Press Archive

2008












HIGHLIGHTS
2007


"Praised by everyone from the Guardian, Prospect magazine, Wired, the New York Times and BBC Radio 4, Edge is an online collective of deep thinkers. Their contributors aren't on the frontier, they are the frontier."


"There is much in many of these brief essays to astonish, to be appalled at, to mull over or to wish for...Most of them are vitally engaging to anyone with an ounce of interest in matters such as being or whatever."



"What's the big idea?...When the lightbulb above your head is truly incendiary."


"...fascinating and provocative reading."


"If you think the web is full of trivial rubbish, you will find the intellectual badinage of edge.org to be a blessed counterpoint."


"Recommended read to detox a tired mind."


"...reads like an intriguing dinner party conversation among great minds in science. Don't expect to find answers here. Brockman will have you asking more questions than when you started—and may even change your mind about the ideas you've always been convinced are right."


"Brilliant... a eureka moment at the edge of knowledge, as scientists ponder the imponderable. ... Visiting Edge will make pseudo-scientists feel cleverer, and the rest of us more than usually stupid, as we discover, with a jolt of pleasure, how little we really know about the world."


"He (Ian McEwan) loves the spirited playfulness evident in places such as John Brockman's celebrated website Edge, where "neuroscientists might talk to mathematicians, biologists to computer-modelling experts", and in an accessible, discipline-crossing language that lets us all eavesdrop. 'In order to talk to each other, they just have to use plain English. That's where the rest of us benefit.' "


"www.edge.org...has established itself as a major force on the intellectual scene in the US and as required reading for humanities heads who want to keep up to speed with the latest in science and technology."


"Intellectual and creative magnificence."


"Open-minded, free ranging, intellectually playful ...an unadorned pleasure in curiosity, a collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world ... an ongoing and thrilling colloquium."— Ian McEwan


"Astounding reading."


"...the fascinating website edge.org."


"An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of visionary."



"Fantastically stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question."


"Danger — brilliant minds at work... exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling."


"A selection of the most explosive ideas of our age."


"Scientific pipedreams at their very best."


"Wonderful reading."


"Strangley addictive."



"Brockman's cross-fertilising club, the most rarefied of chatrooms, has its premises on his website www.edge.org. Eavesdropping is fun. Ian McEwan, one of the few novelists who has contributed to Edge's ongoing debates, suggests that the project is not so far removed from the 'old Enlightenment dream of a unified body of knowledge, when biologists and economists draw on each other's concepts and molecular biologists stray into the poorly defended territory of chemists and physicists'."


"Brilliant! Stimulating reading."



"One of the most interesting stopping places on the Web."


"A stellar cast of thinkers tackles the really big questions facing scientists."


"It is like having a front-row seat at the ultimate scientific seminar series."


"A fascinating site."


"Fascinating...a lot of fun."



"Fascinating and thought-provoking ...wonderful, intelligent."




"Today's visions of science tomorrow."



"You can improve your own science education at www.edge.org."


"Clever minds debate on Edge about God and the world: what life is, what will result from global warming, or what the most recent discoveries in immunology research tell us. It is almost as colorful as the days of Louis XVI, when philosophers, writers, and political thinkers disputed one another in Parisian living rooms — and prepared the way for revolution."


"Awesome indie newsletter with brilliant contributors."


"Everything is permit-ted, and nothing is excluded from this intellectual game."



"Websites of the year. ..Inspired Arena...the world's foremost scientific thinkers."


"Deliciously creative ... the variety astonishes ... intellectual sky- rockets of stunning brilliance. Nobody in the world is doing what Edge is doing."


"High concept all the way...the brightest scientists and thinkers ... heady ... deep and refreshing."



"A marvellous showcase for the Internet, it comes very highly recommended."


"Profound, esoteric and outright entertaining."



"A terrific, thought provoking site."


"....a fascinating survey of intellectual and creative wonders of the world...Thoughtful and often surprising ...reminds me of how wondrous our world is." — Bill Gates


"One of the Net's most prestigious, invitation-only free trade zones for the exchange of potent ideas."


"An enjoyable read."



"A-list: Dorothy Parker's Vicious Circle without the food and alcohol ... a brilliant format."


"Big, deep and ambitous questions... breathtaking in scope."


"Has raised electronic discourse on the Web to a whole new level."



"Lively, sometimes obscure and almost always ambitious."


news


Condé Nast Portfolio, Publico (Lisbon, Portugal), Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, Times Colonist (Victoria, British Columbia), The Times Literary Supplement, Stern, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Spiegel, The New Republic, Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), The Age (Melbourne, Australia), boingboing, San Francisco Chronicle, NEWS@ORF.at, The Globe and Mail, Tempos del Mundo (Buenos Aires), Süddeutsche Zeitung, Il Giornale, The News & Observer, Bloggingheads.TV, The Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, Toronto Star, Washington Post, Infectious Greed, National Review Online, Die Zeit, Correre Della Sera (Italy), El Mundo (Spain), The Times, Slashdot, Guardian Unlimited, The Independent, O'Reilly Radar, The Guardian, The Independent, Arts & Letters Daily, The Independent, The Telegraph



CONDE NAST PORTFOLIO
February 11, 2008

TECH OBSERVER
by Kevin Maney

Daily Brew: Valuable Reasons to Check Your Kid's Closet

RacketBoy.com: They must be lying around the house somewhere. (Try your kid's closet). The rarest and most valuable Super Nintendo video games.

NYTimes.com: In the country of record debt and credit card lovin', how do Americans spend their money?

LATimes.com: The upside of pollution--all our man-made junk is giving life to a new breed of organism.

Edge.org: From the existence of ghosts to losing faith in equality, the world's top scientific thinkers change their minds on some provocative issues.

SmashingMagazine.com: 10 principles of effective web design in the age of A.D.D.

--Kevin Maney and Andrea Chalupa


"Edge: brilliant, essential and addictive"


Publico 14 Jan 2008 Edição Lisboa

Front Page

Science
History Shows That Famous Thinkers Also Get It Wrong. And They Admit It.

Cover Story, Sunday Magazine
When the world's great scientific thinkers change their minds


Click here for PDF of Portugese Original


One hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators, at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following question: "What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?"

Ana Gerschenfeld

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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL — WEEKEND JOURNAL, Page W8
January 26, 2008

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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NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Volume 55, Number 2 · February 14, 2008

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. ...
___

[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).

...



TIMES COLONIST (Victoria, British Columbia)
January 27, 2008 Sunday

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."

...

German Language Original



SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
22. Januar 2008

FEUILLETON

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.

...

German Language Original



SPIEGEL ONLINE
January 22, 2008

GENETICS REVOLUTION

Craig Venter wants to email life (Craig Venter will Lebewesen e-mailen)
By Christian Stöcker

A pioneer in the field of genetics can envision a fantastic future in which genetic codes are sent by email and then reassembled as living beings at the other end.  Or so Craig Venter forecast at an Internet conference in Munich.  He also hopes to solve the problem of global warming—with designer microbes. ...

CRAIG VENTER: LIFE VIA EMAILStart Slide Show: Click on photo (6 photos)


...
Venter, who last made headlines when he published his personal genome in full on the Internet, made brazen claims, but nobody reacted. Venter insisted that climate change represents a much greater risk to humanity than genetic engineering, which could actually help fight it.  For example, with genetically manipulated microbes capable of absorbing CO2: "We can change the environment through genetic engineering."  John Brockman, who is the literary agent of both Dawkins and Venter, had the role of moderator, but let Dawkins take over. When Venter began to speak of specific genetically engineered correctives for the environment, however, he abruptly woke up.  Somebody once explained to him that when you talk about these subjects in Germany, "it causes an uproar—but everyone appears so calm!"  And he is right.

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German Language Original




THE NEW REPUBLIC
January 11, 2008

The TNR Q&A

by Isaac Chotiner
'Atonement' author Ian McEwan on Bellow, the Internet, atheism, and why his books are still scary.

What are your online habits? Do you surf the web?Well, I like Edge very much, Arts and Letters is a great resource for me, and then the whole slew of American magazines. I like that tradition-The New Republic, etc. I get them now quite regularly.

Do you read any online reviews?
I don't read the blogs much. I don't like the tone-the rather in-your-face road-rage quality of a lot of exchange on the Internet. I don't like the threads that come out of any given piece of journalism. It seems that when people know they can't be held accountable, when they don't have eye contact, it seems to bring out a rather nasty, truculent, aggressive edge that I think slightly doesn't belong in the world of book reviewing. ...

... Do you see religion as ineradicable, or do you think there is a chance to change people's minds on religion?
I think it is ineradicable, and I think it is a terrible idea to suppress it, too. We have tried that and it joins the list of political oppression. It seems to be fairly deeply stitched into human nature. It seems to be part of all cultures, so I don't expect it to vanish. And yet at the same time, if it is built into human nature, why are there so many people who don't believe in it? I think it is important that people with no religious beliefs speak up and speak for what they value. It is a bit of a problem, the title "Atheist"--no one really wants to be defined by what they do not believe in. We haven't yet settled on a name, but you wouldn't expect a Baptist minister to go around calling himself a Darwinist. But it is crucial that people who do not have a sky god and don't have a set of supernatural beliefs assert their belief in moral values and in love and in the transcendence that they might experience in landscape or art or music or sculpture or whatever. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, it makes them give more valence to life itself. The little spark that we do have becomes all the more valuable when you can't be trading off any moments for eternity.

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CAPITAL TIMES (Madison, Wisconsin)
January 10, 2008


Think positive

Mary Bergin

"What Are You Optimistic About? Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better," edited by John Brockman, Harper Perennial, $14.95, 374 pages.

If that "bah, humbug" mood lingers, ponder the observations of an odd assortment of academics and other intellectuals, who choose to see that mug of hot cider as half full. "What Are You Optimistic About?" knows that Americans have an increasingly deep morale problem, so these 150 essays of hope are an antidote for societal despair.

Contributors -- quantum physicist David Deutsch of Oxford, former Time magazine editor James Geary, musician/record producer Brian Eno -- tend to use logic, not sap or divine intervention, to make their arguments. "I am a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist," writes Paul Saffo, technology forecaster at Stanford. "History is on my side, because the cause of today's fashionable pessimism lies much deeper than the unpleasant surprises of the last half-decade."

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THE AGE (Melbourne, Australia)
January 10, 2008

What Are You Optimistic About?
QUESTIONS
Lorien Kaye

What Are You Optimistic About?
Ed., John Brockman
Simon & Schuster, $29.95

EVERY YEAR, JOHN Brockman, co-founder of the Edge website (a space for scientists and other "empirical thinkers" to exchange ideas), asks his online community to respond to a question. For the past three years, the results have been compiled for wider dissemination. It's a great idea, but with a self-selecting contributor list, the result is somewhat skewed. The subtitle boasts of "today's leading thinkers" but, strictly speaking, this should be "today's leading scientific thinkers". A more balanced anthology would have more than a smattering of contributors from other fields. Further, the almost 150 contributors are predominantly US-based, limiting the perspective.

It is, nevertheless, full of fascinating discussion. Common themes emerge, such as the coming downfall of religion; increased longevity; and a belief that environmental damage will be redressed if not undone, provided we act immediately. Subjects are not confined to what are traditionally seen as scientific issues - there are also multiple pieces about happiness, morality and democracy.

The definition of optimism given by a contributor, that it is "a way of viewing possible futures with the belief that you can affect things for the better", is a reminder of the need for action to be combined with the sort of deep thinking reflected in this collection.



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 .

...



SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
January 9, 2008


A top 10 of the top 10
Mark Morford


...It's not a top 10 list. It's not even a top 100. It has nothing to do with fashion or trends or politics or the year's coolest iPod accessories. It is intellectual hotbed Edge.org's annual question, this time a profound doozy: "What have you changed your mind about. Why?"

As of now, 165 of the world's finest minds have responded with some of the most insightful, humbling, fascinating confessions and anecdotes, an intellectual treasure trove of proof that flip-flopping is a very good thing indeed, especially when informed/inspired by facts and shot through with personal experience and laced with mystery and even a little divine insight. Best three or four hours of intense, enlightening reading you can do for the new year. Read it now.

Then flip it over and answer the same question for yourself.

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NEWS @ORF.at
January 9, 2008

Wenn Wissenschaftler ihre Meinung ändern Lukas Wieselberg, science.ORF.at

"Flip-Flops" werden im Englischen verächtlich Menschen genannt, die plötzlich ihre Meinung ändern. Was bei Politikern oft als ein Zeichen von Opportunismus interpretiert wird, gehört in der Wissenschaft zum Wesen. Dennoch ist es auch unter Forschern und Forscherinnen nicht üblich, sich öffentlich zu einem Sinneswandel zu bekennen. Genau das haben sie aber nun gemacht. Bereits zum elften Mal hat der New Yorker Literaturagent John Brockman namhaften Wissenschaftlern zum Jahreswechsel knifflige Fragen gestellt. Diesmal lauten sie "Wobei haben Sie Ihre Meinung geändert? Und warum?"

Die Antworten von insgesamt 165 Forschern und Expertinnen sind unterschiedlich und oft amüsant: Der Biologe Richard Dawkins erklärt, warum Meinungswandel kein evolutionärer Nachteil sind; die Philosophin Helena Cronin zeigt, dass es unter Männer zwar mehr Nobelpreisträger gibt, aber auch mehr Trottel; und Anton Zeilinger erzählt von seinem Irrtum, die Quantenphysik einst für "nutzlos" gehalten zu haben. ...

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL
January 9, 2008

RECOMMENDED LINKS

IT doublethink
Shane Schick

Even IT gurus have the right to think twice.

This year the online salon Edge.org has drawn a lot of attention for the annual question it put out to a mixture of scientists and artists: What have you changed your mind about?

Contributors range from actor Alan Alda to folk singer Joan Baez, but some of the real gems came from technology visionaries who decided to take a second look at their original visions.

[Note to Globe and Mail: It's "the mathematician physicist John C. Baez", not his cousin the "folk singer Joan Baez", daughter of the physicist Albert Baez.]

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TEMPOS DEL MUNDO (Buenos Aires)
January 8, 2008


The most prestigious scientists also change their minds


BUENOS AIRES, jan. 8 (UPI) — On the occasion of the new year, the most sublime thinkers of the world have recognized that, from time to time, they are obliged to rectify their views.

When addressing topics as diverse as evolution man, the laws of physics and differences sex, a group of scientists and philosophers, among Which includes Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, Paul Davies and Richard Wrangham, have confessed, all of them Without exception, they have changed their minds, reports Madrimasd.org.

This exhibition of scientific modesty has occurred As a result of the questions, coinciding with New year, annually raised the website edge.org, which has obtained responses from more than 120 of the most Important thinkers in the world.

A recurring theme in the answers is that what distinguishes science from other forms of knowledge and faith is that new ideas based on quickly replace old ones when they are based on evidence produced by tests. Accordingly, in the intellectual scope there is nothing of shameful in recognizing that one has changed positions.

[Spanish Original ...]



SÜDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG — Munich
January 8, 2008FEUILLETON — Page 1

Die Partei der Zweifler;
Bei der Frage des Jahres im Onlinemagazin Edge machen
sich Wissenschaftler Gedanken Ÿber ihre eigene Fehlbarkeit
Ralf Bönt

Eines der anregendsten intellektuellen Spiele findet sich jedes Jahr im Januar auf der Website Edge.org, wenn Wissenschaftler und Künstler im "World Question Center" auf die Frage des Jahres antworten. 2007 prügelte man mit Vehemenz auf die Religionen ein, und so klingt schon die Frage für 2008 wie ein erneuter Generalangriff auf die Seligen: "Welche Ihrer Meinungen haben Sie einmal geändert?" Ist die Religion doch der Ort der göttlichen Wahrheit, die sich nicht begründen muss und nicht bezweifelt werden kann. Wenn er einer Partei angehöre, hatte der Agnostiker Camus auch gesagt, dann der des Zweifels. Keine Konfrontation sollte mehr gescheut werden. Die letzte Heimat der Unverzweifelten bleibt dagegen der Glaube. Was Edge angeht, wird diese Erwartung jedoch enttäuscht. ...



IL GIORNALE (Genoa)
January 6, 2008

Turnaround for Scientists
Matteo Sacchi

What is the coolest online forum, one where scientists and great minds from all over the world exchange opinions and ideas, and the one that keeps the scientific debate alive? Almost certainly it’s edge.org, an American website whose most ardent supporters include, to quote some of the best known, Richard Dawkins, the famous and controversial evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene; Brian Eno, the visionary music producer; psychologist Steven Pinker; and physicists like Alan Guth or Gino Segré, who are changing the present vision of the universe. This where you’ll run into debates that count, thanks also to a device that has started a cultural trend: every year edge.org asks an artful question that the big brains who haunt its electronic pages are invited to answer. This year’s question is: What have you changed your mind about? Why?

The mea culpa flocked in in great numbers and from prestigious sources, (more than a hundred in a few days), revealing that the greatest minds are changing their opinions on a lot of subjects, from the expansion of the universe to evolution, from the meaning of science to the workings of the human brain through the value of the Roman Empire in front of the barbarians.

PDF VERSION

...



THE NEWS & OBSERVER — Raleigh-Durham
January 6, 2008

Zane:

The changing of the mind
By J. Peder Zane, Staff Writer

... As in the past, these world-class thinkers have responded to Web site editor John Brockman's impossibly open-ended questions with erudition, imagination and clarity.

In explaining why they have cast aside old assumptions, the respondents' short essays tackle an array of subjects, including the nature of consciousness, the existence of the soul, the course of evolution and whether reason will ultimately triumph over superstition.

Two of the most interesting answers may signal a cease-fire in the gender wars.

In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence *. Summers was assailed for suggesting that innate differences might explain why there are few top women scientists. Now Diane F. Halpern, a psychology professor at Claremont Mc-Kenna College and a self-described "feminist," says Summers was onto something.

"There are real, and in some cases sizable, sex differences with respect to cognitive abilities," she writes.

Her views are echoed by Helena Cronin, a philosopher at the London School of Economics.

"Females," she writes, "are much of a muchness, clustering around the mean." With men, "the variance — the difference between the most and the least, the best and the worst — can be vast." Translation: There may be fewer female geniuses in certain fields, but there are also fewer female morons...

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BLOGGINGHEADS TV
January 5, 2008

Science Saturday: New Beliefs for a New Year

• Edge.org’s annual question
• George’s answer to the Edge question
• John’s answer to the Edge question


John Horgan & George Johnson

John and George’s New Year resolutions; John softens his pessimism about neuroscience ; The soccer club theory of terrorism; The trouble with relying on experts; How George got hooked on garage-band science; Happiness is a burning bridge.

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THE GLOBE AND MAIL
January 5, 2008
OPINIONS


Hark! A shriek-inducing wake-up call; Culture can change our genes. Men really do outperform women. We can't predict the future ...


Margaret Wente Comment Column; Second Thoughts

If you want to start your year with a jolt of fresh thinking, I have just the thing. Each year around this time, a Web-based outfit called the Edge Foundation asks a few dozen of the world's brightest scientific brains one big question. This year's question: What have you changed your mind about?

The answers address a fabulous array of issues, including the existence of God, the evolution of mankind, climate change and the na