Curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist
In collaboration with artist Ólafur Elíasson
These are exhibitions which are not material, but which are more virtual, virtual in the sense of them always being able to be reactualized. They can be revisited and reactualized and updated, and they are also not related to a place. The exhibition can go to where the viewer is. Anybody in the world can download these formulas and pin them on the wall, or they can do their own and trigger their own formulas. We are in the very early days of understanding how the Internet can be used for exhibitions.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST, a Swiss curator, is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, of the Serpentine Gallery in London.
ANNALS OF INNOVATION IN THE AIR Who says big ideas are rare?
by Malcolm Gladwell
...In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights—that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights—to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies. ...
The Top 100 Public Intellectuals They are some of the world’s most introspective philosophers and rabble-rousing clerics. A few write searing works of fiction and uncover the mysteries of the human mind. Others are at the forefront of modern finance, politics, and human rights. In the second Foreign Policy/Prospect list of top public intellectuals, we reveal the thinkers who are shaping the tenor of our time.
In 1992, when Daniel Wemp was about twenty-two years old, his beloved paternal uncle Soll was killed in a battle against the neighboring Ombal clan. In the New Guinea Highlands, where Daniel and his Handa clan live, uncles and aunts play a big role in raising children, so an uncle’s death represents a much heavier blow than it might to most Americans. Daniel often did not even distinguish between his biological father and other male clansmen of his father’s generation. And Soll had been very good to Daniel, who recalled him as a tall and handsome man, destined to become a leader. Soll’s death demanded vengeance.
Daniel told me that responsibility for arranging revenge usually falls on the victim’s firstborn son or, failing that, on one of his brothers. “Soll did have a son, but he was only six years old at the time of his father’s death, much too young to organize the revenge,” Daniel said. “On the other hand, my father was felt to be too old and weak by then; the avenger should be a strong young man in his prime. So I was the one who became expected to avenge Soll.” As it turned out, it took three years, twenty-nine more killings, and the sacrifice of three hundred pigs before Daniel succeeded in discharging this responsibility.
I first met Daniel half a dozen years after these events, while he was working for the Papua New Guinea branch of ChevronTexaco, which was then managing oil fields in the Southern Highlands, about thirty miles from Daniel’s home village. The fields, where I was doing environmental studies, lie in forest-covered hills near the beautiful Lake Kutubu. The weather is warm but wet—the region gets hundreds of inches of rain a year. As the driver assigned to me, Daniel picked me up an hour before dawn each day, drove me out along narrow dirt roads, waited while I jumped out every mile or so to record birdsongs, and drove me back to the oil camp in time for lunch. He was slim but muscular, and, like other New Guinea Highlanders, dark-skinned, with tightly coiled dark hair, dark eyes, and a strongly contoured face. From the outset, I found him to be a happy, enthusiastic, sociable person. During our hours together on the road, we enjoyed sharing our life stories. Despite some big differences between our backgrounds—Daniel’s Highland village life focussed on growing sweet potatoes, raising pigs, and fighting, and my American city life focussed on college teaching and research—we enjoyed many of the same things, such as our wives and children, conversation, sports, birds, and driving cars. It was in these conversations that he told me the story of his revenge.
Even deeper than emergence and its challenge to reductionism in this new scientific worldview is what I call breaking the Galilean spell. Galileo rolled balls down incline planes and showed that the distance traveled varied as the square of the time elapsed. From this he obtained a universal law of motion. Newton followed with his Principia, setting the stage for all of modern science. With these triumphs, the Western world came to the view that all that happens in the universe is governed by natural law. Indeed, this is the heart of reductionism. Another Nobel laureate physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, has defined a natural law as a compressed description, available beforehand, of the regularities of a phenomenon. The Galilean spell that has driven so much science is the faith that all aspects of the natural world can be described by such laws. Perhaps my most radical scientific claim is that we can and must break the Galilean spell. Evolution of the biosphere, human economic life, and human history are partially indescribable by natural law. This claim flies in the face of our settled convictions since Galileo, Newton, and the Enlightenment. ...
STUART A. KAUFFMAN, a professor at the University
of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences
and physics and astronomy, is
the author of The Origins of Order, At
Home in the Universe, Investigations, and Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (Basic Books, forthcoming, May 5th).
Vermehrung der Denkkulturen (Propagating the culture of thinking)
Suhrkamp startet mit der «edition unseld» Expeditionen in das Niemandsland zwischen Natur und Geist
Who can still recall the "third culture"? This catch phrase, which American
literary agent John Brockman tried to make stick nearly a decade and a half
ago, is a sham. It springs from the term with which CP Snow in 1959
launched the discourse about the two intellectual cultures, which are
foreign in nature and pitted against each other. The gap in mentality
between the humanities and the sciences, as this still-barely-used term
suggests, will inevitably come to be bridged by a third.
Dialogue, Change of View
However, this alleged third culture has decidedly more in common with the
sciences than with the humanities in the view it takes of man and the
world, nature and society. Its overall enterprise is to create a place of
greater importance and prestige for a naturalistic understanding of the
world within intellectual discourse, and the public consciousness. This
design also permeates the web-journal "Edge" — an ambitious popularization
of science that has been committed to the campaign from the beginning
(www.edge.org). There is some evidence, not least in the expanding realm of
brainscience, that naturalism has become a major thrust in all kinds of
worldviews.
...Weizenbaum (and probably Carr) would have been one of those smart, well-meaning elder figures in ancient times preaching against the coming horrors of printing and books. They would highlight the loss or orality, and the way these new-fangled auxiliary technologies demean humanity. We have our own memories, people: use them! They would have been in good company, since even Plato lamented the same. ...
This is where big brains hang out online. Its membership includes 'some of the most interesting minds in the world' debating intellectual, philosophical and artistic issues. Sounds heavy, but it's always full of wise words to steal.
Scientists compared the genetic sequences of ethnically and geographically diverse people from around the world and found that the genes which code for the nervous systems, had some sequence differences (known as polymorphisms) among individuals. By analyzing human and chimpanzee polymorphism patterns, genetic probabilities and various other genetic tools, and geographical distributions, they found evidence that some of these genes are experiencing ongoing positive selection in humans. They calculated that one genetic variant of microcephalin arose approximately 37,000 years ago, which coincides with the emergence of culturally modern humans, and it increased in frequency too rapidly to be compatible with random genetic drift or population migration. This suggests that it underwent positive selection.[xxi] An ASPM variant arose about 5800 years ago, coincident with the spread of agriculture, cities and the first record of written language. It too is found in such high frequencies in the population, that it indicates strong positive selection.[xxii]
MICHAEL GAZZANIGA, one of the world's leading neuroscientists, is a Professor of Psychology and the Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara, and is a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics . He is the author of several books including the forthcoming Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique (Ecco; June 24, 2008).
What is the compelling urgency of the machine that it can so intrude itself into the very stuff out of which man builds his world?
JOSEPH WEIZENBAUM 1923 – 2008
The machine's influence shapes not only society's structures but the more intimate structures of the self. Under the sway of the ubiquitous, "indispensable" computer, we begin to take on its characteristics, to see the world, and ourselves, in the computer's (and its programmers') terms.
A former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review, Nicholas Carr writes regularly for the The Guardian as well as his blog, Rough Type. He is the author of the recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.
Writer, editor and architect of a great number of the recent years' scientific bestsellers, American John Brockman recounts how the project came about to summon a hundred brilliant minds, mostly scientists, and each year ask provocative questions to synthesize, in a way, contemporary thought. The answers are striking.
By Juana Libedinsky
NEW YORK — "It was July and so hot that you could fry an egg on Park Avenue. I went out to do some errands, driving around the city in an airconditioned taxi when I was distracted by the news on the radio: the war in Iraq was going from bad to worse; Bush was, well, being Bush (and let me clarify that among the many hundreds of science-minded thinkers that I know, I can count three who are Republicans). It was then that I had the idea: the question of the year could only be "What are you optimistic about!".
Sitting in his magnificent office on Central Park, with the St. Patrick's Day parade going by below, John Brockman, a writer, editor and the agent behind nearly every major scientific bestseller in recent years (such as books by Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Nassim Taleb, among others) talks about how the idea came about for his latest compilation entitled, obviously "What are you optimistic about?"
In the book, a good portion of today's most prominent thinkers (musician Brian Eno, artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, decoder of the human genome Craig Venter, Nobel laureate George Smoot and writer Ray Kurtzweil, among many others) come up with hopeful answers. Brockman asked specifically that they surprise him with their responses, and they succeeded in doing so.
...All of the responses were originally published at www.edge.org, the website that brings together these great thinkers and of which Brockman is also the publisher.
The Edge Foundation, which is described as the "collective expression of wonder at the living and inanimate world ... an ongoing and thrilling colloquium", by the writer Ian McEwan in The Telegraph, and which, according to The New York Times, "gives today's vision science of tomorrow ", began ten years ago to propose a question that is eventually published in book form. In the website's pages, it is possible to read the material for the next book, to be released in December, whose theme, as always, lends itself to debate: "What have you changed your mind about?". ...
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.
Edge Video
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER, a climatologist, is Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford University. He is internationally recognized as one of the world's leading experts in atmospheric research and its implications for environment and society.
'Opposition to religion occupies the high ground, intellectually and morally,' wrote Martin Amis recently. Over the past few years, leading writers and thinkers have published bestselling tracts against God. John Gray on why the 'secular fundamentalists' have got it all wrong
An atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils. As a result, there has been a sudden explosion in the literature of proselytising atheism. A few years ago, it was difficult to persuade commercial publishers even to think of bringing out books on religion. Today, tracts against religion can be enormous money-spinners, with Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and Christopher Hitchens's God Is Not Great selling in the hundreds of thousands. [*] For the first time in generations, scientists and philosophers, high-profile novelists and journalists are debating whether religion has a future. The intellectual traffic is not all one-way. There have been counterblasts for believers, such as The Dawkins Delusion? by the British theologian Alister McGrath and The Secular Age by the Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor. On the whole, however, the anti-God squad has dominated the sales charts, and it is worth asking why. ...
[*] EDITOR'S NOTE: Dawkins's The God Delusion has sold more than a million and a half copies in the English language, and is being published in 31 countries.
...A curious feature of this kind of atheism is that some of its most fervent missionaries are philosophers. Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon claims to sketch a general theory of religion. In fact, it is mostly a polemic against American Christianity. This parochial focus is reflected in Dennett's view of religion, which for him means the belief that some kind of supernatural agency (whose approval believers seek) is needed to explain the way things are in the world. For Dennett, religions are efforts at doing something science does better - they are rudimentary or abortive theories, or else nonsense. "The proposition that God exists," he writes severely, "is not even a theory." But religions do not consist of propositions struggling to become theories. The incomprehensibility of the divine is at the heart of Eastern Christianity, while in Orthodox Judaism practice tends to have priority over doctrine. Buddhism has always recognised that in spiritual matters truth is ineffable, as do Sufi traditions in Islam. Hinduism has never defined itself by anything as simplistic as a creed. It is only some western Christian traditions, under the influence of Greek philosophy, which have tried to turn religion into an explanatory theory.
The notion that religion is a primitive version of science was popularised in the late 19th century in JG Frazer's survey of the myths of primitive peoples, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. For Frazer, religion and magical thinking were closely linked. Rooted in fear and ignorance, they were vestiges of human infancy that would disappear with the advance of knowledge. Dennett's atheism is not much more than a revamped version of Frazer's positivism. The positivists believed that with the development of transport and communication - in their day, canals and the telegraph - irrational thinking would wither way, along with the religions of the past. Despite the history of the past century, Dennett believes much the same. In an interview that appears on the website of the Edge Foundation (edge.org) under the title "The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion", he predicts that "in about 25 years almost all religions will have evolved into very different phenomena, so much so that in most quarters religion will no longer command the awe that it does today". He is confident that this will come about, he tells us, mainly because of "the worldwide spread of information technology (not just the internet, but cell phones and portable radios and television)". The philosopher has evidently not reflected on the ubiquity of mobile phones among the Taliban, or the emergence of a virtual al-Qaida on the web. ...
Another example that we've been investigating arehuge 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. Perhaps they have come to a collective decision to move from one place to another. We investigated this collective decision, and what really makes this system work in the case of the Mormon cricket is cannibalism.
"Like the participants of failed cultural eras before our own, we have embraced the new technologies and literacies of our age without actually learning how they work and work on us," claims writer and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, in a recent email. He continues:
The 22-letter alphabet did not lead to a society of literate Israelite readers, but a society of hearers, who would gather to hear the Torah scroll read to them by a priest. The printing press and television set did not lead to a society of writers and producers, but one of readers and viewers, who were free to enjoy their own perspective on the creations of an elite with access to the new tools of production. And the computer has not led to a society of programmers, but one of bloggers -- free to write whatever we please, but utterly unaware of the underlying biases of the interfaces and windows that have been programmed for us.
I'd dropped a line to Rushkoff to ask him to explain the following algorithm, titled "Social Control as a Function of Media," which he contributed recently to a special exhibition (on "Formulae for the 21st Century") at the Serpentine Gallery in the UK. (The question was asked by the same folks who brought us recent books in which bleeding-edge thinkers answer questions like, "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?") ...
In
the last edition of John Brockman's always-provokative EDGE,
Harvard MD and sociologist Nicholas Christakis talked about social
networks. But instead of delving into well-trodden social network
phenomena like viral videos, Christakis studies a variety of unexpected
things that can spread through social networks, such as obesity,
happiness, altruism, and, oddly, the taste for privacy. ...
...As EDGE is a conversation, the new edition includes two insightful
responses to Christakis's essay, from Douglas Rushkoff and Alan
Alda (yes, that Alan Alda), and, finally, Christakis's response
to them. Also in this EDGE edition, photos from
the annual EDGE Dinner where big thinkers meet, eat, and somehow
avoid being suffocated by the massive amount of smarts in the room. Link
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. We’ve been investigating
the spread of obesity through a network, the spread of smoking
cessation through a network, the spread of happiness through
a network, the spread of loneliness through a network, the spread
of altruism through a network. And we have been thinking
about these
kinds of things while also keeping an eye on the fact that networks
do not just arise from nothing or for nothing. Very interesting
rules determine their structure. ...
THE
REALITY CLUB: Douglas Rushkoff, Alan Alda; Nicholas Chistakis responds
ED. NOTE: A theme appears to be evolving, beginning with the Edge event "Life: what A Concept!" in August, proceeding to Munich at DLD (Hubert Burda's Digital, Life, Design ) in January, where Craig Venter, and Richard Dawkins held an Edge conversation, "Life" A Gene-Centric View". Both events were important, and newsworthy. Next, the following conversation, Engineering Biology", with Drew Endy, a young researcher who is defining the cutting edge of synthetic biology.
The
only thing that hasn't been engineered are the living things,
ourselves. Again, what's the consequence of doing that at scale?
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 in terms of how this is going to change ourselves,
how the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it's not
going to be nation-state driven work necessarily, how an ownership
sharing and innovation framework needs to be developed that moves
beyond patent-based intellectual property and recognizes that
the information defining the genetic material's going to be more
important than the stuff itself and so you might transition away
from patents to copyright and so on and so forth.
THE
SUN HERALD (Sydney, Australia)
February 17, 2008
Non-fiction
What
Are You Optimistic About? Edited by John Brockman
(Simon & Schuster, $29.95)
By Frank Brunetti
ON
HIS website, www.edge.org, John Brockman has
been asking his contributors an annual question and publishing
the results in book form. This year's question is: what are you
optimistic about? The new offering collects almost 150 contributions
from an array of Nobel laureates, professors, Pulitzer Prize
winners and bestselling authors. Global warming, space travel,
international terrorism, religious intolerance, stay-at-home
dads, the increasing numbers of women in politics and other harder-to-understand
medical and technological advances are some of the topics covered
in this impressive book.
Each
Christmas, those who know what makes me happiest usually give
me the gift of knowledge in the form of a few good books. This
year one of these gifts was What
Are You Optimistic About?, edited by John Brockman.
It contains a collection of answers by some of the world's
leading scientists and thinkers to the third "annual www.edge.org
question. "
BANAJI:
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.
GREENWALD:
The IAT provides a useful window into some otherwise difficult-to-detect
contents of our minds. In some cases, we find things we did
not know were there. 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. ...
The
Presidential tests are based on an assumption central to our
research: We may not know our implicit, less conscious preferences.
So, take the test to see how its result matches up to your consciously expressed
choice of candidate.
The
political preference test is interesting because a voting decision
is made quite deliberately. The candidate you explicitly endorse
is likely to be the candidate you will vote for — even
if the IAT should predict a different preference.
Yet if the IAT suggests a different candidate preference than the
one you believe yourself to have, it can be the basis of interesting
self-examination of why such divergence exists.
One
hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators,
at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following
question: "What
Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?"
CRAIG
VENTER: One of the exciting elements that people who are
interested in the digital world here may find is we can use
the genetic code to watermark chromosomes. You can use
it in a secret code, or you can—basically what we're
using is the three-letter triplet code that codes for amino
acids. There's 20 amino acids, and they use single letters
to denote those. Using the triplet code, we can write
words, sentences, we can say, "This genome was made
by Richard Dawkins on this date in 2008." A key
hallmark of man-made species, manmade chromosomes, is that
they will be very much denoted that way.
RICHARD
DAWKINS: What has happened is that genetics has become a
branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's
digital information. It's precisely the kind of information
that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into
any other kind of information and then translated back again. This
is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably "the" major
revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves. It's
something would have boggled the mind of Darwin, and Darwin
would have loved it, I'm absolutely sure.
LIFE: A GENE-CENTRIC VIEW Craig
Venter & Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich (Moderator: John
Brockman)
ONE HOUR VIDEO
COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT
NOW AVAILABLE
It's
not everyday you have Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter on a stage
talking for an hour about "Life: A Gene-Centric View".
That it occured in Germany, where the culture has been resistant
to open discussion of genetics, and at DLD,
the Digital, Life, Design conference organized by Hubert
Burda Media in Munich,
a high-level event for the digital elite — the
movers and shakers of the Internet — was particularly interesting. This
event was a continuation of the Edge"Life:
What a Concept!" meeting in August, 2008.
Edge is pleased to report on the event: the complete one hour video;
the transcript; a sampling of the nationwide German press coverage of the event: Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel Online, and Stern.
Richard Dawkins & J.Craig
Venter
SÜDDEUTSCHE
ZEITUNG
22.
Januar 2008
FEUILLETON
The
future of Selection: Scientists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins
in Munich(Die
Zukunft der Selektion)
Digital
or biological? There was a moment during Munich's conference about
the future at DLD ( Digital Life Design) this past Monday, that felt like the
exchage of a baton. After a rather dull discussion about social
platforms on the internet a burly man entered the stage, introduced
himself as John Brockman and proclaimed that the topic of the hour
would now be biology.
John
Brockman was not just another moderator. In the late summer
of 2007 he hosted the now legendary symposium 'Life: What a Concept!'
at his farm in Connceticut. This was where six pioneers of science
had jointly proclaimed a new era: After the decyphering of the
human genome soon whole genomes sequences could be written. That
would be the beginning of the age of biology.
Amidst
all the enthusiasm for technology, one conversation had more
explosive potential than the talking points of all the old and
new digital entrepreneurs put together.
When
Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of The God
Illusion, and Craig Venter, first Decoder of the human genome
meet, the members of the audience feel privileged to be allowed
to listen, while straining to understand the ideas. The two philosophers
are united. "Genetics became a part of the information technology",
recognizes Dawkins. The increasing understanding of the composition
of our genes and their complex interaction is "the largest
revolution in the history self realization of humans".
This
super-distribution system has become the foundation of our
economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas,
and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy,
particularly those involved with exports — that is, those
industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth
sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and
constantly.
THE
WALL STREET JOURNAL— WEEKEND JOURNAL, Page W8
January
26, 2008
BOOKS
A Sense of the Future Scientists, writers, athletes and others try to see what lies
ahead By
Paul Boutin
How do you predict the future without making a fool of yourself?
You can extrapolate current trends to their logical next steps,
but unless you stick to the weather -- hurricanes a-comin'
next year! -- you're likely to be wrong. Human beings should
have been cloned by now. Gasoline should be pumping at $5 a
gallon. California, to the disappointment of many, has yet
to collapse into the sea along its fault lines, metaphorical
or otherwise. What, then, is the point of predicting the future
at all?
On the evidence of the more nuanced forecasting in "What's
Next" and "What Are You Optimistic About?," looking
ahead is best undertaken not as a guessing game but as a way
of glimpsing humanity's most realistic yet provocative possibilities,
good or bad.
...Not
surprisingly, the most detailed predictions in both books
come from information technologists. Second-guessing current
trends is, after all, an integral part of their work. Taken
together, the optimistic visions of several of Mr. Brockman's
Net-savvy essayists seem not just wonderful but plausible:
The Internet, for all it has brought so far, is only the
first step before a much bigger leap in information and interconnectivity
between people. ...
...The
contributors to this very cheering anthology are also full
of hope, but theirs is a different brand of optimism, born
of expertise and hard, imaginative thinking. And one of the
most optimistic things about the collection is the breadth
and variety of things the contributors are optimistic about.
So many different ways we can make the world better! So many
lights at the end of so many tunnels! Here we find schemes
for cooling the Arctic ice cap, solving our energy problems,
democratizing the global economy, improving transparency in
government, muffling or dissolving religious discord, and even
enlarging our personal intelligence and improving the phenomenon
of friendship. We can come to understand ourselves and each
other better, finally master math, and share our good fortune
with larger segments of the world's population (which will
soon stabilize).
It's
all too good to be true, of course. That is, it can't all be
sound prognostication. Some of the schemes will eventually
prove to be cock-eyed, but we can't tell which ones until we
try them and test them. This is part of the strength of the
phenomenon: We have an open forum of candidates that can compete
for credibility and feasibility, and the competition—if
we manage it right—will be judged on excellence, not
political support or authoritarian fiat. It's not who you know;
it's what you know.
Knowledge
is the thread that runs through all the entries. Not Knowledge
of the (Divine, Mysterious) Truth, but good old knowledge of
facts, (lower-case) truths dug up and confirmed by careful
testing—the kind of knowledge that has been steadily
accumulating in the human race for thousands of years and is
now expanding explosively on almost all topics. With some few
remarkable—and much analyzed—exceptions, once we
human beings figure something out, it stays figured out. ...
One
of the most interesting developments of the last sixty years
in the popularization of intellectual concerns and higher culture
has been the appearance of "public intellectuals." They
are, for the most part, academics who use a variety of means
of access to a wide audience to disseminate ideas that are
sometimes an integral part of their expertise, and sometimes
very far from their professional field. ...
When
I was a boy The New York Times had one science reporter,
Waldemar Kaempfert, who wrote an occasional column. It now
has a staff that produces an entire ten-page Science Times
every Tuesday. Of the twenty-two contributors to the 2007 Fall
Books edition of The New York Review, nine were academics.
The pages of that edition included twenty-six advertisements
from university presses announcing 154 books. Nor are university
presses the sole publishers of the work of professional thinkers.
Really successful public intellectuals employ a literary agent
who places his clients' work with major trade publishers or
may even serve as the editor of a collection of articles of
his clients, [3] which is then published by
a major house.
There
is a considerable variation in the degree to which academic
public intellectuals stray from their own technical work in
their public writings. Even those who begin with both feet
planted firmly in their discipline find it hard to resist the
seduction of generalizing, especially if they see some relevance
of their knowledge to human history and social structure. E.O.
Wilson, a great expert on the biology of ants and especially
on ant behavior, devoted most of his famous book on sociobiology
to the social behavior of "lower" animals, but his
status as a public intellectual arose from his extension of
those ideas and observations to claims about human nature and
human social institutions. After all, Homo sapiens is an animal,
so why should we not be able to understand human history as
just another example of a general theory about animal behavior?
Some
depart entirely from their expertise and build a public career
with only the slimmest connection to their professional knowledge.
It will not be obvious to the readers of Jared
Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel that he is, in fact, a
physiologist and an expert in tropical biogeography. Still
others are public figures concerned with political questions
quite separate from the content of their intellectual accomplishment. Noam
Chomsky's politics have nothing to do with his theory of
universal grammar, although he might gain attention for his
political arguments because we already know that he is very
smart. It is even possible to become a public intellectual
in science with no institutional home in a technical discipline. Richard
Dawkins, who was trained as a biologist and who obviously
knows a great deal about genetics and evolution, is Professor
of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. ...
___
In
its roundup of best books of 2007, The Economist claimed
that "there is something for everyone" -- but there
wasn't.
There was not a single science title, which is curious, even
for a business and political affairs periodical, given not only
the technology-invention-business connection but also the fact
that we are currently in a golden age of literary science writing.
That we are is affirmed by British science journalist Matt
Ridley in his introduction to a recent collection of essays
on evolution. Scientists, says Ridley, "(are) writers and
their currency (is) words: poetic flights of fancy, ample use
of metaphor, and personal appeals to the reader."
Many
editors, reviewers and other publicists don't seem to have
heard the news, however. Not only The Economist but
also the Globe & Mail and the New York Times snubbed
2007's science titles. ...
...In
his Christmas Day sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury praised
his compatriot Richard
Dawkins for expressing humanity's "amazement and awe" at
nature, and urged people to treat nature with "reverence." It
seems that for some, the famous long cultural war between science
and the humanities can now be over, and that "science
literature" can now be literature.
That is certainly the opinion of editor John
Brockman whose exhilarating science site "edge.org" profiles
dozens of groundbreaking scienists by asking them an annual New
Year's Big Question. This year's is "What Have You Changed
Your Mind About?"
Their answers add up to, roughly, "everything." That
is what science frees thinkers to do: change their theories as
new evidence comes in. Most responders one way or another emphasized
the ethical demands of good science, and described scientific
work as subjective, dynamic and creative -- rather like the humanities,
in fact.
Team Completes Second Step in Three Step Process to Create Synthetic Organism
On August 27th, at Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, CT, Edge held it's annual summer event: Life: What A Concept. The transcript of the event has just been published by Edge as a downloadable PDF.
At the end of June, Craig Venter had 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. In talking to Edge about the research, Venter noted the following:
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 chromosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chromosome 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 was 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.
At the time, Venter said:
Right now we're all focused on the genetic code because it's something we can define and the environment is so many orders of magnitude more complex to define, but we're having this trouble with a single cell with a few hundred genes; we as humans have a hundred trillion cells with 23 thousand or so genes, and an infinite number of combinations, so defining our environment is going to be a lot more complicated than that for a single cell. We decided the only way to answer these questions was to make a synthetic chromosome to understand minimal cellular life.
Today, he announced that he's done it. It's big news. Very big news.
IN
BRIEF: What
Are You Optimistic About? By
James Joseph
To
non-scientists, it may not be obvious that science tends to
be an optimistic endeavour. While
academics working in the arts or humanities may be more equivocal
abut the state of the world, those working in science tend to
be hopeful, at least about furthering the limits of human knowledge
and the possibilities of what can be known in the future. These
are essentially optimistic goals.
What Are You Optimistic About? is
a collection of essays from “the world’s leading scientists and thinkers” addressing
the 2007 annual question posed by John Brockman on his website www.edge.org. Like
its predecessors from previous years, it covers an impressively
wide range of topics, including the futures of religion, the
origins of the universe, climate change, neuroscience, human
relationships, medicine, artificial intelligence, communications
and psychology, among others. Inevitably, many important
ideas get brief, superficial discussion, but as a whole the collection
provides an overview of where the work in a number of interesting
fields is heading, and makes both engaging and consoling predictions
about the future. As Brockman is careful to articulate
in his introduction, not all of these things will come to pass,
but some certainly will.
Almost
all the contributions are written by scientists or at least “thinkers in the empirical world”: people Brockman
considers to be the new intellectuals of modern culture. Steven
Pinker explains why the decline in violence in the world will
continue; Dan Sperber considers altruism on the web; and Oliver
Morton writes on how solar energy can save the planet. A
number of these essays assert confidently that we are living
in a time of shifting paradigms, but they rarely agree on precise
terms, and some hopes for the future openly contradict others. The
most memorable moments in the collection do not come from ambitious
contributions on the showstopper science of torpedoed religion,
cancer cures and climate reversals. Instead they come when
the contributors address wider hopes for human ingenuity, our
capacity for progress and problem-solving. The edge question
for 2008 is: what have you changed your mind about? This
will surely provoke another stimulating array of responses, profiling
issues and ideas where recent data are challenging preconceptions
and highlighting the topics on the brink of breakthrough and
development.
"I
just read the Life transcript book and it is fantastic. One of
the better books I've read in a while. Super rich, high signal
to noise, great subject."
— Kevin
Kelly, Editor-At-Large, Wired
"The
more I think about it the more I'm convinced that Life: What A Concept was
one of those memorable events that people in years to come
will see as a crucial moment in history. After all, it's
where the dawning of the age of biology was officially announced."
— Andrian
Kreye, Süddeutsche
Zeitung
EDGE
PUBLISHES "LIFE: WHAT A CONCEPT!"
TRANSCRIPT AS DOWNLOADABLE PDF BOOK
HANS ULRICH OBRIST, a Swiss curator, is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, of the 
Writer, editor and architect of a great number of the recent years' scientific bestsellers, American John Brockman recounts how the project came about to summon a hundred brilliant minds, mostly scientists, and each year ask provocative questions to synthesize, in a way, contemporary thought. The answers are striking.
Edge Video
