On a new episode of ID the Future, host Emily Kurlinski talks with Michael Egnor, professor of neurosurgery at Stony Brook University, about the dire warnings, stretching back at least to Thomas Malthus near the turn of the 19th century, that overpopulation would lead to starvation and civilizational ruin. Download the podcast or listen to it here.

Egnor discusses this and other scientific claims once widely embraced by scientific experts and later shown to be off base. The lesson, he says, is that when someone tells you to believe something simply because it’s “the scientific consensus,” reserve judgment. Consensus, says Egnor, is “a political concept, not a scientific one.” And when much of the scientific community is held captive by a dogmatic adherence to materialism, any claimed consensus is all the more to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Photo: Michael Egnor at the inauguration of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural & Artificial Intelligence, by Nathan Jacobson.