BOOKS

A Sense of the Future
Scientists, writers, athletes and others try to see what lies ahead
By Paul Boutin

How do you predict the future without making a fool of yourself? You can extrapolate current trends to their logical next steps, but unless you stick to the weather — hurricanes a-comin' next year! — you're likely to be wrong. Human beings should have been cloned by now. Gasoline should be pumping at $5 a gallon. California, to the disappointment of many, has yet to collapse into the sea along its fault lines, metaphorical or otherwise. What, then, is the point of predicting the future at all?

On the evidence of the more nuanced forecasting in "What's Next" and "What Are You Optimistic About?," looking ahead is best undertaken not as a guessing game but as a way of glimpsing humanity's most realistic yet provocative possibilities, good or bad.

...Not surprisingly, the most detailed predictions in both books come from information technologists. Second-guessing current trends is, after all, an integral part of their work. Taken together, the optimistic visions of several of Mr. Brockman's Net-savvy essayists seem not just wonderful but plausible: The Internet, for all it has brought so far, is only the first step before a much bigger leap in information and interconnectivity between people. ...

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The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould
By Richard C. Lewontin

One of the most interesting developments of the last sixty years in the popularization of intellectual concerns and higher culture has been the appearance of "public intellectuals." They are, for the most part, academics who use a variety of means of access to a wide audience to disseminate ideas that are sometimes an integral part of their expertise, and sometimes very far from their professional field. ...

When I was a boy The New York Times had one science reporter, Waldemar Kaempfert, who wrote an occasional column. It now has a staff that produces an entire ten-page Science Times every Tuesday. Of the twenty-two contributors to the 2007 Fall Books edition of The New York Review, nine were academics. The pages of that edition included twenty-six advertisements from university presses announcing 154 books. Nor are university presses the sole publishers of the work of professional thinkers. Really successful public intellectuals employ a literary agent who places his clients' work with major trade publishers or may even serve as the editor of a collection of articles of his clients, [3] which is then published by a major house.

There is a considerable variation in the degree to which academic public intellectuals stray from their own technical work in their public writings. Even those who begin with both feet planted firmly in their discipline find it hard to resist the seduction of generalizing, especially if they see some relevance of their knowledge to human history and social structure. E.O. Wilson, a great expert on the biology of ants and especially on ant behavior, devoted most of his famous book on sociobiology to the social behavior of "lower" animals, but his status as a public intellectual arose from his extension of those ideas and observations to claims about human nature and human social institutions. After all, Homo sapiens is an animal, so why should we not be able to understand human history as just another example of a general theory about animal behavior?

Some depart entirely from their expertise and build a public career with only the slimmest connection to their professional knowledge. It will not be obvious to the readers of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel that he is, in fact, a physiologist and an expert in tropical biogeography. Still others are public figures concerned with political questions quite separate from the content of their intellectual accomplishment. Noam Chomsky's politics have nothing to do with his theory of universal grammar, although he might gain attention for his political arguments because we already know that he is very smart. It is even possible to become a public intellectual in science with no institutional home in a technical discipline. Richard Dawkins, who was trained as a biologist and who obviously knows a great deal about genetics and evolution, is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. ...
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[3] See, for example, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty, edited by John Brockman (HarperPerennial, 2006).

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Boffins wax poetic about their passions; Mainstream media, readers seem scared despite fine writing, fascinating facts
By Barbara Julian, Special to the Times Colonist

In its roundup of best books of 2007, The Economist claimed that "there is something for everyone" — but there wasn't.

There was not a single science title, which is curious, even for a business and political affairs periodical, given not only the technology-invention-business connection but also the fact that we are currently in a golden age of literary science writing.

That we are is affirmed by British science journalist Matt Ridley in his introduction to a recent collection of essays on evolution. Scientists, says Ridley, "(are) writers and their currency (is) words: poetic flights of fancy, ample use of metaphor, and personal appeals to the reader."

Many editors, reviewers and other publicists don't seem to have heard the news, however. Not only The Economist but also the Globe & Mail and the New York Times snubbed 2007's science titles. ...

...In his Christmas Day sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury praised his compatriot Richard Dawkins for expressing humanity's "amazement and awe" at nature, and urged people to treat nature with "reverence." It seems that for some, the famous long cultural war between science and the humanities can now be over, and that "science literature" can now be literature.

That is certainly the opinion of editor John Brockman whose exhilarating science site "edge.org" profiles dozens of groundbreaking scienists by asking them an annual New Year's Big Question. This year's is "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?"

Their answers add up to, roughly, "everything." That is what science frees thinkers to do: change their theories as new evidence comes in. Most responders one way or another emphasized the ethical demands of good science, and described scientific work as subjective, dynamic and creative — rather like the humanities, in fact.

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THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

IN BRIEF: What Are You Optimistic About?
By James Joseph

To non-scientists, it may not be obvious that science tends to be an optimistic endeavour.  While academics working in the arts or humanities may be more equivocal abut the state of the world, those working in science tend to be hopeful, at least about furthering the limits of human knowledge and the possibilities of what can be known in the future.  These are essentially optimistic goals.

What Are You Optimistic About? is a collection of essays from "the world’s leading scientists and thinkers" addressing the 2007 annual question posed by John Brockman on his website www.edge.org.  Like its predecessors from previous years, it covers an impressively wide range of topics, including the futures of religion, the origins of the universe, climate change, neuroscience, human relationships, medicine, artificial intelligence, communications and psychology, among others.  Inevitably, many important ideas get brief, superficial discussion, but as a whole the collection provides an overview of where the work in a number of interesting fields is heading, and makes both engaging and consoling predictions about the future.  As Brockman is careful to articulate in his introduction, not all of these things will come to pass, but some certainly will.

Almost all the contributions are written by scientists or at least "thinkers in the empirical world": people Brockman considers to be the new intellectuals of modern culture.  Steven Pinker explains why the decline in violence in the world will continue; Dan Sperber considers altruism on the web; and Oliver Morton writes on how solar energy can save the planet.  A number of these essays assert confidently that we are living in a time of shifting paradigms, but they rarely agree on precise terms, and some hopes for the future openly contradict others.  The most memorable moments in the collection do not come from ambitious contributions on the showstopper science of torpedoed religion, cancer cures and climate reversals.  Instead they come when the contributors address wider hopes for human ingenuity, our capacity for progress and problem-solving.  The edge question for 2008 is: what have you changed your mind about?  This will surely provoke another stimulating array of responses, profiling issues and ideas where recent data are challenging preconceptions and highlighting the topics on the brink of breakthrough and development.

STERN
January 23, 2008

"Digital, Life, Design" Conference
DR. BURDA'S DIGITAL SUMMIT (Dr. Burdas digitales Gipfeltreffen)
By Dirk Liedtke, Munich

[Photo: Two men with many opponents: Critic of Religion Richard Dawkins (left) and Genome Decoder Craig Venter]

Once a year publishing legend Hubert Burda invites the biggest names in science, economics and the arts to Munich.  This year, Genome-decoder Craig Venter chatted with staunch atheist Richard Dawkins; Deutsche Telekom CEO René Obermann chatted with EU Commissioner Viviane Reding, and even one of the Facebook founders looked on.

... When Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and dispeller of the God delusion, and Craig Venter, who first decoded the human genome, come together for their conversation, the audience feels privileged to listen in, and strains to follow their not-entirely-easy-to-follow lines of reasoning. The two thinkers are in agreement that, as Dawkins put it, "genetics has entered the realm of information technology." The growing understanding of our genetic makeup and the complex interplay of our genes has been "the biggest revolution in the history of human self-knowledge."

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German Language Original

The future of Selection: Scientists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins in Munich (Die Zukunft der Selektion)
BY FLORIAN KESSLER

Digital or biological? There was a moment during Munich's conference about the future at DLD ( Digital Life Design) this past Monday, that felt like the exchage of a baton. After a rather dull discussion about social platforms on the internet a burly man entered the stage, introduced himself as John Brockman and proclaimed that the topic of the hour would now be biology.

John Brockman was not just another moderator. In the late summer of 2007 he hosted the now legendary symposium 'Life: What a Concept!' at his farm in Connceticut. This was where six pioneers of science had jointly proclaimed a new era: After the decyphering of the human genome soon whole genomes sequences could be written. That would be the beginning of the age of biology.

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German Language Original

boingboing
January 10, 2008

EDGE Question 2008: What have you changed your mind about?

POSTED BY XENI JARDIN, JANUARY 10, 2008 9:44 AM | PERMALINK

I've been traveling in Central America for the past few weeks, so I'm late on blogging a number of things -- including this. Each year, EDGE.org's John Brockman asks a new question, and a bunch of tech/sci/internet folks reply. This year's question: What have you changed your mind about?

Science is based on evidence. What happens when the data change? How have scientific findings or arguments changed your mind?

Link.

I was one of the 165 participants, and wrote about what I learned from Boing Boing's community experiments, under the guidance of our community manager Teresa Nielsen Hayden: Link to "Online Communities Rot Without Daily Tending By Human Hands."Here's a partial link-list of my favorite contributions from others:

Tor Nørretranders, W. Daniel Hillis, Ray Kurzweil, David Gelernter, Kai Krause, Clay Shirky, J. Craig Venter, Simon Baron-Cohen, Jaron Lanier, Martin Rees, Esther Dyson, Brian Eno, Yossi Vardi, Tim O'Reilly, Chris Anderson, Rupert Sheldrake, Daniel C. Dennett, Aubrey de Grey, Nicholas Carr, Linda Stone, George Dyson,Steven Pinker, Alan Alda, Stewart Brand, Sherry Turkle, Rudy Rucker, Freeman Dyson, Douglas Rushkoff .

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