Anticipating CSICon 2022: An Interview with Nathan H. Lents | Skeptical Inquirer

This interview is part of my series with the featured speakers of CSICon 2022, the conference run by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. It will take place in Las Vegas October 20–23, and you can find all of the details and register for the conference right here. For this installment, my special guest was Dr. Nathan H. Lents.

Lents is a CSI fellow, scientist, author, and university professor on the faculty of John Jay College, where he is the director of the Cell and Molecular Biology program. He is noted for his work in cell biology, genetics, and forensic science, as well as his popular science writing and blogging on the evolution of human biology and behavior.

Lents studies the evolution of the human genome and is the author of the books Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals and Human Errors: A Panorama of our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes.

Lents’s CSICon presentation, “The Future Is Now! The Emerging Science of Human Improvement,” is scheduled for Friday at 11:00 a.m. Here is the conference website’s description of the talk:

From bandages to eyeglasses, humans have been using tools and ingenuity to enhance our body functions well beyond their biological constraints.

As often happens when cultural evolution supplants genetic evolution, the pace of this advancement is ever-accelerating and technologies that were previously in the realm of science fiction may soon become reality.

In this presentation, Professor Lents will discuss the current state of research on gene therapy and genetic engineering, aging and immortality, human-machine interfaces, and other ways that we are hacking and enhancing our bodies and minds.

During our conversation, we went into detail about some notable flaws in our bodies (at both the genetic and anatomical levels) that belie the concept of intelligent design (ID), and we discussed Lents’s clashes with leading ID proponents spurred on by his scathing critique of Michael Behe’s bookDarwin Devolves: The New Science about DNA That Challenges Evolution.

This led to a discussion of how personal bias allows some educated individuals (such as Behe) to reach conclusions opposite to the scientific consensus and the role of the scientific method in ameliorating this problem.            

Of course, we also talked about Lents’s CSICon presentation and discussed whether “tinkering” with humanity at the genetic level will be accepted considering that many will not even eat food with a GMO label. I learned to my surprise that genetic cures are in trials right now, and, according to Lents,  we are perhaps just a decade away from permanently fixing a variety of genetic diseases!

We also touched upon the topic of Lents’s upcoming book—an exploration of human sexuality; this very well may be the topic of his next CSICon talk.

So, enjoy this informative interview, and check out my conversations with many of the other CSICon 2022 speakers (including Neil deGrasse Tyson, Penn Jillette, and Richard Wiseman). Those can be found right here.