Edge in the News: 2003

Recently, I was at a gathering in New York to discuss biases in the media (this being the best-seller template of the day). For over an hour, the conversation volleyed back and forth from left to right, ultimately reaching that ethereal place where nothing really means anything. Sometime during dessert, the dapper woman sitting next to me turned and asked, in the spirit of the evening, what our bias is at this magazine, presumably expecting a lengthy reflection on liberal and conservative leanings. My answer was somewhat more matter-of-fact: science matters. She smirked, expecting a follow-up clarification (something like: and we lean [direction here]). Nothing. She turned back to her espresso, half confused, half intrigued. In hindsight, maybe an elaboration would have been appropriate… but that's why I have this column.

As summer turns to presidential election season in this country, it is high time we contemporize the debate. Not to say that "left" or "right," "liberal" or "conservative," "Democrat" or "Republican" are insignificant designations or schools of thought; taken alone, however, they disregard the larger, over-arching ideas and issues of the times. Is a Republican for ther-apeutic cloning? Is a liberal against a missile shield? For an economy, society, culture, and global village largely influenced by science, you wouldn't think it in the nation's capital. Instead, science is special interest. A sometimes misused, almost always misunderstood culture pe-ripheral to the Beltway. In fact, in attempting to hone in on "sound science" in the climate change debate, one senator recently remarked, "It is no secret that we are not scientists up here, so we look at things logically."
Right.

Just over a year ago, on a continent that sometimes seems so far, far away, Prime Minister Blair delivered a speech entitled "Science Matters." "First, science is vital to our country's continued future prosperity," he said. "Second, science is posing hard questions of moral judgment and of practical concern, which, if addressed in the wrong way, can lead to prejudice against science, which I believe would be profoundly damaging. Third, as a result, the benefits of science will only be exploited through a renewed compact between science and society, based on a proper understanding of what science is trying to achieve.

"Britain can benefit enormously from scientific advance .... We need a robust, engaging dialogue with the public. We need to re-establish trust and confidence in the way that science can demonstrate new opportunities and offer new solutions. This task will be aided if we can embed a more mature attitude towards science in our society. I absolutely reject notions of two cultures. There is a deep human need to understand, and science has revealed so much of our extraordinary world. Science is a central part, not a separate part, of our common culture, together with art, history, the social sciences, and the humanities."

The "two cultures" notion Mr. Blair refers to is, indeed, no longer a reality. In 1991, author and literary agent John Brockman put forward the following contention in his landmark essay, "The Emerging Third Culture": "The playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. They are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly ignorant of the many truly significant intellectual accomplish-ments of our time. Their culture... is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost."

In a recent essay, "The New Humanists" (also the title of his new book, serialized on page 52), Brockman writes, "Twelve years later, that fossil culture has been essentially replaced by the 'third culture.' " Indeed, we are in the midst of a renais-sance driven by science; and the third culture is bridging the sciences and the humanities.

Washington, however, remains an anachronism. It is time for a debate at the highest level in this country on science and society; on stem cells and space, bioterrorism, AIDS/HIV and public health, cloning and GMO, climate change and global warming; an informed discussion on what we know now about our universe and ourselves, and what we seek to know.

I don't delude myself. Clearly, this idea will not easily be embraced. But we intend to give it credence in these pages. Traditionally, this has not been the role of a science magazine. But then, we have yet to subscribe to any limitations of the category. Over the next few issues we intend to fuel the debate with powerful essays, features and interviews, in the hope that they extend beyond the magazine to impact the national dialogue. We begin by asking you in "Dialogue" to identify what you want to hear debated. Your answers appear on page 28 and online at seedmagazine.com.

A great debate requires great minds; this issue, we profile 16. They are biologists, photographers, activists, physicists, and writers, redefining science and its place in our culture. During the last 12 months, they have put forth bold and original ideas in areas ranging from superstrings to death row, and they have contributed in significant ways to shaping the nation's (and often, the world's) conversation.

Finally, this issue marks our one-year anniversary on newsstands in the US. At a time when over half of all new magazines fail within the first year, this is reason to celebrate. And we plan to. This season, you will see more of SEED—more copies on the newsstand, more events around the country, and a few surprises. You will also see several changes in the magazine itself. We have lengthened our "Review" and "Ideas" departments to allow for greater discussion of powerful ideas in science; "Above the Fold" has been redesigned to allow for a greater mix of opinion and satire; We are introducing a number of new departments, including "Ethics"- an essay on controversial science and its adoption in society; "Notebook"- a portrait of the most personal dimension of science; and "Gone to Seed"—an off-the-cuff take on an otherwise weighty issue; We even have a new typeface. Let us know what you think of these changes through the Reader Survey on page 17.

It's been an extraordinary year. Thank you. —Adam Bly

Also...

The Third Culture — Class of 2003
Seed presents and exclusive portfolio of the icons and iconoclasts who redefined science in 2003. With an introduction by John Brockman.

With research cash increasingly targeted at interdiscipIinary study and cutting-edge science becoming ever-more complex, the aphorism 'it's not what you know but who you know' has never been more apt. Harriet Swain explains why networking is now a key academic skill 

...Smolin, along with Rees and Dawkins, has also been prominent on a website (www.edge.org) run by John Brockman. This site has brought together thinkers such as Daniel Dennett, Steven Pinker and Lynn Margulis to explore what Brockman refers to as "the third culture"—bridging the gap between scientific ideas and the "intelligent reading public". [Janna] Levin describes Brockman as a man who "knows everybody", who "collects people - and some pretty interesting ones". She met [Brian] Eno through Brockman, who also introduced Smolin and Jaron Lanier, inventor of virtual reality, to each other. This introduction was made at an event held to bring together Dawkins and the web intelligentsia who were fascinated by his "memes" theory—the idea of cultural replicators such as tunes and ideas being passed from person to person in a similar way to genes—in some ways a paeon to the powers of networking.

"Katinka Matson, an amazing digital artist, merging the technological with the botanical in a beautiful way. "

 Katinka Matson’s Scanner Art
Finally, about Katinka’s flowers! I hope you take a long look at our "photo" essay (really a "scanner" essay) of a few of Ms. Matson’s remarkable studies. (I regret that to publish her work on our website, we had to make dumbed-down petite versions.) When printed on large paper or shown, as they should also be, on high-definition television screens, Katinka’s scanned creations are towering, dense and richly hued. For several years, using the same digital flatbed scanners most of us simply copy documents with, this Manhattan-based artist unlocked the simple elegance of nature. Without cameras or special lenses, Katinka Matson captures the unfiltered raw vibrancy of lilies, tulips, and daisies. Closer to painting with nature than to containing and “capturing” it, Ms. Matson’s work is raw, striking, if not shocking. There is honest power in this fusion of technology with n ature and it’s made possible by an inkjet printer and a humble scanner.

See CBS News Video & "Scanner Essay" on Katinka Matson's Art

Katinka Matson is cofounder of Edge and it's resident artist. Her work can be seen at katinkamatson.com.

Education during most of the 20th century divided, all too neatly, between liberal arts and the sciences. You studied one or the other, but rarely both. It was C.P. Snow who divided the world of the intellect into literary criticism and science. But in recent years, science, once relegated by academia to the sidelines as a sort of technical specialty, has been where most of the worthwhile intellectual activity has been taking place. And a lot of what science is discovering tends to stand much of what literary intellects believed on its head. 

So, anyway, says John Brockman, an author and the editor and publisher of the Web site, edge.org. Brockman has a theory about the way in which science has flowed over into the liberal arts and forged a partnership between the two disciplines that Brockman calls "the third culture." Brockman argues that a growing number of scientists are writing elegant books and articles linking science and its discoveries to the real world of the average person. 

What used to be the purview of philosophers and poets, interpreting the world for the rest of us, has been taken over by scientists. Brockman argues that scientists look forward and change the world, while philosophers and, perhaps less so, poets examine and interpret their predecessors. 

While not knocking history, Brockman wonders at the value of the intellectual debate over "who was or was not a Stalinist in 1937, or what the sleeping arrangements were for guests at a Bloomsbury weekend in the early part of the 20th century." 

Meanwhile, science is about "the new and important ideas that drive our times: revolutionary developments in molecular biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, linguistics, superstrings, biodiversity, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, virtual reality, cyberspace and teraflop machines. Among others." 

Brockman offers examples of where science and art ought to, but don't always, come together. The art critic who doesn't understand visual perception is suspect. So are those who balk at genetic modification though ignorant of evolutionary biology and genetics. 

Naturally, Brockman's theories are subject to demeaning and intellectual disagreement, and to Brockman's credit, he provides his critics space to make their points. But the basic point belongs to Brockman, who has stirred the thought pot and added new spices. Many whose education spanned the middle of the last century can identify with Brockman's description of the sciences as technical specialties. The adage popular then was that students who got A's did the technical work, while people who managed only C's wound up running things. 

That this adage may no longer hold true seems like progress.

Copyright © 2003 Winston-Salem Journal  

Because the last decade brought forth not only scientific successes, but also a new scientific culture, the struggle for the future no longer takes place in privileged circles, but on the public stage...The worldview with the greatest profile in this regard is the "third culture," because it attempts to find scientific answers to the most important questions facing humanity. New York literary agent John Brockman coined the term...and conducts its most important debating club on his internet platform, Edge (http://www.edge.org).

murky.waters writes "The responses to this year's Edge.org question have been published; basically, people were asked to imagine they were nominated as White House science adviser and the President asked them what are some important issues in science and what we should do about them. There are 84 responses, ranging in topic from advanced nanotechnology to the psychology of foreign cultures, and lots of ideas regarding science, technology, politics, and education. The responses were written by academics (e.g. Roger Schank, Marvin Minsky), journalists (Kevin Kelly), Nobel Laureates (Eric Kandel), and others (Alan Alda). Some of responses are politically loaded but the majority has either a more specialised proposal, or general remarks about our world. Many are absolutely fascinating: funny, insightful, interesting, hell even informative. ... One of the most public supporters of the Singularity 'religion', Ray Kurzweil, is a regular at Edge, and currently discussed issues range from said transhumanism to early-universe theories, and many other kinds of exciting and novel science." 

If you had the President’s ear, what would you advise him was the most urgent scientific issue the country faces? Energy? Stem-cell research? Bioterror? Science teaching?...

At the end of every year, John Brockman, a literary agent and the publisher of Edge.org, a Web site devoted to science, poses a question to leading scientists, writers and futurists. In 2002, he asked respondents to imagine that they had been nominated as White House science adviser and that President Bush had sought their answer to ''What are the pressing scientific issues for the nation and the world, and what is your advice on how I can begin to deal with them?'' Here are excerpts of some of the responses.

Mapping the Planet

Over the last decade, the human genome project has laid the foundation for a comprehensive understanding of human biology. The translation of the new understanding into cures for human diseases will be a slow and difficult process.

Meanwhile, a new century has begun. It is time to begin a bold new initiative in biology: a planetary genome sequencing project to identify all the segments of the genomes of all the millions of species that live together on the planet.

This would require, first, the aggressive development of new technology for deciphering genes, comparable to the development of computer technology during the last half century, so that the cost of sequencing genes can continue to fall as rapidly as the cost of computing.

The goal would be to complete the sequencing of the biosphere within less than half a century, at a cost comparable with the cost of the human genome. This project would bring an enormous increase in understanding of the ecology of the planet, which could then be translated into practical measures to sustain and improve the environment while allowing continued rapid economic development. It could also lead to the stabilization of the atmosphere and the climate. Let this century be the century of cures for planetary as well as human diseases.

-- Freeman Dyson, retired professor of physics, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J.

Professor PlayStation

While American schools are notoriously underserving their students, American children are rushing home from class to learn how to succeed in the alternative universes of video games. They spend dozens of hours every week exploring virtual worlds, each with its own set of rules. Barring a complete overhaul of our schools, makers of game systems like Nintendo and PlayStation will continue to be the most successful institutions when it comes to captivating young minds.