will cover a variety of topics, including accounts of first-hand encounters of participants' scientific and journalistic journeys all over the world, as well as in-depth looks into aspects of skepticism, power, deceit, climate change, and the environment.

Kolbert’s career as a journalist and author began in 1983 when she worked for The New York Times, and has made her way from writing columns to best-selling non-fictions books, including her 2006 book Field Notes from a Catastrophe. She has also been an observer and commentator on environmentalism for The New Yorker magazine. Kolbert received the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for her book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.

Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, a regular contributor to Time.com, and presidential fellow at Chapman University. His new book is "The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom." Shermer is the founder of The Skeptics Society, and editor-in-chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. Shermer is also the producer and co-host of the 13-hour Fox Family television series Exploring the Unknown. He is also a scientific advisor to the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH).

Marean is a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the associate director of the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University. He is interested in the relation between climate and environmental change and human evolution, both for its significance as a force driving past human evolution, and as a challenge to be faced in the near future. Curtis has focused his career on developing field and laboratory teams and methods that tap the synergy between the disciplines to bring new insights to old scientific problems. He has spent over 20 years doing fieldwork in Africa, and conducting laboratory work on the field-collected materials, with the goal of illuminating the final stages of human evolution – how modern humans became modern.

Krauss is an author, professor, theoretical physicist and director of the Origins Project, with wide research interests including the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his research and writing and is the only physicist to have received major awards from all three U.S Physics Societies. Considered by Scientific American to be a rare scientific public intellectual, he writes regularly for the New York Times, New Yorker, and other media on issues of science, and science and society. In 2015 he was named Humanist of the Year by the American Humanist Association.

A book signing will follow.

All performances, dates, times and prices are subject to change without notice.

For more information about the Origins Project, visit https://origins.asu.edu.