Questions for Tyler Cowen

I listened to an interview of the esteemed economist and blogger Tyler Cowen the other day and I came away with a number of questions I would be curious to hear him answer. At some point in my life I may actively seek him out to directly ask him these questions but for now I'm cool with simply cataloging them and seeing if they rise to his attention on their own.

1) Do you find Darwin's theory of evolution in any way controversial or lacking? Likewise with the germ theory of disease?

2) Is social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) closer to being the greatest accomplishment of civilization or the worst?

3) Why are perfect scores in bowling so rare? (I understand that doing anything right twelve times in a row is a challenge but bowling--more than any other game or sport I can think of--is literally exactly the same every time and in an age when we casually produce athletic geniuses like Peyton Manning, Tiger Woods, Justin Verlander, Patrick Mahomes, Lionel Messi, etc., shouldn't a 300 in bowling be rather ordinary?)

4) How do you think Alexis de Tocqueville would have fared if he lived in the social media era?

5) Is the fact that Pink Floyd's The Wall has been adapted to other genres of music (orchestral, dub, rockabilly just off the top of my head and, of course, Roger Waters has done numerous solo interpretations, as well) an example of the work's greatness or simply it's popularity? How does it's adaptability suggest or relate to its greatness?

6) Was the discovery and acceptance of 'zero' as a numeral inevitable in human intellectual development? Why do you suppose it took so long for thinkers to accept that?

7) Can you name five ways in which Thomas Jefferson is still relevant to contemporary America (or Americans)?

8) Is the proliferation of homosexuality, asexuality, and/or sexual identity in general simply a function of overall human population growth or is it an anomaly of our time?

9) Do you think there is greater societal benefit in a solar calendar or a lunar calendar or a conjunction of the two? Or is societal benefit even an outcome of systems of calendars?

10) Would you describe the cinema of Kiyoshi Kurosawa as merely genre-driven?

11) In a bizarre book I once read (which is so rife with conspiracy theory nonsense it is not even worth identifying), it was alleged that in the city of Ur, arguably the first notable population center in history, there was a thriving garment industry where the two main competitors were the Aryans and the Jews. Is it shocking to consider the possibility that all of Western Civilization is just an outgrowth of that competition?

12) Is it necessary or fundamental to acknowledge that virtually all states/gov'ts/nations derive first from hydro-logic projects? Is this in fact true (or true enough)?

13) In a basic economic sense, would you say the amount of slavery throughout the world today is greater, lesser or on par with average within the period of recorded history?

14) Is Shakespeare's King Lear an adequate representation of familial love?

15) Do you believe music appreciation declines as church attendance declines? Or: How is music appreciation in our society correlated to church attendance?

16) How will sports gambling change the American economy in the coming decades?

17) In this golden era of TV (let's say, from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones), how do we account for the fact that South Park preceded and survived all of these beloved shows? And what is the role Family Guy plays in this era?

18) Is the Ming Dynasty's dismissal of Zheng He the greatest missed opportunity in history?

19) Does the NCAA serve a worthwhile purpose in the lives and careers of student-athletes? How would you differentiate between the big money sports (football, basketball) and all the other sports in terms of the impact on the student-athlete?

20) I think Andrew Johnson is the worst president in USA's history. It is hard to imagine a president having a more deleterious effect on the society, polity, institutions and citizens than Johnson. And yet looking back over the articles of impeachment brought against him, I find the charges to be rather flimsy, insignificant and petty considering his dereliction of duty (indeed, his hostility to duty!) and they didn't even all pass. Can we Americans comfortably sit here 150-ish years later and say the nation survived 'just fine' without removing Johnson from office? Was our heritage robbed by allowing Andrew Johnson to finish his term?

21) If you could travel through time without consequences and go wherever you wanted to go, which live entertainment would you attend first? (This is not to suggest that going to, say, a concert would be the first thing you would do but that surely you would eventually)

22) Did you realize that John Elway tore his ACL in his rookie camp and played his entire career on a torn ACL? Why isn't this a better known factoid? (It just seems like every time we hear of an injury like this someone would remind us of Elway's greatness in spite of his lack of a properly functioning ACL)

23) We chide children for still believing in Santa Claus and yet representations of Santa Claus are ubiquitous around Xmas-time, doesn't this clearly show that society as a whole still believes in Santa Claus? Is this because our society is youthful or foolish? Or because personification of an idea is handy as a tool for dispersing a meme throughout a population?

24) As I've gotten older I find cosmology (and astronomy to a lesser extent) to be clear and obvious fraud, unverifiable at best and the most shameless kind of un-scientific nonsense at worst. What am I missing? And why do we continue to hold stargazers to such high esteem in our culture when clearly they are not practicing science but at best some kind of pseudo-philosophy?

25) I believe education is problem of demand rather than supply. Do you agree? Is this at the basis of our society's inability to improve educational outcomes?

26) We now routinely see "tanking" in sports (that is, losing in an effort to eventually get better). Does tanking in other areas of our society or economy that we have yet to notice?

27) Do you think the proliferation of podcasts will return us to our oral history traditions? If so, will the period from Gutenberg's printing press to the demise of the daily newspaper be seen as just a blip in history?

28) Why do film nerds (I use the term lovingly and with self-identification) feel the need to separate and differentiate Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton? Why is it so necessary to choose one or the other? (Are there other dualities like this in other parts of human endeavor?)

29) How did the cooking of food become so widespread in humanity? Does it suggest using fire as a tool of hunting? Does it suggest that the adaptability of food cookers was higher or more flexible than those of raw meat eaters? Does it suggest a greater deal of dissemination and interactivity than the fossil record would suggest? Or is cooked food just so damn tasty to us that it was inevitable that we would all eventually adopt this process?

30) Personally I do not consider the Beatles alone as the producers of the greatest music of the 20th century but rather the conjunction of the Beatles and The Rolling Stones simultaneously as the greatest producers of that time. Am I mistaken? Why is this line of thinking faulty?  (Hmmm....there's a better question here and I don't simply want to compare/contrast the Beatles and Stones)