Edge in the News: 2006

Five issues, insights, and observations shaping our perspective, from the editors of Seed.

1 The Edge Annual Question — 2007
What are you optimistic about? Why? Tons of brilliabnt thinkers respond. Check out our own editor-in-chief's answer here.

People's fascination for religion and superstition will disappear within a few decades as television and the internet make it easier to get information, and scientists get closer to discovering a final theory of everything, leading thinkers argue today.

The web magazine Edge (www.edge.org) asked more than 150 scientists and intellectuals: "What are you optimistic about?" Answers included hope for an extended human life span, a bright future for autistic children, and an end to violent conflicts around the world.

Philosopher Daniel Denett believes that within 25 years religion will command little of the awe it seems to instil today. The spread of information through the internet and mobile phones will "gently, irresistibly, undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance".

Biologist Richard Dawkins said that physicists would give religion another problem: a theory of everything that would complete Albert Einstein's dream of unifying the fundamental laws of physics. "This final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue death blow to religion and other juvenile superstitions."

• 'Jeremiahs' list their great hopes for 2007
• More romance, better old age and better death

Scientists often find themselves accused of pessimism. From the gravity of their public warnings about the dangers of climate change or bird flu, they have earned a reputation as Jeremiahs with a bleak view of human nature and humanity’s future.

It is a charge most researchers contest vigorously: science, they say, is a profoundly optimistic pursuit. The idea that the world can be understood by gathering evidence, to the ultimate benefit of its citizens, lies at its heart. It is not just about problems, but about finding the solutions.

The breadth of this optimism is revealed today by the discussion website Edge.org — often likened to an online scientific “salon” — which marks every new year by inviting dozens of the world’s best scientific minds to answer a single question. For 2007, it is: “What are you optimistic about?” The answers show that even in the face of such threats as global warming and religious fundamentalism, scientists remain positive about the future.

If we could eradicate disgust, would global warfare disappear? That is the intriguing thesis of Marc Hauser, Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and contributor to Edge (www.edge.org), a discussion forum for some of the world’s leading scientists.

Every year, Edge contributors are asked to consider an open-ended question. In his response to this year’s poser — What are you optimistic about, and why? — Hauser suggests that science may be able to rid the world of prejudices such as racism and sexism. These "isms" are fuelled not only by the perception of difference, but by the systematic denigration of others.

Pivotal to this process is disgust. Some aspects of this emotion are common to all cultures (an aversion to faeces and urine) but others are culture-specific. The agreeability of consuming sheeps’ eyeballs or chicken’s feet, for example, varies between countries.

Hauser calls disgust a "mischievous emotion", stretching beyond the purpose for which it originally evolved (most probably to keep us away from disease-carrying substances) and leaking into other arenas, such as the construction of social hierarchies. Look at the Indian caste system — the Dalits, or untouchables, perform the dirtiest work (such as handling dead animals or human excrement), live apart from polite society and, in some rural regions, are still banned from temples. ...

Scientists often find themselves accused of pessimism. From the gravity of their public warnings about the dangers of climate change or bird flu, they have earned a reputation as Jeremiahs with a bleak view of human nature and humanity’s future.

It is a charge most researchers contest vigorously: science, they say, is a profoundly optimistic pursuit. The idea that the world can be understood by gathering evidence, to the ultimate benefit of its citizens, lies at its heart. It is not just about problems, but about finding the solutions.

The breadth of this optimism is revealed today by the discussion website Edge.org — often likened to an online scientific “salon” — which marks every new year by inviting dozens of the world’s best scientific minds to answer a single question. For 2007, it is: “What are you optimistic about?” The answers show that even in the face of such threats as global warming and religious fundamentalism, scientists remain positive about the future.

Steven Pinker

Psychologist, Harvard University, author of The Blank Slate

In 16th-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat hoisted on a stage was slowly lowered into a fire.

As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable today in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and under appreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence.

My optimism lies in the hope that the decline of force over the centuries is a real phenomenon, that it is the product of systematic forces that will continue to operate, and that we can identify those forces and perhaps concentrate and bottle them.

Simon Baron-Cohen

Director of the Autism Research Centre, University of Cambridge

I remain optimistic that for a good proportion of them [people with autism], it has never been a better time to have autism. Why? Because there is a remarkably good fit between the autistic mind and the digital age.For this new generation of children with autism, I anticipate that many of them will find ways to blossom, using their skills with digital technology to find employment, to find friends, and in some cases to innovate.

Daniel Dennett

Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University, author of Breaking the Spell

I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion. I think that in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena . . . With the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television), it is no longer feasible for guardians of religious traditions to protect their young from exposure to the kinds of facts (and, yes, of course, misinformation and junk of every genre) that gently, irresistibly undermine the mindsets requisite for religious fanaticism and intolerance. The religious fervour of today is a last, desperate attempt by our generation to block the eyes and ears of the coming generations, and it isn’t working.

Jared Diamond

Biologist and geographer, UCLA, and author of Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse

I am cautiously optimistic about the state of the world, because: 1. Big businesses sometimes conclude that what is good for the long-term future of humanity is also good for their bottom line (cf Wal-Mart’s recent decision to shift their seafood purchases entirely to certified sustainable fisheries within the next three to five years). 2. Voters in democracy sometimes make good choices and avoid bad choices (cf some recent elections in a major First World country).

Each year, John Brockman's EDGE asks a single question for the new year, and publishes the responses online. For 2007:

What are you optimistic about? Why?

While conventional wisdom tells us that things are bad and getting worse, scientists and the science-minded among us see good news in the coming years. That's the bottom line of an outburst of high-powered optimism gathered from the world-class scientists and thinkers by EDGE, the influential online salon that features an ongoing conversation among third culture thinkers (i.e., those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.)

The 2007 EDGE Question marks the 10th anniversary of EDGE, which began in December, 1996 as an email to about fifty people. In 2006, EDGE had more than five million user sessions.

The responses to this year's EDGE Question span topics such as string theory, intelligence, population growth, cancer, climate and much much more. Among the 150 world-class thinkers contributing their optimistic visions are Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Freeman Dyson, Howard Gardner, Marc D. Hauser, W. Daniel Hillis, Ray Kurzweil, Steven Pinker, Lisa Randall, and J, Craig Venter.

The World Question Center at www.edge.org every year asks scientists, doctors, philosophers and educators a question.

The question for 2006 was "What is your dangerous idea?"

Princeton University professor of astrophysics Piet Hut posted this idea:"In everyday experience, time flows, and we flow with it. In classical physics, time is frozen as part of a frozen spacetime picture. And there is, as yet, no agreed-upon interpretation of time in quantum mechanics."

What if a future scientific understanding of time would show all previous pictures to be wrong, and demonstrate that past and future and even the present do not exist? That stories woven around our individual personal history and future are all just wrong? Now that would be a dangerous idea.

"We hope we've reassured you, dear reader, that those crow's feet do not really exist. They are just an illusion.

Still, here on Earth, we like to celebrate the passage of time. Like we did last night. That's why our head hurts this morning and we don't have much of an appetite.

Natural scientists are now and are 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.

The Third Culture in Süddeutsche Zeitung

WHEN ONLY THE ENLIGHTENED SPEAK OUT, REASON IS BOUND TO LOSE

Is religion a destructive force? The debate over Fundamentalism and the new Atheists overshadows the scientific research on faith.

By Andrian Kreye, Editor, the Feuilleton, Süddeutsche Zeitung

ANDRIAN KREYE, from 1987 to 2006, was the US cultural correspondent for the Süddeutsche Zeitung (currently the largest German-language daily). At the end of 2006, he moved from New York to Germany, where he took over the Feuilleton section of the newspaper (part Arts & Ideas, part Op-Ed section). He is also an Edge contributor.

NEW YORK The Edge of Computation Science Prize endowed with a hundred housand dollars goes at David Deutsch, the pioneer of quantum computer research. The honor is aimed at scientists, who advance the "computatrional idea" in the past ten years with their work. Deutsch, born in Israel and trained in Oxford and Cambridge, is credited with the development of a set of algorithms on which the theoretical conditions for a recent revolution in computation are based. The Edge Prize, named after the virtual Internet salon Edge, in which an international avant-garde of researchers and philosophers meet, was organized by John Brockman, the New York Guru of the third culture.

The Prize was initiated by the investor Jeffrey Epstein, an inspired promoter of science, who also donated the Prize money. Among the other nominees were researchers such as Tim Berners Lee, Noam Chomsky, David Gelernter, Larry Smarr and J. Craig Venter.