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THIRD
CULTURE HOLIDAY READING [12.19.07]
Books By Edge Contributors (and others)— 2007 |
This is
the season for year-end lists of books in which the mainstream review
media steer literate culture away from deep questions about how our
world works and who we are and toward celebrations of narcissism,
celebrity gossip, and literary cliques. What I wrote in 1991 in "The
Emerging Third Culture", still pertains today:
A 1950s
education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not a sufficient qualification
for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American
intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite
often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant
intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which
dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon
and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment
on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching
the point where the real world gets lost.
Given the well-documented challenges and issues we are facing as a nation, as a culture, how can it be that there are no science books (and hardly any books on ideas) on the New York Times 100 Notable Books of the Year list; no science category in the Economist Books of the Year 2007; only Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker's list of Books From Our Pages?
Instead of having science and technology at the center of the intellectual world—of having a unity in which scholarship includes science and technology along with literature and art—the official culture has kicked them out. Science and technology appear as some sort of technical special product. Elite universities have nudged science out of the liberal arts undergraduate curriculum—and out of the minds of many young people, who, arriving at their desks at the establishment media, have so marginalized themselves that they are no longer within shouting distance of the action. Clueless, they don't even know that they don't know.
But science
today is changing our understanding of our universe and species,
and scientific literacy is indispensable to dealing with some of
the world’s most pressing issues. Fortunately, we live in a
time when third culture intellectuals—scientists, science
journalists, and other science-minded writers—are among
our best nonfiction writers, and their many engaging books have brought
scientific insight to a wide audience.
We are
pleased to present a list of books published in 2007 by Edge contributors
(and others in the science-minded community) for your holiday pleasures
and challenges.
John Brockman
Publisher & Editor
Permalink
|
In this lecture I will argue that the future of life depends not only in our ability to understand and use DNA, but also, perhaps in creating new synthetic life forms, that is, life which is forged not by Darwinian evolution but created by human intelligence.
To some this may be troubling, but part of the problem we face with scientific advancement, is the fear of the unknown - fear that often leads to rejection.
Science is a topic which can cause people to turn off their brains. I contend that science has failed to excite more people for at least two reasons: it is frequently taught poorly, often as rote memorization of complex facts and data, and it is antithetical to our visceral-driven way we live and interact with our world.
A DNA-DRIVEN WORLD [12.6.07]
The 32nd Richard Dimbleby Lecture
Delivered by J. Craig Venter, BBC One, December 4, 2007
One of the principal scientists who decoded the human genome is about to create the first artificial life form on Earth. So what does the future hold in A DNA-Driven World?
 J. CRAIG VENTER, a geneticist, is Founder and President of the J. Craig Venter Institute and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation. He is the author of A Life Decoded.
J. Craig Venter's Edge Bio
Page
...
|
SCIENCE AND THE CANDIDATES [12.6.07]
By Lawrence M. Krauss
Almost all of the major challenges we will face as a nation in this new century, from the environment, national security and economic competitiveness to energy strategies, have a scientific or technological basis. Can a president who is not comfortable thinking about science hope to lead instead of follow? Earlier Republican debates underscored this problem. In May, when candidates were asked if they believed in the theory of evolution, three candidates said no. In the next debate Mike Huckabee explained that he was running for president of the U.S., not writing the curriculum for an eighth-grade science book, and therefore the issue was unimportant.
...
|
GOD VS. SCIENCE:
A Debate Between Natalie Angier and David Sloan Wilson
Moderated By Thomas A. Bass
 I see some fundamental contradiction here. Everybody criticizes Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. But at least they’re talking about how ludicrous some of these belief systems are. I know that David Sloan Wilson doesn’t take issue with the way I’ve framed these questions, but to see religion as having a positive influence does not get at the fundamental question of what it means to have faith. What is so good about having faith when you don’t have evidence? What is the real advantage to that? Why is this something that we want to encourage? Why not say, as I do with my daughter, “Let’s see some proof.” She asked her friend, who believes in Jesus, if she could wait up one night and see Him for herself, and it didn’t happen. Why is that OK? Why is it OK for scientists to say that skepticism is the default position, except when it comes to mainstream religion? — Natalie Angier
 With apologies to Natalie, I think there’s a kind of a silliness to banging away at religious beliefs for their obvious falsehood, when in fact, if you’re an evolutionist, the only way you would want to evaluate these beliefs is to examine what they cause people to do. Do they help people function in their communities? Then this might be an explanation for why they exist. It also makes it unnecessary to criticize these ideas, again and again, because they depart from factual reality. We should be more sophisticated in the way we evaluate beliefs. — David Sloan Wilson
...
|
TAKING
SCIENCE ON FAITH
By Paul Davies
 Clearly,
then, both religion and science are founded on faith — namely,
on belief in the existence of something outside the universe, like
an unexplained God or an unexplained set of physical laws, maybe
even a huge ensemble of unseen universes, too. For that reason, both
monotheistic religion and orthodox science fail to provide a complete
account of physical existence.
THE
REALITY CLUB: Jerry Coyne, Nathan Myhrvold, Lawrence
Krauss, Scott Atran, Sean Carroll, Jeremy Bernstein, PZ Myers,
Lee Smolin, John Horgan, Alan
Sokal; NEW Paul Davies responds
... |
EDGE THANKSGIVING EDITION
TERRORISM AND RADICALIZATION: WHAT NOT TO DO, WHAT TO DO
By Scott Atran
... Scott Atran, an American academic who has investigated the Hamburg cell connected to the September 11 2001 attacks in the US and numerous other terrorist attacks around the world, witnessed much of the trial and described it as "a complete farce". —The Guardian, October 31, 2007
Presented at U.S. State Department/UK House of Lords
October/November 2007
[Click for Presentation]
SCOTT ATRAN is a research director in anthropology at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, France. He is also visiting professor of psychology and public policy at the University of Michigan and presidential scholar in sociology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York City.
Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page |
The
dinner party was a microcosm of a newly dominant sector of American
business. — Wired
Monterey,
California (during the TED
Conference) — March 7, 2007
|
WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM?" [10.13.07]
FORMULAE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
A "World Question Center" Special Event
An Edge-Serpentine Gallery Collaboration
Alun Anderson, Scott Atran, Mahzarin R. Banaji, Simon Baron-Cohen, Samuel Barondes, Gregory Benford, Susan Blackmore, Paul Bloom, Stewart Brand, John Brockman, Rodney A. Brooks, Sean Carroll, George Church, M.Csikszentmihalyi, Leda Cosmides, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, David Deutsch, Keith Devlin, Chris DiBona, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, Drew Endy, Brian Eno, Dan Everett, J. Doyne Farmer, Richard Foreman, Howard Gardner, David Gelernter, Steve Giddings, Daniel Gilbert, Marcelo Gleiser, Alison Gopnik, Joshua Greene, John Gottman, Jonathan Haidt, Judith Rich Harris, Marc D. Hauser, Donald D. Hoffman, Gerald Holton, John Horgan, Nicholas Humphrey, Marcy Kahan, Danny Kahneman, Dean Kamen, Kevin Kelly, Rem Koolhaas, Bart Kosko, Kai Krause, Ray Kurzweil, Lawrence M. Krauss, Janna Levin, Seth Lloyd, Benoit Mandelbrot, Geoffrey Miller, Marvin Minsky, Oliver Morton, David Myers, PZ Myers, Tor Nørretranders, Mark Pagel, Irene Pepperberg, Steven Pinker, Jordan Pollack, Ernst Pöppel, William Poundstone, Eduardo Punset, Martin Rees, Lisa Randall, Matt Ridley, Carlo Rovelli, Rudy Rucker, Doug Rushkoff, Dimitar D. Sasselov, Gino Segre, Michael Shermer, Neil Shubin, George Smoot, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Linda Stone, Leonard Susskind, Nassim Taleb, Timothy Taylor, John Tooby, Max Tegmark, Craig Venter, Alexander Vilenkin, Shing-Tung Yau, Anton Zeilinger
Introduction
I
recently paid a visit to the Serpentine
Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London
to see Swiss curator Hans
Ulrich Obrist, a long-time friend
with whom I have a mutual connection:
we both worked closely with the late James
Lee Byars, the conceptual artist
who, in 1971, implemented "The
World Question Center" as
a work of conceptual art.
The
walls of Obrist's office were covered with single pages of size A4
paper on which artists, writers, scientists had responded to his
question: "What Is Your Formula?" Among the pieces were
formulas by quantum physicist David Deutsch, artist and musician
Brian Eno, architect Rem Koolhaas, and fractal mathematician Benoit
Mandelbrot.
Within
minutes we had hatched an Edge-Serpentine collaboration
for a "World Question Center" project, to debut on Edge during
the annual Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon, the weekend of
October 13-14. The plan was to further the reach of Obrist's question
by asking for responses from the science-minded Edge community,
thus complementing the rich array of formulas already assembled by
the Serpentine from distinguished artists such as Marina Abramovic,
Matthew Barney, Louise Bourgeois, Gilbert & George, and Rosemarie
Trockel.
Edge
Live in London
The
Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon
10:00 am to 1:30 pm, Sunday 14 October
In
addition to the online publication of "Formulae for the 21st
Century," Edge was invited to program four hours of the
twenty-four hour Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon. The event,
which took place October 14th, was held in The Serpentine Gallery
Pavilion 2007, commissioned by Serpentine Director Julia Peyton-Jones
and designed by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorson.
The
session session featured live presentations of "table-top" experiments
from zoologist Seirian Sumner (A Cooperative Foraging Experiment
— Lessons From Ants), archeologist Timothy Taylor (The
Tradescant's Art Experiment), physiologist Simon Baron-Cohen
(Do Women Have Better Empathy Than Men), biologist Amrand
Leroi (The Songs of Songs), geneticist Steve Jones (Some
Like It Hot), physicist Neil Turok (What Banged? and The
Morning Line), biologist Lewis Wolpert (How Our Limbs Are
Patterned Like The French Flag), and playwright Marcy Kahan
in conversation with psychologist Steven Pinker.
—JB |
A SHORT COURSE IN THINKING ABOUT THINKING [7.18.07]
A "Master Class" By Danny Kahneman
AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT
"I'm deeply ashamed of the rest of the story, but there was something really instructive happening here, because there are two ways of looking at a problem; the inside view and the outside view. The inside view is looking at your problem and trying to estimate what will happen in your problem. The outside view involves making that an instance of something else—of a class. When you then look at the statistics of the class, it is a very different way of thinking about problems. And what's interesting is that it is a very unnatural way to think about problems, because you have to forget things that you know—and you know everything about what you're trying to do, your plan and so on—and to look at yourself as a point in the distribution is a very un-natural exercise; people actually hate doing this and resist it." |
JAMES
LEE BYARS: THE ART OF WRITING [9.25.07]
Museum of Modern Art—Throught October
29
MoMA.org
Artist James
Lee Byars is known for work that touches upon philosophy
and poetry, purity and beauty, materiality and the intangible.
His art also deals with notions of time, ephemerality, and transition.
Byars took abstract ideas and made them physical, and he believed
that even concepts should be considered as aesthetic objects.
He frequently orchestrated actions, or performances, many of
which included props and participatory garments. ...
THE NEW YORK SUN
September 12, 2007
Notes
From a Young Artist
By Francis Morrone
... The
exhibition principally comprises numerous letters or missives that
the artist Byars sent to the MoMA curator Dorothy C. Miller beginning
in 1959. These and other small pieces by Byars take us up to 1977.
(Byars died in 1997, at the age of 65.) In 1958, Byars, then an
unknown artist, came to New York from Detroit with the intentio
nof meeting Mark Rothko. Byars went to MoMA, apparently figuring
someone there could put him in touch with Rothko. Perhaps not knowing
what to do with Byars, the front desk summoned Miller. It's evident
that something in Byars moved Miller deeply, as we see in a 1961
recommendation letter she wrote on his behalf to the Guggenheim
Foundation: Byars, she wrote, possesses "certain very sound
ideas about simplicity and directness, both in art and in living." (The
writer and "cultural impresario" John
Brockman, who was Byars's close friend, wrote that "he
kept only four books at a time in a box in his minimally furnished
room, replacing books as he read them.") More to the point,
she arranged for Byars to exhibit his large works on paper in the
museum's emergency exit stairwell, in the very year he first showed
up at MoMA. For a 27-year-old artist just arrived in New York from
Detroit, that emergency exit stairwell must have seemed like heaven.
And how quaint the story! When, one wonders, did MoMA last offer
an exhibition to a young artist who just showed up at the front
desk? When, indeed, did MoMA last summon a curator - as opposed
to, say, a security guard or an intern - to greet such a visitor? ...
|
EINSTEIN: AN EDGE SYMPOSIUM [9.19.07]
Brian Greene, Paul Steinhardt, Walter Isaacson
 BRIAN GREENE: Naturally, scientists quite generally and string theorists in particular often describe their work without giving all of the associated qualifications all of the time. I, for example,have spoken of string theory as a possible final theory, as the possible theory that would unite all forces and all matter in one consistent framework—and I generally try to say—but perhaps not always—that this is not yet a proven theory; this is our hope for what it will achieve. We aren’t certain that this is where it is going to lead. We just need to explore and see where we land.
PAUL STEINHARDT: What angers people, I think, is the notion that the ultimate theory of physics might allow a googol possibilities. That is, even though everywhere we look in the universe has the same laws as far as we can see and seems remarkably smooth and uniform—more uniform than we needed for human existence—somehow we are supposed to believe that the greater universe that we can't ever see is completely different. I think many people wonder whether a theory like that is science, or metaphysics?
WALTER ISAACSON: That's exactly it: we were talking about why it is that it arouses such passion and then started directly debating string theory. I'd love to take it right back to Einstein—twice you said something that I find very interesting, which is, we have to find a way to make his two grand pillars of 20th century physics compatible, general relativity and quantum theory. Of course Einstein totally would believe that, because he loved unification, he loved unity. Secondly he and Newton agreed on one big thing, which is that nature loves simplicity. But I've always wondered about the more metaphysical philosophical question: how do we know that God likes simplicity? How do we know he wants these things to be compatible? How do we know that quantum theory and relativity have to be reconcilable? |
BOOTSTRAPPING OUR WAY TO AN AGELESS FUTURE [9.19.07]
By Aubrey de Grey
"So there you have it. We will almost certainly take centuries to reach the level of control over aging that we have over the aging of vintage cars—totally comprehensive, indefinite maintenance of full function—but because longevity escape velocity is not very fast, we will probably achieve something functionally equivalent within only a few decades from now, at the point where we have therapies giving middle-aged people 30 extra years of youthful life.
I think we can call that the fountain of youth, don't you?" |
MORAL PSYCHOLOGY AND THE MISUNDERSTANDING OF RELIGION [9.12.07]
By Jonathan Haidt
"It might seem obvious to you that contractual societies are good, modern, creative and free, whereas beehive societies reek of feudalism, fascism, and patriarchy. And, as a secular liberal I agree that contractual societies such as those of Western Europe offer the best hope for living peacefully together in our increasingly diverse modern nations (although it remains to be seen if Europe can solve its current diversity problems).
I just want to make one point, however, that should give contractualists pause: surveys have long shown that religious believers in the United States are happier, healthier, longer-lived, and more generous to charity and to each other than are secular people."
The Reality Club: Marc Hauser, David Sloan Wilson, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, PZ Myers |
LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT! [8.27.07]
An Edge Special Event at Eastover Farm
George Church, Freeman Dyson, Seth Lloyd, Dimitar Sasselov, Robert Shapiro, and J. Craig Venter
This year's Annual Edge Event took place at Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, CT on Monday, August 27th. Invited to address the topic "Life: What a Concept!" were Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George Church, Robert Shapiro, Dimitar Sasselov, and Seth Lloyd, who focused on their new, and in more than a few cases, startling research, and/or ideas in the biological sciences. |
THE CHANGING ARCTIC [8.14.07]
By Alun Anderson
"Knowing that Arctic climate models are imperfect, it would be reassuring for me, if not for the scientists, to be able to write that scientists keep making grim predictions that just that don't come true. If that were so, we could follow Dyson's line that the models aren't so good and "the fuss is exaggerated". Scarily, the truth is the other way around. The ice is melting faster than the grimmest of the scientist's predictions, and the predictions keep getting grimmer. Now we are talking about an Arctic free of ice in summer by 2040. That's a lot of melting given that, in the long, dark winter the ice covers an area greater than that of the entire United States." |
THE NEED FOR HERETICS [8.8.07]
By Freeman Dyson
"My first heresy says that all the fuss about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of climate model experts and the crowd of deluded citizens who believe the numbers predicted by the computer models. Of course, they say, I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak. But I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models." |
SCIFOO 2007 [8.8.07]
A Photo Essay by George Dyson
"Every year Edge publishes a Summer Postcards edition. For the 2007 edition, here are photos (mine and those of other Edge contributors) from SciFoo Camp—the unclassifiable O'Reilly/Nature/Google meeting of the minds now in its second year." |
LIONS:
AFRICA'S MAGNIFICENT PREDATORS [8.1.07]
Photo
Essay By Nathan Myhrvold
"One
of the focal points, if you pardon the pun, of my recent trip to
Botswana was lions, Africa's magnificent
predators." |
THE TECHNIUM AND THE 7TH KINGDOM OF LIFE [7.18.07]
A Talk with Kevin Kelly
"What is the meaning of technology in our lives? What place does technology have in the universe? What place does it have in the human condition? And what place should it play in my own personal life? Technology as a whole system, or what I call the technium, seems to be a dominant force in the culture. Indeed at times it seems to be the only force — the only lasting force — in culture. If that's so, then what can we expect from this force, what governs it? Sadly we don't even have a good theory about technology." |
REGARDING A NEW HUMANISM [7.10.07]
By Salvador Pániker
Translation by Karen Phillips
"The true "sacred texts" of the western tradition have been for centuries, those of the great authors. Plato and Aristotle, Dante and Shakespeare. But also Victoria, Bach, Handel, Beethoven. And Giotto, Fra Angelico, Rembrandt. And Archimedes, Pascal, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg. And Paul Celan and Bela Bartok. Etcetera. All of them are "sacred authors." Canonical. Quantum physics is no less-inspired a monument than the Bible. Nor less ambiguous."
|
CHANGING ONE SPECIES INTO ANOTHER [6.29.07]
J. Craig Venter
In a news cycle dominated by Paris Hilton and the Apple iPhone, Craig Venter has announced the results of his lab's work on genome transplantation methods that allows for the transformation of one type of bacteria into another, dictated by the transplanted chromosome. In other words, one species becomes another. This is news, bound to affect everyone on the planet. Below is the press release from Venter's Institute, along with links to the scientific paper published in Science, and the international press.
The day after the announcement, Edge talked to Venter, who had the following to say about the research underway:
Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn't matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn't know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.
— JB |
DANGEROUS IDEAS [6.21.07]
Steven Pinker
Richard Dawkins
The 2006 Edge Question — "What Is Your Dangerous Idea" — has now been published in book form in the US and the UK. The question was posed by Steven Pinker, who wrote:
The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?
For the book version, Steven Pinker has written the Preface and Richard Dawkins wrote the Afterword. I am pleased to present both pieces below just in time for the start of the summer reading season.
Edge is a conversation. The conversation continues.
—JB |
EDGE SUMMER READING [6.21.07]
What are third culture intellectuals reading at the beach this summer? Well, most of them don't go to the beach. They're too busy doing interesting and important work including writing books that you can read at the beach, or anywhere else.
Here's a selection of recent books by Edge contributors... |
RECURSION AND HUMAN THOUGHT: WHY THE PIRAHÃ DON'T HAVE NUMBERS [6.13.07]
A Talk With Daniel L. Everett
"As I look through the structure of the words and the structure of the sentences, it just becomes clear that they don't have recursion. If recursion is what Chomsky and Mark Hauser and Tecumseh Fitch have called 'the essential property of language', the essential building block—in fact they've gone so far as to claim that that might be all there really is to human language that makes it different from other kinds of systems—then, the fact that recursion is absent in a language—Pirahã—means that this language is fundamentally different from their predictions."
The Reality Club: Steven Pinker, Daniel L.Everett, Robert D. Van Valin, Jr., David Pesetsky |
WHEN ONLY THE ENLIGHTENED SPEAK OUT, REASON IS BOUND TO LOSE [6.13.07]
By Andrian Kreye, Editor, the Feuilleton, Süddeutsche Zeitung
Is religion a destructive force? The debate over Fundamentalism and the new Atheists overshadows the scientific research on faith.
The Third Culture in Süddeutsche Zeitung
"Natural scientists are now daring to study one of the last fields to have eluded them for so long: faith itself. This, of course, threatens faith and philosophy’s hold on the definition of man and his place in the world. This is a main reason why Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett are debated so fervently." |
DON'T KNOW MUCH BIOLOGY [6.6.07]
By Jerry Coyne
"Whether he knows it or not, Brownback's forthright declarations, denying any possibility that empirical matters of fact might differ from those assumed by his creed, amount to nothing less than a rejection of the whole institution of science. Who is "we", and where did "our" conviction and certainty come from? Would Brownback believe these "spiritual truths" if he hadn't been taught them as a child, or brought up in the United States instead of China?
According to Brownback, we should reject scientific findings if they conflict with our faith, but accept them if they're compatible. But the scientific evidence says that humans are big-brained, highly conscious apes that began evolving on the African savannah four million years ago. Are we supposed to reject this as "atheistic theology" (an oxymoron if there ever was one)?" |
FAUST IN COPENHAGEN [6.6.07]
By Gino Segre
"The contrast between the two [Bohr & Pauli], the affection felt for both of them, and the affection they felt for each other, is manifest in a skit put on by the young physicists at the April 1932 Copenhagen meeting. That year was the hundredth anniversary of the death of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the passing of the man, both humanist and scientist, widelyregarded as the last true universal genius. As commemorations marking the occasion took place all over Europe, this small band of physicists at the annual informal gathering decided to have a celebration of their own. It took the form of a sketch, a tongue-in-cheek adaptation to the world of physics of Faust, Goethe's great drama. In the script, written primarily by Delbrück, noble Bohr was identified as the Lord, sardonic Pauli as Mephistopheles, and troubled Ehrenfest as Faust. As in Goethe's version Mephistopheles has the wittiest lines, but that was of course true of Pauli's real-life speech as well." |
SCIENCE AND RELIGION [6.4.07]
By Werner Heisenberg
"Wolfgang [Pauli] shared my concern. "It's all bound to end in tears," he said. "At the dawn of religion, all the knowledge of a particular community fitted into a spiritual framework, based largely on religious values and ideas. The spiritual framework itself had to be within the grasp of the simplest member of the community, even if its parables and images conveyed no more than the vaguest hint as to their underlying values and ideas. But if he himself is to live by these values, the average man has to be convinced that the spiritual framework embraces the entire wisdom of his society. For 'believing' does not to him mean 'taking for granted,' but rather 'trusting in the guidance' of accepted values. That is why society is in such danger whenever fresh knowledge threatens to explode the old spiritual forms. The complete separation of knowledge and faith can at best be an emergency measure, afford some temporary relief. In western culture, for instance, we may well reach the point in the not too distant future where the parables and images of the old religions will have lost their persuasive force even for the average person; when that happens, I am afraid that all the old ethics will collapse like a house of cards and that unimaginable horrors will be perpetrated. In brief, I cannot really endorse Planck's philosophy, even if it is logically valid and even though I respect the human attitudes to which it gives rise." |
HAPPINESS WINS SCIENCE BOOK PRIZE [5.15.07]
BBC News
A scientific exploration of the various ways people attempt to make themselves happy has won the annual Royal Society Prize for Science Books.
Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness had been tipped as the favourite to win the prestigious £10,000 award.
It beat five other titles including Henry Nicholl's Lonesome George, an account of the last known individual of a subspecies of Galapagos tortoise. |
LIFE 2.0 [6.4.07]
Newsweek Cover Story
COVER STORY A band of maverick scientists—including Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome—are in the verge of rewriting life's genetic code from scratch. They think they can create artificial cells that can manufacture drugs and new materials, prowl the bloodstream for cancer and turn sunlight into biofuels. Are they playing God?
By Lee Silver
Newsweek International |
WHY DO SOME PEOPLE RESIST SCIENCE? [5.16.07]
By Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg
"In sum, the developmental data suggest that resistance to science will arise in children when scientific claims clash with early emerging, intuitive expectations. This resistance will persist through adulthood if the scientific claims are contested within a society, and will be especially strong if there is a non-scientific alternative that is rooted in common sense and championed by people who are taken as reliable and trustworthy. This is the current situation in the United States with regard to the central tenets of neuroscience and of evolutionary biology. These clash with intuitive beliefs about the immaterial nature of the soul and the purposeful design of humans and other animals — and, in the United States, these intuitive beliefs are particularly likely to be endorsed and transmitted by trusted religious and political authorities. Hence these are among the domains where Americans' resistance to science is the strongest." |
PEN/ROBERT BINGHAM FELLOWSHIP FOR WRITERS ($35,000) [5.21.07]
To Janna Levin for her novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf)
The fellowship honors an exceptionally talented fiction writer whose debut work—a novel or collection of short stories published in 2006—represents distinguished literary achievement and suggests great promise.
2007 Awardee
This year's PEN/Robert Bingham Fellow is Janna Levin for her novel A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines (Knopf). |
THE CYCLIC UNIVERSE [5.16.07]
A talk with Neil Turok
"In recent years, the search for the fundamental laws of nature has forced us to think about the Big Bang much more deeply. According to our best theories — string theory and M theory — all of the details of the laws of physics are actually determined by the structure of the universe; specifically, by the arrangement of tiny, curled-up extra dimensions of space. This is a very beautiful picture: particle physics itself is now just another aspect of cosmology. But if you want to understand why the extra dimensions are arranged as they are, you have to understand the Big Bang because that's where everything came from." |
THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE [5.8.07]
"IMAGINE an electronic for each species of organism on earth available everywhere by single access on command." — E.O. Wilson
A Leap for All Life: World’s Leading Scientists Announce Creation of "Encyclopedia of Life"
Biodiversity, Science Communities Unite Behind Epic Effort To Promote Biodiversity, Document All 1.8 Million Named Species on Planet
Comprehensive, collaborative, ever-growing, and personalized, the Encyclopedia of Life is an ecosystem of websites that makes all key information about life on Earth accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world. Our goal is to create a constantly evolving encyclopedia that lives on the Internet, with contributions from scientists and amateurs alike. To transform the science of biology, and inspire a new generation of scientists, by aggregating all known data about every living species. And ultimately, to increase our collective understanding of life on Earth, and safeguard the richest possible spectrum of biodiversity. |
E. O. WILSON: TED PRIZE WISH: HELP BUILD THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LIFE [5.8.07]
By Chris Anderson, TED Curator
Those of us in Monterey this year watched in awe as E O Wilson unveiled his inspiring TED Prize wish to create an Encyclopedia of Life. (If you weren't there, you can see it at the link above). As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere. We know so little about nature, he says, that we're still discovering tiny organisms indispensable to life; yet we're still steadily destroying nature. Wilson identifies five grave threats to biodiversity (a term he coined), using the acronym HIPPO, and makes his TED wish: that we will work together on the Encyclopedia of Life, a web-based compendium of data from scientists and amateurs on every aspect of the biosphere.
In Washington DC this morning, the first big step in that dream came true. Five major scientific institutions, backed by a $50m funding commitment led by the MacArthur Foundation, announced the launch of a global effort to launch the Encyclopedia. Ed Wilson described today's announcement as a dream come true. |
SATURN BACKLIT BY THE SUN [5.8.07]
By Steven Pinker
One of these days, Edge may want to run this photo, which planetary scientist Carolyn Porco, leader of the Imaging Team for the Cassini mission to Saturn, showed us at the TED Conference: Saturn backlit by the sun, with the Earth appearing as a tiny dot in upper left (shown in the inset blowup). It is not only perhaps the most stunning photograph ever taken, but the fact that it has not appeared on the cover of Time, New York Times, etc., is a sign of our culture's indifference to science. This is truly awe-inspiring — not just visually beautiful, but a mind-boggling technical achievement, and a way to depict the finiteness and fragility of the planet in a way that we haven’t experienced since the famous "Earthrise" photo from the Apollo program in the late 1960s. — Steve Pinker
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THE TIME 100 [5.3.07]
The People Who Shape Our World
Here's our list of the 100 men and women whose power, talent or moral example is transforming the world.
SCIENTISTS & THINKERS
J. Craig Venter
By Jean-Michel Cousteau
Lisa Randall
By Julie Rawe
Richard Dawkins
By Michael Behe
Chris Anderson
By Malcolm Gladwell |
THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS [4.30.07]
A talk with Elaine Pagels
This text sees Judas dying as a martyr—because here the other disciples hate him so much that they kill him! But the Gospel of Judas challenges the idea that God wants people to die as martyrs—just as it challenges the idea that God wanted Jesus to die. Whoever wrote this gospel—and the author is anonymous—is challenging church leaders who teach that. It's as if an imam were to challenge the radical imams who encourage "martyrdom operations" and accuse them of complicity in murder—the Gospel of Judas shows "the twelve disciples"—stand-ins for church leaders—offering human sacrifice on the altar—and doing this in the name of Jesus! Conservative Christians hate gospels like this—usually call them fakes and the people who publish them (like us) anti Christian. There was a great deal of censorship in the early Christian movement—especially after the emperor became a Christian, and made it the religion of the empire—and voices like those of this author were silenced and denounced as "heretics" and "liars." The story of Jesus was simplified and cleaned up—made "orthodox." |
WHY THE GODS ARE NOT WINNING [4.30.07]
by Gregory Paul & Phil Zuckerman
Disbelief now rivals the great faiths in numbers and influence. Never before has religion faced such enormous levels of disbelief, or faced a hazard as powerful as that posed by modernity. How is organized religion going to regain the true, choice-based initiative when only one of them is growing, and it is doing so with reproductive activity rather than by convincing the masses to join in, when no major faith is proving able to grow as they break out of their ancestral lands via mass conversion, and when securely prosperous democracies appear immune to mass devotion? The religious industry simply lacks a reliable stratagem for defeating disbelief in the 21st century.
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WHO SAYS WE KNOW: ON THE NEW POLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE [4.19.07]
by Larry Sanger
In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media—in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.
But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge. |
THE HEROIC IMAGINATION [4.12.07]
A Talk with Philip Zimbardo
"...little is known about the psychology of heroism. There’s a scant body of empirical literature, and most of it consists of interviews with people weeks, months, or decades after they have done a heroic deed. Much of the first work on heroism came from interviewing Christians and others who helped Jews during the Holocaust. Nobody asked the question “did anybody help?” until 20 years later. People helped in every country,where the lives of Jews were on the Nazi stake. However, the main response that researchers got during interviews with these people was, “it wasn’t special.” Regardless of what they did, or where they did it, or how they did it, these heroes typically said, “I am not a hero. I did what had to be done. I can’t imagine how anybody in that situation who wouldn’t do it.” Some of these heroes tended to be more religious than not, and tended to have parents who had been active in various kinds of causes. However, many more religious people with socially-politically active parents did nothing to help."
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A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE [3.28.07]
by Steven Pinker
In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.
[ED. NOTE: Based on Pinker's talk at this year's interesting and eclectic TED Conference in Monterey, California, organized by TED "curator" Chris Anderson.] |
SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER [3.28.07]
by Denis Dutton
This makes instrumental criticism a tricky business. I'm personally convinced that there is an authentic, objective maturity that I can hear in the later recordings of Rubinstein. This special quality of his is actually in the music, and is not just subjectively derived from seeing the wrinkles in the old man's face. But the Joyce Hatto episode shows that our expectations, our knowledge of a back story, can subtly, or perhaps even crudely, affect our aesthetic response. |
UNIVERSE: REVEALING OUR MODERN MYTHOLOGY [3.28.07]
by Jonathan Harris
As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.
[ED. NOTE: One of the highlights of the TED Conference was the premiere a new work by Jonathan Harris, a New York artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. His work involves the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web.] |
ADDENDUM TO "ARISTOTLE: THE KNOWLEDGE WEB" [3.13.07]
by W. Daniel Hillis
... In retrospect the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database that could be read by computers, then the computers could present that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would be most useful to them. The missing link to make the idea work was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.
One might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia or even the World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories of knowledge are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted by computers. They confound the presentation of information with the information itself. The crucial difference of the knowledge web is that the information is represented in the database, while the presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according to the specific needs of the viewer. ... |
A NEUROSCIENCE SAMPLING [3.6.07]
by Eric R. Kandel
In a larger sense, social cognition is an extreme example of a broader issue in biology of mind, and that is social interaction in general. Even here we are beginning to make some rather remarkable progress. Cori Bargmann, a geneticist at the Rockefeller University, has studied two variants of a worm called C elegans, that differ in their feeding pattern. One variant is solitary and seeks its food alone; the other is social and forages in groups. The only difference between the two is one amino acid in an otherwise shared receptor protein. If you move the receptor from a social worm to a solitary worm, it makes the solitary worm social. |
NASA GOES DEEP [2.27.07]
by Carolyn Porco
...instead of having a ubiquitous presence throughout the solar system, humans haven't set foot on the Moon in 35 years, and even our robotic explorations in that time have been throttled because we deliberately reduced our access to deep space. |
FALLING IN LOVE [2.27.07]
by Marvin Minsky
"In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note; But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise."
—Shakespeare
Many people find it absurd to think of a person as like a machine — so we often hear such statements as this:
Citizen: Of course machines can do useful things. We can make them add up huge columns of numbers or assemble cars in factories. But nothing made of mechanical stuff could ever have genuine feelings like love.
No one finds it surprising these days when we make machines that do logical things, because logic is based on clear, simple rules of the sorts that computers can easily use. But Love, by its nature, some people would say, cannot be explained in mechanical ways—nor could we ever make machines that possess any such human capacities as feelings, emotions, and consciousness.
What is Love, and how does it work? Is this something that we want to understand, or is it one of those subjects that we don't really want to know more about?.... |
WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD
by Richard Foreman
RICHARD FOREMAN RETURNS TO
THE ONTOLOGICAL THEATRE
WITH HIS LATEST MIXED MEDIA EXTRAVAGANZA
In 2005, Edge featured Richard Foreman's "The Pancake People, or, 'The Gods are Pounding My Head' " which he noted that "I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance—as we all become "pancake people"—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button". He then announced his 40+ career as New York's leading avant garde theatrical director had come to an end, and he was going to begin exploring film. Now Foreman is back as a new hybrid vision |
YouTube
THE DAWKINS DELUSION [2.8.07]
Dr. Terry Tommyrot
"No, Richard Dawkins does not exist. I have never seen him. Science has given a full and satisfying explanation of the book alleged to be his handiwork. It is but a collection of fortuitously ordered a's, b's and c's, recombined from previous pattern | |
