RE-THINKING "OUT OF AFRICA"
A Talk With Christopher Stringer [1.6.12]  

I'm thinking a lot about species concepts as applied to humans, about the "Out of Africa" model, and also looking back into Africa itself. I think the idea that modern humans originated in Africa is still a sound concept. Behaviorally and physically, we began our story there, but I've come around to thinking that it wasn't a simple origin. Twenty years ago, I would have argued that our species evolved in one place, maybe in East Africa or South Africa. There was a period of time in just one place where a small population of humans became modern, physically and behaviourally. Isolated and perhaps stressed by climate change, this drove a rapid and punctuational origin for our species. Now I don’t think it was that simple, either within or outside of Africa. —Christopher Stringer

INFINITE STUPIDITY
A Talk With Mark Pagel [12.15.11] 

A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers.—Mark Pagel

THINKING ABOUT THE UNIVERSE ON THE LARGER SCALES
Raphael Bousso [11.22.11] 

Andrei Linde had some ideas, Alan Guth had some ideas, Alex Vilenkin had some ideas.  I thought I was coming in with this radically new idea that we shouldn't think of the universe as existing on this global scale that no one observer can actually see, that it's actually important to think about what can happen in the causally connected region to one observer, what can you do in any experiment that doesn't actually conflict with the laws of physics, and require superluminal propagation, that we have to ask questions in a way that conform to the laws of physics if we want to get sensible answers
.—Raphael Bousso

A ROUGH MIX:BRIAN ENO & JENNIFER JACQUET
Brian Eno,  Jennifer Jacquet [11.22.11] 

Here we are in my studio. What I am working on at the moment is a rough mix for a piece of music for a totem pole. Usually one is asked to do music for films but this is for a totem pole. I call this piece of music Jennifer Financial Talk 3 and in fact it's a soundtrack for the project Jennifer is working on which is called a "Shame Totem", and we don't yet know exactly what form this shame totem will be presented in which gives me a few problems as a composer because obviously I would compose differently for different scenarios. —Brian Eno

Throughout the 19th century, native tribes that spanned the north coast of North America erected shame totem poles to signal to the community that certain individuals or groups had transgressed. This art is resurrected with a modernized, garish, digitally rendered 3-D shame pole to represent the most shameful corporations—chosen with the assistance of 650 people based in the U.S. who surveyed about the corporations that have most negatively affected society. —Jennifer Jacquet

SERPENTINE GALLERY ~ EDGE EVENT
CITIES AS GARDENS

Up until 10,000 years ago there were no permanent settlements and all human groups lived by hunting and gathering. Then agriculture was discovered and everything changed. Now a small number of people could supply food for the rest and the first cities arose. Every since that time there has been a steady movement of people out of our original arcadia and into cities, such that now over half the world lives in them. But why given that cities have historically been targets of attack and places of crime and where diseases fester and spread? The answer is that cities have acted as gardens of our prosperity, creativity and innovations and their continued existence is vital to fitting the projected 9 billion people onto this planet. Surprisingly, they are the new 'green centres' of the world.—Mark Pagel

SERPENTINE GALLERY ~ EDGE EVENT
COMPOSERS AS GARDENERS
Brian Eno [11.10.11]

My topic is the shift from 'architect' to 'gardener', where 'architect' stands for 'someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made', to 'gardener' standing for 'someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up'. I will argue that today's composer are more frequently 'gardeners' than 'architects' and, further, that the 'composer as architect' metaphor was a transitory historical blip.—Brian Eno

SCIFOO
Googleplex, Mountain View, California — August 12-14, 2011
Frank Wilczek,  Jennifer Jacquet,  Timo Hannay[9.11.11]

Ask the question you are asking yourself. You have one minute.—JB

THE LOCAL-GLOBAL FLIP, OR, "THE LANIER EFFECT"
A Conversation with Jaron Lanier [8.29.11]

If you aspire to use computer network power to become a global force through shaping the world instead of acting as a local player in an unfathomably large environment, when you make that global flip, you can no longer play the game of advantaging the design of the world to yourself and expect it to be sustainable. The great difficulty of becoming powerful and getting close to a computer network is: Can people learn to forego the temptations, the heroin-like rewards of being able to reform the world to your own advantage in order to instead make something sustainable?— Jaron Lanier

ON THE SCIENCE OF COOKING
An Edge Conversation with Nathan Myhrvold[10.25.11]

Cooking also obeys the laws of physics, in particular chemistry. Yet it is quite possible to cook without understanding it. You can cook better if you do understand what is going on, particularly if you want to deviate from the ways that people have cooked before. If you want to follow a recipe exactly, slavishly, what the hell, you can do it without understanding it. As a rote automaton, you can say, "yes, I mixed this, I cook at this temperature" and so forth. But if you want to do something really different, if you want to go color outside the lines, if you want to go outside of the recipe, it helps if you have some intuition as to how things work.—Nathan Myhrvold

THE MARVELS AND THE FLOWS OF INTUITIVE THINKING
Daniel Kahneman [9.12.11]

The power of settings, the power of priming, and the power of unconscious thinking, all of those are a major change in psychology. I can't think of a bigger change in my lifetime. You were asking what's exciting? That's exciting, to me.

THE EVOLUTION OF COOPERATION
Martin Nowak [9.19.11]

Why has cooperation, not competition, always been the key to the evolution of complexity?

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
Steven Pinker [9.27.11] 

What may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history is that violence has gone down, by dramatic degrees, and in many dimensions all over the world and in many spheres of behavior: genocide, war, human sacrifice, torture, slavery, and the treatment of racial minorities, women, children, and animals.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF MOTIVATION
Leda Cosmides [10.5.11]

Recent research concerning the welfare of others, etc. affects not only how to think about certain emotions, but also overturns how most models of reciprocity and exchange, with implications about how people think about modern markets, political systems, and societies. What are these new approaches to human motivation?

NEUROSCIENCE AND JUSTICE
Michael Gazzaniga [7.16.11]

Asking the fundamental question of modern life. In an enlightened world of scientific understandings of first causes, we must ask: are we free, morally responsible agents or are we just along for the ride?

THE BOOK OF REVELATION: PROPHECY AND POLITICS
Elaine Pagels [7.17.11]

Why is religion still alive? Why are people still engaged in old folk takes and mythological stories — even those without rational and ethical foundations. 

INSIGHT
A Conversation with Gary Klein [7.2.11]

Judgments based on intuition seem mysterious because intuition doesn't involve explicit knowledge. It doesn't involve declarative knowledge about facts. Therefore, we can't explicitly trace the origins of our intuitive judgments. They come from other parts of our knowing. They come from our tacit knowledge and so they feel magical. Intuitions sometimes feel like we have ESP, but it isn't magical, it's really a consequence of the experience we've built up.— Gary Klein

THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGICAL NARRATIVE—OR—WHAT IS SOCIAL OSYCHOLOGY, ANYWAY?
A Conversation with Timothy Wilson [6.7.11]

One of the basic assumptions of the field is that it's not the objective environment that influences people, but their constructs of the world. You have to get inside people's heads and see the world the way they do. You have to look at the kinds of narratives and stories people tell themselves as to why they're doing what they're doing. What can get people into trouble sometimes in their personal lives, or for more societal problems, is that these stories go wrong. People end up with narratives that are dysfunctional in some way. — Timothy D. Wilson

WHY CITIES KEEP GROWING, CORPORATIONS AND PEOPLE ALWAYS DIE, AND LIFE GETS FASTER
A Conversation With Geoffrey West [5.23.11]

The question is, as a scientist, can we take these ideas and do what we did in biology, at least based on networks and other ideas, and put this into a quantitative, mathematizable, predictive theory, so that we can understand the birth and death of companies, how that stimulates the economy? —Geoffrey West

THE ARGUMENTATIVE THEORY
A Conversation with Hugo Mercier [4.27.11] 

WHO IS THE GREATEST BIOLOGIST OF ALL TIME?
A Talk With Armand Marie Leroi [3.11.11]

"Okay, but who is the real top dog? For me, the answer is absolutely clear. It's Aristotle. And it's a surprising answer because even though I suppose some biologists might know, should they happen to remember their first year textbooks, that Aristotle was the Father of Biology, they would still say, "well, yes, but he got everything wrong." And that, I think, is a canard. The thing about Aristotle - and this is why I love him - is that his thought was is so systematic, so penetrating, so vast, so strange—and yet he's undeniably a scientist." —Armand Marie Leroi

A SENSE OF CLEANLINESS
A Talk with Simone Schnall [12.5.10]

As far as morality goes, disgust has received a lot of attention, and there has been a lot of work on it. The flip side of it is cleanliness, or being tidy, proper, clean, pure, which has been considered the absence of disgust, or contamination. But there is actually more to being clean, and having things in order. On some level even cleanliness, or the desire to feel clean and pure has a social origin in the sense that primates show social grooming: Monkeys tend to get really close to each other, they pick insects off each other's fur, and it's not just useful in terms of keeping themselves clean, but it has an important social function in terms of bonding them together.
—Simone Schnall

THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY  [7.20.10]

The New Science of Morality, Part 1
A Presentation By Jonathan Haidt [9.17.10]

The New Science of Morality, Part 2
A Presentation By Joshua D. Greene [9.17.10]

The New Science of Morality, Part 3
A Presentation By Sam Harris [9.17.10]

The New Science of Morality, Part 4
A Presentation By Roy Baumeister [9.17.10]

The New Science of Morality, Part 5
A Presentation By Paul Bloom [9.17.10]

The New Science of Morality, Part 6
A Presentation By David Pizarro [9.17.10]

The New Science of Morality, Part 7
A Presentation By Elizabeth Phelps [9.17.10]

CANCERING  Edge Master Class 2010 [12.27.10]

Class 1: Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation (Part I)
W. Daniel Hillis

Right now, I am asking a lot of questions about cancer, but I probably should explain how I got to that point, why somebody who's mostly interested in complexity, and computers, and designing machines, and engineering, should be interested in cancer. I'll tell you a little bit about cancer, but before I tell you about that, I'm going to tell you about proteomics, and before I tell you about proteomics, I want to get you to think about genomics differently because people have heard a lot about genes, and genomics in the last few years, and it's probably given them a misleading idea about what's important, how diseases work, and so on.

— W. Daniel Hillis

Class 2: Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation (PART II)
W. Daniel Hillis

What I've been talking about here is more analysis than construction. The genome is used to construct things, and I'm claiming it's not the best place for analysis of what's going on. Certainly there are times it is useful, but I don't think that's where most of the information is. In fact, in some sense, it is literally true that the information that's in proteomics tells you everything that was in the genome, everything useful that was in the genome. In a sense, the genome is redundant if you have the proteomics, that's theoretical though, because the genome is digital, and we actually have it. In many ways it's enabled proteomics.
— W. Daniel Hillis

THE HARD PROBLEM
Nassim Nicholas Taleb [5.16.10]

The notion of robustness became my recent obsession. How to be a robust? It's not clear; it's the hard problem — and that's my problem. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

EAT ME BEFORE I EAT YOU! A NEW FOE FOR BAD BUGS
Kary Mullis [3.17.10] 

Now we are starting to work with organisms that are more likely to appear in a hospital, like staph and influenza, and we have our sights on Clostridia difficile, Pneumococcus aeruginosa, Acetinobacter baumanii and an alarming number of other bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. We are also working on influenza, which has a convenient little feature called M2e. — Kary Mullis

DON'T DISAPPEAR INTO A DREAM 
Richard Foreman [12.11.09]

"I believe that people, en masse, always have a reaction that is lower and less interesting than any individual person that you can confront and have a relationship with." — Richard Foreman

TOXO 
Robert Sapolsky [12.4.09]

"The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma." — Robert Sapolsky

SIGNATURES OF CONSCIOUSNESS 
Stanislas Dehaene [11.24.09]

"For the past twelve years my research team has been using all the brain research tools at its disposal, from functional MRI to electro- and magneto-encephalography and even electrodes inserted deep in the human brain, to shed light on the brain mechanisms of consciousness." — Stanislas Dehaene

WHY DOES THE UNIVERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES? 
Sean Carroll [11.13.09]

"Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now." — Sean Carroll

THE AGE OF THE INFORMAVORE 
Frank Schirrmacher [8.20.09]

"We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember." — Frank Schirrmacher

DOES TECHNOLOGY EVOLVE 
Brian Arthur [10.08.09]

"If you ask people, "What is technology," as a whole they would have said it's a bunch of standalone methods or devices: the Solvay process, the computer, laser printers, and so on, that are sometimes interrelated and have some sort of ancestry." — Brian Arthur

WE ARE AS GODS AND HAVE TO GET GOOD AT IT Stewart Brand [8.20.09]

"It involves what ecologists call ecosystem engineering. Beavers do it, earthworms do it. They don't usually do it at a planetary scale." — Stewart Brand

AMAZING BABIES 
Alison Gopnik [8.11.09]

"We've known for a long time that human children are the best learning machines in the universe. But it has always been like the mystery of the humming birds. We know that they fly, but we don't know how they can possibly do it." — Alison Gopnik

A SHORT COURSE IN SYNTHETIC GENOMICS: DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES 
George Church [7.25.09]

MAPPING THE NEANDERTHAL GENOME 
Svante Pääbo [7.4.09]

"When I started out in '84/'85, intent on studying the genomes of ancient civilizations, I was, as is often the case in this kind of situation, driven by delusions of grandeur... Then, after some intital success, I realized the real limitations on what I wanted to do." — Svante Pääbo

THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW 
Gavin Schmidt [6.29.09]

"How do you ask questions about expectations in the future? Obviously, you have to have things that are based on the physics that we know." — Gavin Schmidt

THE SIMPLIFIER 
John A. Bargh [6.19.09]

"[H]umans must have had these kinds of mechanistms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness." — John A. Bargh

CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE 
Jonah Lehrer [5.21.09]

"After all, we're a brain embedded in this larger set of structures." — Jonah Lehrer

THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY 
Yochai Benkler [4.01.09]

"The big question I ask myself is how we start to think much more methodically about human sharing, about the relationship between human interest and human morality and human society." — Yochai Benkler

A COOPERATIVE FORAGING EXPERIMENT: LESSONS FROM ANTS 
Seirian Sumner [3.17.09]

"You are a leaf-cutting ant from South America. You will compete against hte humans across the aisle in a foraging activity. You're task is to collect as much forage as possible. There's a reason ants are so successful." — Seirian Sumner

IS THERE A HIGGS? 
Brian Cox [2.24.09]

"In a very pure sense you build the accelerator you need when you know what the question is." — Brian Cox

HOW OUR LIMBS ARE PATTERNED LIKE THE FRENCH FLAG 
Lewis Wolpert [3.4.09]

"I've spoken to these eggs many times and they make it quite clear...they are not a human being." — Lewis Wolpert

THE REALITY OF THE HUMAN SITUATION 
Denis Dutton [2.24.09]

"Darwinian aesthetics is not some kind of ironclad doctrine that is supposed to replace a heavy postructuralism with something just as oppressive. What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it." — Denis Dutton

SONG OF SONGS 
Armand Leroi [1.30.09]

"Songs can survive hundreds of years of geographical and cultural separation." — Armand Leroi

REFLECTIONS ON A CRISIS 
Daniel Kahneman & Nassim Nicholas Taleb: A Conversation in Munich (Moderator: John Brockman) [1.30.09]

"I want those responsible for the crisis gone today, today and not tomorrow." — Nassim Taleb

CHANGING LIFESTYLE CHANGES GENE EXPRESSION 
Dean Ornish [12.5.08]

"Even if your mother and your father and your sister and brother and aunts and uncles all died from heart disease, it doesn't mean that you need to. If you are willing to make big enough changes, there is no reason you need ever develop heart disease, except in relatively rare cases." — Dean Ornishornish

LIFE IS THE WAY THE ANIMAL IS IN THE WORLD 
A Talk with Alva Noë [11.14.08]

"The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness." — Alva Noë

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS Edge Master Class 2008

Class 1: A Talk By Richard Thaler [10.1.08]

"If you remember one thing from this session, let it be this one: There is no way of avoiding meddling. People sometimes have the confused idea that we are pro meddling. That is a ridiculous notion. It's impossible not to meddle. Given that we can't avoid meddling, let's meddle in a good way." — Richard Thaler

Class 2: A Talk By Richard Thaler and Sendhil Mullainathan[10.9.08]

"At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal." — Richard Thaler

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCARCITY Class 3: A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan [10.16.08]

"We need to understand whether there are unifying principles under conditions of scarcity that can help us understand behavior and to craft intervention. If we feel that conditions of scarcity evoke certain psychology, then that, not to mention pure scientific interest, will affect a vast majority of interventions. It's an important and old question." — Sendhil Mullainathan

TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY Class 4: A Talk By Daniel Kahneman [10.22.08]

"There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!" — Daniel Kahneman

THE IRONY OF POVERTY Class 5: A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan [10.30.08]

"On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. " — Sendhil Mullainathan

BRIAN ENO Leads Impromptu A Cappella Group [6.5.08]

Electronic musician, music theorist and record producer Brian Eno

MODELING THE FUTURE A Talk with Stephen Schneider [4.1.08]

"Warming is unequivocal, that's true. But that's not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is from her, and how much is caused by us. That's a much more sophisticated, and much more difficult question." — Stephen Schneider

ANTS HAVE ALGORITHMS A Talk with Iain Couzin [3.13.08]

"Another example that we've been investigating are huge swarms of Mormon crickets. If you look at these swarms, all of the individuals are marching in the same direction, and it looks like cooperative behavior. We investigated this collective decision, and what really makes this system work in the case of the Mormon cricket is cannibalism. — Iain Couzin

SOCIAL NETWORKS ARE LIKE THE EYE A Talk with Nicholas A. Christakis [2.25.08]

"It is customary to think about fashions in things like clothes or music as spreading in a social network. But it turns out that all kinds of things, many of them quite unexpected, can flow through social networks, and this process obeys certain rules we are seeking to discover." — Nicholas Christakis

ENGINEERING BIOLOGY A Talk with Drew Endy [2.12.08]

"The only thing that hasn't been engineered are the living things, ourselves. Biotechnology is 30 years old; it's a young adult. Most of the work is still to come, but how do we actually do it? Let's not talk about it, let's actually go do it, and then let's deal with the consequences ." — Drew Endy

THE IMPLICIT ASSOCIATION TEST A Talk with Mahzarin Banajiand Anthony Greenwald [2.12.08]

"What is remarkable about this test, which is called the Implicit Association Test—the IAT—is that it allows you to be a subject in your own experiment." Most scientists do not have the remarkable experience of being the object of study in their own research. — Mahzarin Banaji

"The IAT provides a useful window into some otherwise difficult-to-detect contents of our minds. It may be "an inconvenient truth" that what's there is not what we thought was there or want to be there. But I think it is generally something we can come to grips with." — Anthony Greenwald

A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING A "Master Class" By Danny Kahneman[9.25.07]

Session One

"I'll start with a topic that is called an inside-outside view of the planning fallacy. And it starts with a personal story, which is a true story." — Daniel Kahneman

Session Two

"When you ask who is more likely to take the two million for sure, the one who has one million or the one who has four, it is very clear that it's the one with one, and that the one with four might be much more likely to gamble. When you draw real demand curves, they are kinked where the person is. Where you are turns out to be a fundamentally important parameter." — Daniel Kahneman

Session Three

"People are not good at affective forecasting. We have no problem predicting whether we'll enjoy the soup we're going to have now if it's a familiar soup, but we are not good if it's an unfamiliar experience, or a frequently repeated familiar experience." — Daniel Kahneman

Session Four

"The puzzle of well-being is related to the affective forecasting that most people believe that circumstances like becoming richer will make them happier. It turns out that people's beliefs about what will make them happier are mostly wrong, and they are wrong in a directional way, and they are wrong very predictably. And there is a story here that I think is interesting." — Daniel Kahneman

Session Five

"Life serves us problems one at a time; we're not served with problems where the logic of the comparison is immediately evident so that we'll be spared the mistake. We're served with problems one at a time, and then as a result we answer in ways that do not correspond to logic." — Daniel Kahneman

Session Six

"The question I'd like to raise is something that I'm deeply curious about, which is what should organizations do to improve the quality of their decision-making? And I'll tell you what it looks like, from my point of view." — Daniel Kahneman

LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT! An Edge Event at Eastover Farm [9.4.07]

Freeman Dyson

"The essential idea is that you separate metabolism from replication. We know modern life has both metabolism and replication, but they're carried out by separate groups of molecules. My version of the origin of life is that it started with metabolism only." — Freeman Dyson

J. Craig Venter

"We're just at the tip of the iceberg of what the divergence is on this planet. We are in a linear phase of gene discovery maybe in a linear phase of unique biological entities if you call those species, discovery, and I think eventually we can have databases that represent the gene repertoire of our planet." — J. Craig Venter

George Church

"Many of the people here worry about what life is, but maybe in a slightly more general way, not just ribosomes, but inorganic life. Would we know it if we saw it? It's important as we go and discover other worlds, as we start creating more complicated robots, and so forth, to know, where do we draw the line?" — George Church

Robert Shapiro

"Suppose you took Scrabble sets containing every language on Earth and you heap them together and you then took a scoop and you scooped into that heap and you flung it out on the lawn there and the letters fell into a line which contained the words “To be or not to be, that is the question,” that is roughly the odds of an RNA molecule, given no feedback, appearing on the Earth." — Robert Shapiro

Dimitar Sasselov

"Together with the realization of our changing universe, we are now facing a second, seemingly unrelated realization: there is a new kind of planet out there which have been named super-Earths, that can provide to life all that our little Earth does. And more." — Dimitar Sasselov

Seth Lloyd

"If you program a computer at random, it will start producing other computers, other ways of computing, other more complicated, composite ways of computing. And here is where life shows up." — Seth Lloyd