Gavin Schmidt [6.29.09] • David M. Eagleman [6.24.09] • John A. Bargh [6.19.09] • LA Times [6.09] • Lera Boroditsky [6.11.09] • Don Tapscott [6.4.09] • Max Brockman [5.26.09] • Laurence C. Smith [5.27.09] • Jonathan Lehrer [5.21.09] • Seed [5.21.09] • The Economic Manhattan Project [5.21.09] • The Economic Manhattan Project [5.15.09] • C.P Snow [5.7.09] • Larry Brilliant [5.7.09] • Nathan Wolfe [5.1.09] • Philip Campbell [4.26.09] • Edge London Dinner [4.20.09] • David Gelernter, John Markoff, Clay Shirky [4.26.09] • Simon Baron-Cohen [4.24.09] • AC Grayling [4.16.09] • Nassim Nicholas Taleb [4.16.09] • Sir John Maddox [4.15.09] • John Maddox [3.4.97] • Kraussfest 2009 [4.10.09] • Heinz Pagels [4.10.09] • Yochai Benkler [3.31.09] • Timothy Taylor [4.26.09] • By The Late John Brockman [3.22.09] • Peter Dizikes [3.22.09] • Steve Jones [3.25.09] • Clay Shirky [3.17.09] • Seirian Sumner [3.17.09] • Brian Cox [3.4.09] • Lewis Wolpert [3.4.09] • Denis Dutton [2.24.09] • Armand Leroi [2.24.09] • Juan Enriquez [2.24.09] • James Lee Byars [2.9.09] • The Edge Dinner 2009 [2.9.09] • The New Yorker [2.9.09] • Nathan Wolfe [1.30.09] • Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Nicholas Taleb [1.30.09] • Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges [1.27.09] • Steven Pinker [1.22.09] • Jerry Coyne [1.21.09] •Katinka Matson [1.23.09] • Frank Wilczek [1.15.09] • Steven Pinker [1.11.09] • John Markoff [1.11.09] • V.S. Ramachandran [1.1.09]• James Lee Byars [1.1.09] • World Question Center [1.1.09]

THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW [6.29.09]
A Conversation with Gavin Schmidt

Introduction

There is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100% accuracy. First, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 13 billion years.

But if you want something useful right now, if you want to construct a means of taking the knowledge that we have and use it to predict future climate, you build computer simulations. Your models are messy, complicated, in constant need of fine tuning, exacting and inexact at the same time. You're using the past to predict the future, extrapolating the very complicated from the very simple, and relying on an ever-changing data stream to inform the outcome.

Climatologist Gavin Schmidt explains: "How do you ask questions about expectations in the future? Obviously, you have to have things that are based on the physics that we know. You have to have things that are based on processes we can go and measure, that has to be based on our ability to understand the climate that we have now. Why do you get seasonal cycles? Why do you get storms? What controls the frequency of these events over a winter, over a longer period? What controls the frequency of, say, El Nino events in the tropical Pacific that have impacts on rainfall in California or in Peru or in Indonesia? How do you understand all of those things?"

"We approach this is in a very ambitious way."

"What we have decided, as a scientific endeavor, is to extrapolate as much as we can from our knowledge of the individual processes that we can measure: evaporation from the ocean, the formation of a cloud, rainfall coming from a cloud, changes in the wind patterns as a function of the pressure field, changes in the jet stream. What we have tried to do is encapsulate those small-scale processes, put them altogether, and see if we can predict the emerging properties of that fundamental complex system."

— Russell Weinberger

GAVIN SCHMIDT is a climatologist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, where he models past, present, and future climate. His essay "Why Hasn't Specialization Led To The Balkanization Of Science?" in included in What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited By Max Brockman

Gavin Schmidt's Edge Bio Page

BRAIN TIME [6.24.09]
By David M. Eagleman

Your brain, after all, is encased in darkness and silence in the vault of the skull. Its only contact with the outside world is via the electrical signals exiting and entering along the super-highways of nerve bundles. Because different types of sensory information (hearing, seeing, touch, and so on) are processed at different speeds by different neural architectures, your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world?

DAVID M. EAGLEMAN is director of Baylor College of Medicine's Laboratory for Perception and Action at Oxford University, whose long-range goal is to understand the neural mechanisms of time perception. He also directs BCM's Initiative on Law, Brains, and Behavior, which seeks to determine how new discoveries in neuroscience will change our laws and criminal justice system. He is the author of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.

David M. Eagleman's Edge Bio Page

From WHAT'S NEXT? Dispatches on the Future of Science Edited By Max Brockman

We discovered a new vein of research — the relation between physical and social or psychological concepts — that we came to by taking evolutionary principles seriously and applying them to psychology. We weren't using evolutionary psychology, which has largely been focused on mating and reproduction. Our focus, rather, was in terms of evolutionary biology and the basic principles of natural selection: and that field makes clear that humans must have had these kinds of mechanisms or these processes to guide our behavior prior to evolution or emergence of consciousness.

THE SIMPLIFIER
A Conversation with John A. Bargh

Introduction

"They say that in science there are complicators and there are simplifiers," says John Bargh, Yale social psychologist known for his early work on the topic of automaticity, and more recently for bringing experimental methodology to the philosophical question of free will.

According to Bargh, the tension between the complicators and the simplifiers is a good thing in any field of ideas or science. "I've always been a simplifier." he says, "looking for the simple mechanisms that produce complex effect, instead of building a complicated model. Once we find one of these veins — one of these avenues of research — we just go for it and mine it and mine it until we run out of gold.

Bargh's lines of research all focus on unconscious mechanisms that underlie social perception, evaluation and preferences, and motivation and goal pursuit in realistic and complex social environments. That each of these basic psychological phenomena occur without the person's intention and awareness, yet have such strong effects on the person's decisions and behavior, has considerable implications for philosophical matters such as free will, and the nature and purpose of consciousness itself.

He maintains that the resulting findings "are very consistent and in harmony with evolutionary biology. And this is very unlike psychology, which has always presumed a kind of consciousness bottle-neck or a self, some kind of a homunculus type of self sitting there, making all the decisions and deciding without any explanation of where they comes from or what's causing the self or what's causing the conscious choices. Emphasizing what our unconscious systems do for us, in turn, links us very strongly to other organisms and other animals very closely. Recent primate research is showing that primates are closer to us than we thought. They fall for the same kind of economic fallacies that Kahneman and Tversky talked about in humans 30 years ago."

— Russell Weinberger
Associate Publisher, Edge

JOHN A. BARGH is professor of social psychology at Yale University and director of the ACME (Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation and Evaluation) Lab.

John Bargh's Edge Bio Page

Does language shape our thinking?

An essay on how language influences thought from the pop-science anthology "What's Next: Dispatches on the Future of Science" has been posted on The Edge. Author Lera Boroditsky, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience and symbolic systems at Stanford, writes:

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

She brings up experiments and other examples involving use of language and direction, time, color and gender, all of which seem to demonstrate that yes, language shapes how we think.

But my favorite is this example above. Only a linguist — or perhaps a social scientist — would put Chomsky in a hypothetical.

— Carolyn Kellogg

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? [6.11.09]
By Lera Boroditsky

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.

Lera Boroditsky's Edge Bio Page

In the industrial model of student mass production, the teacher is the broadcaster. A broadcast is by definition the transmission of information from transmitter to receiver in a one-way, linear fashion. The teacher is the transmitter and student is a receptor in the learning process. The formula goes like this: "I'm a professor and I have knowledge. You're a student, you're an empty vessel and you don't. Get ready, here it comes. Your goal is to take this data into your short-term memory and through practice and repetition build deeper cognitive structures so you can recall it to me when I test you."... The definition of a lecture has become the process in which the notes of the teacher go to the notes of the student without going through the brains of either.

THE IMPENDING DEMISE OF THE UNIVERSITY [6.4.09]
By Don Tapscott

Introduction

In his Edge feature "Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus", Clay Shirky noted that after WWII we were faced with something new: "free time. Lots and lots of free time. The amount of unstructured time among the educated population ballooned, accounting for billions of hours a year. And what did we do with that time? Mostly, we watched TV."

In "The End of Universal Rationality", Yochai Benkler explored the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. Benkler has been looking at the social implications of the Internet and network societies since the early 90s. He saw the end of an era:

For those of us like me who have been working on the Internet for years, it was very clear you couldn't encounter free software and you couldn't encounter Wikipedia and you couldn't encounter all of the wealth of cultural materials that people create and exchange, and the valuable actual software that people create, without an understanding that something much more complex is happening than the dominant ideology of the last 40 years or so. But you could if you weren't looking there, because we were used in the industrial system to think in these terms.

Benkler believes that these "phenomena on the Net are not ephemeral". And he has spent the last 20 years trying to get his head around the process of understanding what is transpiring.

In a Reality Club discussion "On 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' By Nicholas Carr" W. Daniel Hillis, Kevin Kelly, Nicholas Carr, Jaron Lanier, Douglas Rushkoff and others explored the future of the printed book.

And Shirky, in his recent piece "Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable", (with comments from Nicholas Carr, Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, Marc Frons) wrote:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

Enter Don Tapscott, who is looking at the challenges the digital revolution poses to the fundamental aspects of the University.

"Universities are finally losing their monopoly on higher learning", he writes. "There is fundamental challenge to the foundational modus operandi of the University — the model of pedagogy. Specifically, there is a widening gap between the model of learning offered by many big universities and the natural way that young people who have grown up digital best learn."

The old-style lecture, with the professor standing at the podium in front of a large group of students, is still a fixture of university life on many campuses. It's a model that is teacher-focused, one-way, one-size-fits-all and the student is isolated in the learning process. Yet the students, who have grown up in an interactive digital world, learn differently. Schooled on Google and Wikipedia, they want to inquire, not rely on the professor for a detailed roadmap. They want an animated conversation, not a lecture. They want an interactive education, not a broadcast one that might have been perfectly fine for the Industrial Age, or even for boomers. These students are making new demands of universities, and if the universities try to ignore them, they will do so at their peril.

Contrary to Nicholas Carr's proposition that Google is making us stupid, Tapscott counters with the following:

My research suggests these critics are wrong. Growing up digital has changed the way their minds work in a manner that will help them handle the challenges of the digital age. They're used to multi-tasking, and have learned to handle the information overload. They expect a two-way conversation. What's more, growing up digital has encouraged this generation to be active and demanding enquirers. Rather than waiting for a trusted professor to tell them what's going on, they find out on their own on everything from Google to Wikipedia.

This is a topic that is worthy of a serious conversation by the Edge community and I hope to present comments from contributors in future Edge editions.

— John Brockman

DON TAPSCOTT is the author of 13 books on new technology in society, most recently Grown Up Digital. He recently completed a $4 million dollar investigation of the Net Generation. He is Chairman of the think tank nGenera Insight and an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

Don Tapscott's Edge Bio Page

If these authors are the future of science, then the science of the future will be one exciting ride! Find out what the best minds of the new generation are thinking before the Nobel Committee does. A fascinating chronicle of the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night. — Daniel Gilbert

WHAT'S NEXT? [5.26.09]
Dispatches on the Future of Science
Edited By Max Brockman

"A preview of the ideas you're going to be reading about in ten years." — Steven Pinker

[ED. NOTE: What are "the big, new ideas that are keeping young scientists up at night?" Beginning today with Laurence Smith's "Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim", and in the coming weeks, Edge will publish a selection of the essays in Max Brockman's book What's Next: Dispatches On the Future of Science, published today by Vintage Books. —JB]

WILL WE DECAMP FOR THE NORTHERN RIM? [5.27.09]
By Laurence C. Smith

Already the impacts are obvious in the extreme north, where melting Arctic sea ice, drowning polar bears, and forlorn Inuit hunters are by now iconic images of global warming. The rapidity and severity of Arctic warming is truly dramatic. However, the Arctic, a relatively small, thinly populated region, will always be marginal in terms of its raw social and economic impact on the rest of us. The greater story lies to the south, penetrating deeply into the "Northern Rim," a vast zone of economically significant territory and adjacent ocean owned by the United States, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia. As in the Arctic, climate change there has already begun. This zone — which constitutes almost 30 percent of the Earth's land area and is home to its largest remaining forests, its greatest untouched mineral, water, and energy reserves, and a (growing) population of almost 100 million people — will undergo one of the most profound biophysical and social expansions of this century.

Laurence C. Smith is Professor and vice chairman of geography and professor of earth and space sciences at UCLA. He studies likely impacts of northern climate change including the economic effects in the Northern Rim.

Laurence C. Smith's Edge Bio Page

The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old brain-body, mind-body problem, and we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat.

CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE [5.21.09]
A Conversation with Jonah Lehrer

INTRODUCTION

"I always thought of myself as a scientist," says Jonah Lehrer "and then I had the privilege of working for several years in the lab of Eric Kandel as a technician, doing the manual labor of science, and what I discovered there was that I was a terrible scientist. As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it." But there are many ways to contribute to the conversation that is science, and Lehrer is making important contributions as a writer who has internalized the process of the scientific method in asking interesting questions about ourselves and the world around us.

"Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves," he says. "But how can we take that same rigor, which has made this research so valuable and, at the same time, make it a more realistic representation of what it's actually like to be a human. After all, we're a brain embedded in this larger set of structures."

"You can call it culture, call it society, call it your family, call it your friend, call it whatever it is. It's the stuff that makes people sign onto their Facebook a thousand times a day. It's the reason Twitter exists. We have got all these systems now that really make us fully aware of just how important social interactions are to what it is to be human. The question is, how can we study that? Because that, in essence, is a huge part of what's actually driving these enzymatic pathways in your brain. What's triggering these synaptic transmissions and these squirts of neurotransmitter back and forth is thoughts of other people, what other people say to us, interacting with the world at large. " Read on...

— John Brockman

JONAH LEHRER, Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist, has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe.

Jonah Lehrer's Edge Bio Page

The Third Culture has grown beyond Edge, as scientists have become increasingly public — and even famous  — figures. Seed approached six thinkers to ask where we are now: Whether the Two Cultures are still divided, and what role the Third Culture is playing.

SEED CELEBRATES THE QUESTIONS C.P. SNOW RAISED 50 YEARS AGO BY ASKING: WHERE ARE WE NOW? [5.21.09]

Introduction

"Are we beyond the Two Cultures?" asks Seed Magazine in its May 7 commemoration of the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture. Readers following Edge since it began 12 years, 285 editions, and 2,939,953 words ago, know how to answer this question. Fortunately, Seed follows up and asks "Where are we now?"

It's been clear for several years that the third culture I predicted I fifteen years earlier has been in need of an update. "There are encouraging signs," I wrote in "The Expanding Third Culture" (2006), "that the third culture includes scholars in the humanities who think the way scientists do. Like their colleagues in the sciences, they believe there is a real world and their job is to understand it and explain it. They test their ideas in terms of logical coherence, explanatory power, conformity with empirical facts. They do not defer to intellectual authorities: Anyone's ideas can be challenged, and understanding and knowledge accumulate through such challenges. They are not reducing the humanities to biological and physical principles, but they do believe that art, literature, history, politics—a whole panoply of humanist concerns—need to take the sciences into account."

Seed has played in this field of ideas, creating their own kind of culture, one that embraces artists, architects, novelists designers, musicians, etc., presenting their work in vibrant and imaginative ways.

In the videos below, Seed asks six notable scientists, authors, thinkers (all also early Edge contributors) to comment on where the third culture is today.

— John Brockman

"May 7 marks the 50th anniversary of C.P. Snow's Two Cultures lecture. Half a century ago the prominent novelist and speaker, who studied under Lord Rutherford, described a chasm between literary intellectuals and scientists, a gulf that impoverished both sides and impeded efforts to relieve suffering around the world. Science was not understood or respected by the dominant culture, to the detriment of all, he said. At some point scientists had ceased to be considered intellectuals, Snow noted, and though any educated person was required to know Shakespeare, almost none knew the second law of thermodynamics.

"Snow's words touched off decades of debate on both the existence of the "Two Cultures" and the possibility of a "Third Culture" — a group Snow envisioned as curious non-scientists who could bridge the gap between scientists and humanists. In 1991, literary agent John Brockman wrote an essay entitled "The Third Culture," which made the point that "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." In 1991, his Edge Foundation launched a website  — Edge  — explicitly to bring together intellectuals of the Third Culture — many scientists, but also writers and philosophers—with the goal of bringing empirical studies directly to the public. The Third Culture has grown beyond Edge, as scientists have become increasingly public — and even famous  — figures. Seed approached six thinkers to ask where we are now: Whether the Two Cultures are still divided, and what role the Third Culture is playing."

After all, we are witnessing the Waterloo of Wall Street. So, ironically, it was in the Canadian province of Ontario, in the small town of Waterloo, that a meeting was convened to shed new light on the world's financial debacle. In a densely packed conference schedule, the general approach was to take measure of the crisis not only in a new way, but with instruments never used before. Even the venue for event, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, was itself programmatic, though invitations to participate were sent far beyond the boundaries of economics and physics to mathematicians, lawyers, behavioral economists, risk managers, evolutionary biologists, complexity theorists and computer scientists.— Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

THE ECONOMIC MANHATTAN PROJECT — THE VIDEOS [5.15.09]

Introduction

In December, Edge published "Can Science Help Solve the Economic Crisis?" by Mike Brown, Stuart Kauffman, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose, and Lee Smolin. The paper was prompted by a suggestion by Eric Weinstein for an "Economic Manhattan Project".

This led to the Perimeter Institute conference: "The Economic Crisis and its Implications for The Science of Economics". According to the organizers, "Concerns over the current financial situation are giving rise to a need to evaluate the very mathematics that underpins economics as a predictive and descriptive science. A growing desire to examine economics through the lens of diverse scientific methodologies — including physics and complex systems — is making way to a meeting of leading economists and theorists of finance together with physicists, mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists in an effort to evaluate current theories of markets and identify key issues that can motivate new directions for research."

Eric Weinstein Nouriel Roubini Richard Freeman Nassim Taleb at Perimeter

The conference began on May 1st, with a day of invited talks by leading experts to a public audience on the status of economic and financial theory in light of the crisis. I was pleased to be invited and to listen to the first day of public talks.

Among those participating were Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb, Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Eric Weinstein, introduced by Theoretical Physicist Neil Turok, who recently moved Cambridge to become the Executive Director of Perimeter, and Lee Smolin, a founding member and research physicist. Doyne Farmer of the Santa Fe Institute, and one of the original Edge contributors, was also in attendance.

Nassim Taleb at Perimeter: there's too much in the fourth quadrant to clean up.

Eric Weinstein set the stage with a statement on his talk, which began the proceedings:

An unexpected economic crisis provides an excellent opportunity to better understand the state of Economic theory as a science. While there appears to have been a broad systemic failure within the community of professional economists to predict the current collapse, it must be noted that there have been scattered successes which appear striking and demand our attention. The goal of this conference is to bring together economists, biologists, mathematicians, physicists, programmers, and financial professionals to explore the opportunities for bringing economic theory into closer contact with the more traditional sciences as the basis for ongoing work, partnership, and collaboration.

Eric Weinstein: Success is not an option

Jordan Mejias, arts correspondent for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and frequent Edge contributor, attended as well. His interesting report ran on the front page of the FAZ Feuilleton.

Jordan Mejias

I am pleased to present the video presentations of Eric Weinstein; Nouriel Roubini; Nassim Taleb, a panel discussion of Eric Weinstein, Nouriel Roubini, Richard Freeman, and Nassim Taleb; Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander; a panel discussion of Emanuel Derman, Andrew Lo, Richard Alexander, Bill Janeway, Zoe-Vonna Palmrose; and Doyne Farmer.

— John Brockman

The third culture consists of 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.

ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE PUBLICATION OF
C.P. SNOW'S REDE LECTURE,
"THE TWO CULTURES" [5.7.09]

Today, May 7, 2009, marks the 50th Anniversary of the publication of C.P. Snow's Rede Lecture, "The Two Cultures". In a second edition of The Two Cultures, published in 1963, Snow added a new essay, "The Two Cultures: A Second Look," in which he optimistically suggested that a new culture, a "third culture," would emerge and close the communications gap between the literary intellectuals and the scientists. In Snow's third culture, the literary intellectuals would be on speaking terms with the scientists. This never happened. Although I borrowed Snow's phrase in my 1991 essay "The Third Culture", it does not describe the third culture he predicted.

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers isn 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. Increasingly, The Third Culture has moved into the mainstream and the questions it is asking are those that inform us about ourselves and the world around us.

I am pleased to honor the memory of C.P. Snow and his "Two Cultures" by presenting "The Third Culture" on Edge, from 1997 to today (2,939,953 words).

John Brockman, Editor

[...continue]

The threat of deadly new viruses is on the rise due to population growth, climate change and increased contact between humans and animals. What the world needs to do to prepare.

THE AGE OF PANDEMIC [5.7.09]
By Larry Brilliant

Introduction

John Maddox, who recently stepped down as editor of Nature, occupies a unique place in today's culture. During the past 23 years he managed to build Nature into the premier publication of its kind, while still retaining the respect of the international science community for his intellect and writing.

In this discussion he talks about what we need to be concerned about: the increasing accumulation of data on a huge scale, lack of quantitative progress in biology, infection, impact, cloning, and the stability of the human genome.

— John Brockman

SIR JOHN MADDOX, who served 22 years as the editor of Nature, was a trained physicist, who has served on a number of Royal Commissions on environmental pollution and genetic manipulation. His books include Revolution in Biology, The Doomsday Syndrome, Beyond the Energy Crisis, and What Remains to be Discovered: The Agenda for Science in the Next Century.

John Maddox's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

KRAUSSFEST 2009

Lawrence Krauss

The Origins Initiative at ASU, under the leadership of its Director, physicist and Edge contributor Lawrence Krauss, is a University-wide initiative to focus on deep and foundational questions ranging across the entire spectrum of scholarship at ASU. The three-day Origins Symposium explored forefront questions at the edge of knowledge: from the origin of the universe and the laws of nature to the evolution of life, humans, consciousness, and culture. The symposium, which took place April 3-6 and consisted of private scientific seminars and large public lectures, was an intellectual extravaganza, a "Kraussfest", which assembled in one place a group containing the most well known scientific public intellectuals in the world, many of whom are well-known to readers of these pages. The entire program was available globally through a live webcast, and a video archive of the proceedings will soon be online on the Origins Initiative Website.

On the bus with Nobel Laureates David Gross, Wally Gilbert, Frank Wilczek

Among the Edgies at "Kraussfest 2009" were Roger Bingham, Patricia Churchland, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Rebecca Goldstein, A. C. Grayling, Brian Greene, David Gross, Alan Guth, Jonathan Haidt, Lawrence Krauss, John Mather, Randolph Nesse, Steven Pinker, Terrence Senjnowski, Maria Spiropulu, Craig Venter, Alex Vilenkin, Frank Wilczek.

[Proceed to Edge photo album of the event...]

Mathematicians and others are endeavoring to apply insights gleaned from the sciences of complexity to the seemingly intractable problem of understanding the world economy. I have a guess, however, that if this problem can be solved (and that is unlikely in the near future), then it will not be possible to use this knowledge to make money on financial markets. One can make money only if there is real risk based on actual uncertainty, and without uncertainty there is no risk.

THE QUICK BUCK BECOMES QUICKER
By Heinz Pagels

[EDITOR'S NOTE:] Heinz R. Pagels, died on July 23, 1988, in a mountain climbing accident on Pyramid Peak in Aspen, Colorado. A physicist, he was Executive Director of The New York Academy of Sciences, adjunct professor of physics at Rockefeller University, and president of the International League for Human Rights. He was the author of three books: The Cosmic Code, Perfect Symmetry, and Dreams of Reason. He was also a founding member, and, at the time of his death, president of "The Reality Club," which, in 1997, moved to the Web as Edge.

It was before and after Reality Club meetings at the New York Academy of Sciences around 1985-6 that Heinz began to talk about the themes that became central to his 1988 book Dreams of Reason: The Rise of the Sciences of Complexity, (Simon & Schuster):

"the importance of biological organizing principles, the computational view of mathematics and physical processes, the emphasis on parallel networks, the importance of nonlinear dynamics and selective systems, the new understanding of chaos, experimental mathematics, the connectionist's ideas, neural networks, and parallel distributive processing". ...

He notes that "the computer, with its ability to manage enormous amounts of data and to simulate reality, provides a new window on that view of nature." In other words new technology equals new perception. He also had interesting insights into how the new sciences of complexity would impact global financial markets. He wrote:

As a new mode of production, the computer creates not only a new class of people struggling for intellectual and social acceptance, but a new way of thinking about knowledge. It will transform the scientific enterprise and bring forth a new worldview.

Given the current global economic meltdown, it's instructive to re-read Pagels. Below, please find the Preface and Chapter 7: "The Quick Buck Becomes Quicker". The Edge Introduction is by Emanuel Derman, a physicist who was at Rockefeller University with Pagels, and went on to become the world's best know "Quant".

— John Brockman

LINK: Edge Dedication: Heinz R. Pagels

INTRODUCTION
By Emanuel Derman

There are dualisms everywhere: mind or matter, literature or pornography, investment or speculation. Just today in the New York Times, David Brooks wondered whether our current economic crisis was due to greed or stupidity, and felt obliged to plump for stupidity.

All of these 'or's are choices between complex mental constructs that merely sound simple or primitive; every 'or' is an attempt to forcibly convert the duality into a unity. But the fact that that we can see (at least) two sides to each of these issues signifies intrinsic complexity. Physicists long ago learned to turn wave or particle into wave and particle and live with it, or at least stop thinking about it for as long as they could keep successfully calculating.

Heinz Pagels' 1998 book The Dreams of Reason tackled the science of complexity and the use of computers to understand complex systems that defy reduction. I met Heinz when I was a colleague in particle physics, the most reductionist of fields, in an office down the hall at The Rockefeller University in the late 1970s. An enthusiastic iconoclast with wide interests, Heinz devoted one chapter to the consequences he foresaw of putting science and computing in the service of banking, finance and trading. He presciently warned about the possibility of uncontrollably complex markets, and of the way in which finance, intended to finance investment and construction, may be tempted to incestuously turn in upon itself to recursively finance merely more financial activities.

— Emanuel Derman

EMANUEL DERMAN is a professor in Columbia University's Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department, as well as a partner at Prisma Capital Partners. He is a former managing director and head of the Quantitative Strategies group at Goldman, Sachs & Co. He is the author of My Life As a Quant. He was recently featured in "They Tried to Outsmart Wall Street" [3.9.09], a front page New York Times "Science Times" profile by Dennis Overbye.

Emanuel Derman's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Joseph Traub, Jaron Lanier. Lee Smolin

[...continue]

We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with.

THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY [3.31.09]
A Talk With Yochai Benkler

YOCHAI BENKLER is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. He is the author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.

Yochai Benkler's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

THE TRADESCANT'S ARK EXPERIMENT
Timothy Taylor

In this Edge Video, archeologist Tim Taylor conducts an experiment about making sense of things.

"There are 43 stones passing amongst you. It's called the Tradescant's Ark Experiment and I've named it in honor of John Tradescant and John Tradescant, Sr. and Jr., father and son, who were collectors of things in the 17th century. They were the exhibitors of the world's first pay-to-view museum and they had a cabinet of curiosities set up in Lambeth, on the Thames, which much later was sold to Elias Ashmole and became the germ of the Ashmolean Museum. Not much of it survives, there are little parts of it in the Ashmolen Museum. What is more important is the intellectual move they made in the catalog, which John Tradescant the younger created and in which he distinguished between 2 types of things, naturalls and artificialls. He divided all the things he collected into those he thought were natural and those that were modified by human hand—what archaelogists today call artifacts."

TIMOTHY TAYLOR teaches in the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK, and conducts research on the later prehistoric societies of southeastern Europe. He has presented BBC archaeology programs and he is the author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture, and The Buried Soul.

Timothy Taylor's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
March 22, 2009

Few literary phrases have had as enduring an after life as "the two cultures," coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem to read Snow's book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point appears so evident?

It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution," which was later published in book form. Snow's famous lament was that "the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups," consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this "gulf of mutual incomprehension." These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, "is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"...

...Snow's descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle. Scientists, he asserts, have "the future in their bones," while "the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist." Scientists, he adds, are morally "the soundest group of intellectuals we have," while literary ethics are more suspect. Literary culture has "temporary periods" of moral failure, he argues, quoting a scientist friend who mentions the fascist proclivities of Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Wyndham Lewis, and asks, "Didn't the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?" While Snow says those examples are "not to be taken as representative of all writers," the implication of his partial defense is clear.

Snow's essay provoked a roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis — who called Snow "intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be" — and a more measured one from Lionel Trilling, who nonetheless thought Snow had produced "a book which is mistaken in a very large way indeed." Snow's cultural tribalism, Trilling argued, impaired the "possibility of rational discourse."

Today, others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a "third culture" to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists — who are "rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives" and superseding literary artists in their ability to "shape the thoughts of their generation." Snow himself suggested in the 1960s that social scientists could form a "third culture." ...

SOME LIKE IT HOT
Steve Jones

In this Edge Video, biologist Steve Jones talks about genetics as the study of difference, asking how differences get there, why they are there, and how many there are.

"If you look at people who sequence DNA—the original DNA sequences, which is a wonderful piece of work of course—in Watson's own DNA sequence—it's a very platonic view of what life is all about. You take a human being, an exemple, an exemplar, J.D. Watson. You've got his DNA. That's the end of the story.

"But of course it isn't like that. If there wasn't difference, then we wouldn't have genetics. We wouldn't have evolution. We'd all be stuck in the primeval slime. Genetics has moved on to think about difference. Why are people, why are snails, so different from each other?"

STEVE JONES is a biologist; Professor of Genetics at the Galton Laboratory of University College London and well-known television presenter. His most recent books are Coral, and Darwin's Island.

Steve Jones's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE [3.17.08]
By Clay Shirky

CLAY SHIRKY is an adjunct professor in NYU's graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology—how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. He is the author of Here Comes Everybody.

Clay Shirky's Edge Bio page

THE REALITY CLUB: Nicholas Carr, Martin Wattenberg & Fernanda Viégas

[...continue]

You are a leaf-cutting ant from South America. You will compete against the humans across the aisle in a foraging activity. You're task is to collect as much forage as possible. There's a reason ants are so successful. They're disciplined. They follow a series of rules. The first rule is no talking. Ants can't talk so you can't talk. The second rule is no gestures, facial or otherwise. And to make sure you can't use facial expressions we're going to put a paper bag on your head. The third rule is 'Ant walking'. ...

A COOPERATIVE FORAGING EXPERIMENT—LESSONS FROM ANTS
Seirian Sumner

In this Edge Video, Serian Sumner teaches us a lesson about the social nature of ants. She selects fifteen people in the audience at the Serpentine Gallery in London and tells them to imagine they're ants.

SEIRIAN SUMNER is a research fellow in evolutionary biology at the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London. Her research focuses on the evolution of sociality—how eusociality evolves and how social behavior is maintained. She has worked with a variety of bees, wasps, and ants from around the world, studying their behavior through observation, experimental manipulation, and molecular analyses, including gene expression. She is especially interested in the origins of sociality and the role of the genome in this major evolutionary transition.

Seirian Sumner's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

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

IS THERE A HIGGS?
A Talk With Brian Cox

INTRODUCTION
By Martin Rees

As an astronomer I'm lucky to work in a subject where there is already public interest, and where it's not too difficult to convey the key ideas and new discoveries in a non-technical and accessible way. It's far harder to make particle physics accessible and interesting. Brian Cox is one of the few scientists who succeed in doing this, and I much admire him for it. It's fortunate that he's been willing to devote so much time and effort to 'outreach'—and especially to seize the opportunity to publicise the LHC launch so effectively. Scientists—not just particle physicists—should be grateful to him for raising the profile of 'blue skies' research so engagingly and effective.

—Martin Rees, President, The Royal Society; Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics; Master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; Author, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity's Survival.

BRIAN COX is a Royal Society University Research Fellow based in the Particle Physics group at the University of Manchester, where he holds a chair in Particle Physics. He works on the ATLAS experiment at CERN in Geneva. A former rock star, he has become a well-known public communicator of science to the public through highly-regarded television and radio presentations on the BBC and other networks.

Brian Cox's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

Darwinian aesthetics is not some kind of ironclad doctrine that is supposed to replace a heavy postructuralism with something just as oppressive. What surprises me about the resistance to the application of Darwin to psychology, is the vociferous way in which people want to dismiss it, not even to consider it. Is this a holdover from Marxism or religious doctrines? I don't know. Stephen Jay Gould was one of those people who had the idea that evolution was allowed to explain everything about me, my fingernails, my pancreas, the way my body is designed—except that it could have nothing to say about anything above the neck. About human psychology, nothing could be explained in evolutionary terms: we just somehow developed a big brain with its spandrels and all, and that's it.

ART AND HUMAN REALITY [2.24.09]
A Talk With Denis Dutton
Introduction By Steven Pinker

INTRODUCTION
By Steven Pinker

Denis Dutton is a visionary. He was among the first (together with our own John Brockman) to realize that a website could be a forum for cutting-edge ideas, not just a way to sell things or entertain the bored. Today Arts and Letters Daily is the web site that I try the hardest not to visit, because it is more addictive than crack cocaine. He started one of the first print-on-demand services for out-of-print scholarly books. He saw that philosophy and literature had much to say to each other, and started a deep and lively scholarly journal to move that dialogue along. He saw that pompous and empty prose in the humanities had become an impediment to thinking, and initiated the Bad Academic Writing contest to expose it.

And now he is changing the direction of aesthetics. Many people believe that this consilience between the arts, humanities, and sciences represents the future of the humanities, revitalizing them with a progressive research agenda after the disillusionments of postmodernism. Dutton has written the first draft of this agenda. He has defended a universal definition of art—something that many theorists assumed was simply impossible. And he has advanced a theory that aesthetics have a universal basis in human psychology, ultimately to be illuminated by the processes of evolution. His ideas in this area are not meant to be the last word, but they lay out testable hypotheses, and point to many fields that can be brought to bear on our understanding of art.

I see this as part of a larger movement of consilience, in which (to take a few examples), ideas from auditory cognition will provide insight into music, phonology will help illuminate poetics, semantics and pragmatics will advance our understanding of fiction, and moral psychology will be brought to bear on jurisprudence and philosophy. And in his various roles, Denis Dutton will be there when it happens.

—Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Author, The Stuff of Thought.

~~

DENIS DUTTON, a philosopher, is founder and editor of the highly regarded Web publication, Arts & Letters Daily (www.aldaily.com). He teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, writes widely on aesthetics. and is editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature, and the author of the recently published The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure and Human Evolution.

Denis Dutton's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

JUAN ENRIQUEZ: BEYOND THE CRISIS, MINDBOGGLING SCIENCE AND THE ARRIVAL OF HOMO EVOLUTIS

Even as mega-banks topple, Juan Enriquez says the big reboot is yet to come. But don't look for it on your ballot -- or in the stock exchange. It'll come from science labs, and it promises keener bodies and minds. Our kids are going to be ... different.

This year's TED Conference, TED 2009, held in Long Beach and curated by Chris Anderson, offered four intense days interesting presentations of "ideas worth spreading". The "spreading" of these ideas extends far beyond the confines of the conference hall as Anderson has extended his vision to multiple viewing locations as well and by presenting TED conferences in venues such as India, Africa, Oxford, and Europe. And most importantly, he has tapped into the viral nature of the Internet age with the "Ted Talks", videos of the live conference events, which feature superb production quality coupled with elegant web presentation. The combination of interesting speakers, excellent technology and production, and the Internet, makes for a rich experience, free for all.

At TED 2009, one of the highlights was the very first talk, as Juan Enriquez, a frequent Edge contributor, opened the conference with his usual energy. [Click here for Juan Enriquez's TED Talk.]

JUAN ENRIQUEZ is CEO, Biotechonomy; was Founding Director, Harvard Business School's Life Sciences Project; Author, The Untied States of America

Juan Enriquez's Edge Bio Page

"John Brockman, a literary agent, is the shadowy figure at the top of the cyberfashion food chain."

—Ted Nelson, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How The Computer World Got This Way

Yves Behar, FuseProject; Jeff Bezos, Amazon; Zack Bogue; Stewart Brand, Long Now Foundation; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; Rod Brooks, Robotocist, Heartland Robotics; Geoffrey Carr, The Economist; Steve Case, Revolution Health; Jean Case, Case Foundation; Larry Cohen, Gates Foundation; Keith Coleman, Google G-Mail; Brian Cox, CERN; Daniel C. Dennett, Tufts; Susan Dennett; Peter Diamandis, X-Prize Foundation; Juan Enriquez, Excel Medical Ventures; Tony Fadell, Apple; Peter Gabriel; Bill Gates, Gates Foundation; Saul Griffith, Makani Power; Pati Hillis; Danny Hillis, Applied Minds; Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post; Joi Ito, Creative Commons, Neotony; Bill Joy, Kleiner Perkins; Dean Kamen, Deka Research; Jon Kamen, Radical Media; Mickey Kaus, Slate; Kevin Kelly, kk.org; Danielle Lambert; Jaron Lanier; Steven Levy, Wired; Katinka Matson, edge.org, Brockman, Inc.; Marissa Mayer, Google; Nathan Myhrvold, Intellectual Ventures; Shannon O'Leary; Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly's Radar; Anne Ornish; Dean Ornish, Preventive Medicine Research Institute; Pierre Omidyar, Omidyar network; Pam Omidyar, Omidyar Network; Larry Page, Google; Lori Park, Google; Nick Pritzker; Lisa Randall, Harvard; Jacqui Safra; Linda Stone; Yossi Vardi; Evan Williams, Twitter; Nathan Wolfe, Stanford; Richard Saul Wurman, Founder, TED

[Continue to Edge Dinner 2009]

[ED. NOTE: Edge contributors will be pleased to read about Sara Lippincott in John McPhee's article in the February 9th edition of The New Yorker (see abstract below, from the magazine's Web site). Sara has has served as the line editor of all the Edge Annual Question books, turning our lightly edited Web texts into publishable and well-received books. —JB]

THE NEW YORKER
February 9, 2009

CHECKPOINTS
Where accuracy meets flair. (Registration required.)
by John McPhee

Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker's fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer's called "The Curve of Binding Energy" received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, "Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker's imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick." The writer describes a paragraph from his sixty-thousand-word piece—which was about weapons-grade nuclear material in private industry and what terrorists might do with it—which presented Sara with a certain degree of difficulty. Physicist John A. Wheeler had told the writer about a Japanese weapon balloon landing on a nuclear reactor at the Hanford Engineer Works, in the winter of 1944 or 45. If Wheeler's story were true, it would make it into print. If unverifiable, it would be deleted. Sara's telephone calls ricocheted all over the U.S. Hanford Engineer Works, of the Manhattan Project, was so secret that the Joint Chiefs of Staff didn't know about it. Sara finally located a site manager who confirmed that the balloon had landed on a high-tension line carrying power to the reactor. The fix was made and the piece ran. Sometimes a mistake is introduced during the checking process. This has happened to the writer only once—and nearly thirty years ago. The piece, called "Basin and Range," was the first in a series of long pieces on geology. Mentions current fact-checker Joshua Hersh. Sara, who checked the "Basin" piece, told the writer that he was wrong about the Adriatic Plate, that it is not moving north but southwest. Eldridge Moores had apparently confirmed it. After the piece was published, the writer called Moores, who said that it was in fact the Aegean Plate, not the Adriatic, that was moving southwest. Any error is everlasting. Mentions Time and Atlantic. After an error gets into The New Yorker, heat-seeking missiles rise off the earth and home in on the author, the fact-checker, and the editor. In the comfortable knowledge that the fact-checking department is going to sweep up behind him, the writer likes to guess at certain names and numbers early on. Mentions Willy Bemis and the Illinois River. Describes the process of fact-checking a piece the writer wrote in 2003 about tracing John and Henry Thoreau's upstream journey. Mentions Henry Moore's "Oval with Points." The writer describes checking parts of a book he was writing in 2002. The task took him three months. Mentions William Penn, Cotton Mather, and Joseph Seccombe. ...

...

 WAITING FOR "THE FINAL PLAGUE" [1.30.09]
A Talk with Nathan Wolfe

We should be and we can be doing a much better job to predict and prevent pandemics. But the really bold idea is that we could reach a point—and this is a distant point in the future—where we become so good at this that we really reach a point where we have the "final plague," and where we are really capable of catching so many of these things that new pandemics become an oddity. I think that is something that we should certainly have as an ideal.

INTRODUCTION

Nathan Wolfe trained at Harvard under Marc Hauser (where he was Hauser's first doctoral student) and Richard Wrangham. "I started working with Richard and thinking about self-medicating behavior of chimpanzees," he says. "Richard encouraged me to understand what the chimps may be treating, and so I starting thinking about what are the viruses, what are the microorganisms of chimps that they may be consuming plants in order to treat. Then I never really came back from that."

Subsequently he lived in Malaysia for three years and then in Africa for close to seven years. He describes himself as "a nice Jewish boy from suburban Detroit", which opens up an interesting line of research for Edge scientists, given that our other pandemics expert, Larry Brilliant, Executive Director of Google.org. and the man credited with eliminating smallpox, is also "a nice Jewish boy from suburban Detroit"."I'm sure it was some kind of rebellion," Wolfe said, "but I'm not sure what it was. My grandmother, for years, even when I became an assistant professor at Hopkins, said, "Will this let you go back and get an MD now, Nathan?" Something like that. I do come from that sort of family background, but they just figure it is working out okay. They certainly wish I would make a lot more money. But I told them you were going to help me with that. "

—John Brockman

NATHAN WOLFE is the Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and directs the Global Viral Forecasting Initiative (www.gvfi.org). His research combines methods from molecular virology, ecology, evolutionary biology, and anthropology to study the biology of viral emergence.

Nathan Wolfe's Edge Bio Page

...

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

View the complete 1-hour HD streaming video of the Edge event that took place at Hubert Burda Media's Digital Life Design Conference (DLD) in Munich on January 27th as the greatest living psychologist and the foremost scholar of extreme events discuss hindsight biases, the illusion of patterns, perception of risk, and denial.

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, essayist and former mathematical trader, is Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at New York University's Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of Fooled by Randomness and the international bestseller The Black Swan.

Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page
Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize Lecture
Nassim Taleb's Edge Bio Page

An EDGE @ DLD Event

HOW WORDS COULD END A WAR [1.27.09]
By Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges

... Across the world, people believe that devotion to sacred or core values that incorporate moral beliefs — like the welfare of family and country, or commitment to religion and honor — are, or ought to be, absolute and inviolable. Our studies, carried out with the support of the National Science Foundation and the Defense Department, suggest that people will reject material compensation for dropping their commitment to sacred values and will defend those values regardless of the costs.

In our research, we surveyed nearly 4,000 Palestinians and Israelis from 2004 to 2008, questioning citizens across the political spectrum including refugees, supporters of Hamas and Israeli settlers in the West Bank. We asked them to react to hypothetical but realistic compromises in which their side would be required to give away something it valued in return for a lasting peace.

SCOTT ATRAN, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, John Jay College and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is the author of In Gods We Trust. JEREMY GINGES is a professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research.

Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page
Jeremy Ginges's Edge Bio Page

...

OAF OF OFFICE [1.22.09]
By Steven Pinker

...On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the Flubber Hall of Fame when he administered the presidential oath of office apparently without notes. Instead of having Barack Obama “solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of president of the United States,” Chief Justice Roberts had him “solemnly swear that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” When Mr. Obama paused after “execute,” the chief justice prompted him to continue with “faithfully the office of president of the United States.” (To ensure that the president was properly sworn in, the chief justice re-administered the oath Wednesday evening.)

How could a famous stickler for grammar have bungled that 35-word passage, among the best-known words in the Constitution? Conspiracy theorists and connoisseurs of Freudian slips have surmised that it was unconscious retaliation for Senator Obama’s vote against the chief justice’s confirmation in 2005. But a simpler explanation is that the wayward adverb in the passage is blowback from Chief Justice Roberts’s habit of grammatical niggling. ...

STEVEN PINKER is Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought; chairman of the usage panel of The American Heritage Dictionary.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

...

We will restore science to its rightful place... We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers. —Barack Obama, Inaugural Address

Attempts to reconcile God and evolution keep rolling off the intellectual assembly line. It never stops, because the reconciliation never works. —Jerry Coyne

DOES THE EMPIRICAL NATURE OF SCIENCE CONTRADICT THE REVELATORY NATURE OF FAITH? [1.21.2009]

By Jerry Coyne

An Edge Special Event

JERRY A. COYNE is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. His new book is Why Evolution Is True.

Jerry Coyne's Edge Bio page

...

TULIPS
A new exhibition by Katinka Matson
(Click here)

THE NOBEL PRIZE AND AFTER [1.15.09]
A Talk with Frank Wilczek

The most exciting thing that can happen is when theoretical dreams that started as fantasies, as desires, become projects that people work hard to build. There is nothing like it; it is the ultimate tribute. At one moment you have just a glimmer of a thought and at another moment squiggles on paper. Then one day you walk into a laboratory and there are all these pipes, and liquid helium is flowing, and currents are coming in and out with complicated wiring, and somehow all this activity is supposedly corresponds to those little thoughts that you had. When this happens, it's magic.

FRANK WILCZEK, a theoretical physicist at MIT and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics (2004), is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the discovery and exploitation of new forms of quantum statistics (anyons). He is the author of Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.

...

THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
January 11, 2009

click to enlarge

A RENOWNED SCIENTIST OF THE MIND PONDERS THE IDENTITY BURIED IN HIS OWN DNA

MY GENOME, MY SELF
By Steven Pinker

In the coming era of consumer genetics, your DNA will have much to tell you about the biological bases of your health, your physique and even your personality. But will this knowledge really amount to self-knowledge?

... Looking to the genome for the nature of the person is far from innocuous. In the 20th century, many intellectuals embraced the idea that babies are blank slates that are inscribed by parents and society. It allowed them to distance themselves from toxic doctrines like that of a superior race, the eugenic breeding of a better species or a genetic version of the Twinkie Defense in which individuals or society could evade responsibility by saying that it's all in the genes. When it came to human behavior, the attitude toward genetics was "Don't go there." Those who did go there found themselves picketed, tarred as Nazis and genetic determinists or, in the case of the biologist E. O. Wilson, doused with a pitcher of ice water at a scientific conference.

Today, as the lessons of history have become clearer, the taboo is fading. Though the 20th century saw horrific genocides inspired by Nazi pseudoscience about genetics and race, it also saw horrific genocides inspired by Marxist pseudoscience about the malleability of human nature. The real threat to humanity comes from totalizing ideologies and the denial of human rights, rather than a curiosity about nature and nurture. Today it is the humane democracies of Scandinavia that are hotbeds of research in behavioral genetics, and two of the groups who were historically most victimized by racial pseudoscience — Jews and African-Americans — are among the most avid consumers of information about their genes. ...

...

THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 11, 2009

SLIPSTREAM
IN VENTING, A COMPUTER VISIONARY EDUCATES

By John Markoff

BEFORE the personal computer, and before the Web, there was Theodor Holm Nelson, who almost half a century ago understood how computers would transform the printed page.

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term "hypertext," which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video.

In his self-published new book, "Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way" (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward. ...

...

SELF AWARENESS: THE LAST FRONTIER [1.1.09]
By V.S. Ramachandran

One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human brain—a mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vault—can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. "Who am I" is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.

It really breaks down into two problems—the problem of qualia and the problem of the self. My colleagues, the late Francis Crick and Christof Koch have done a valuable service in pointing out that consciousness might be an empirical rather than philosophical problem, and have offered some ingenious suggestions. But I would disagree with their position that the qualia problem is simpler and should be addressed first before we tackle the "Self." I think the very opposite is true. I have every confidence that the problem of self will be solved within the lifetimes of most people reading this column. But not qualia.

V.S. RAMACHANDRAN is a Neuroscientist, Director, Center for Brain and Cognition, University of California, San Diego; Author, Phantoms in the Brain.

...

Though James Lee Byars has been increasingly identified,
since his death, with elegant, reductive objects, his most radical-and characteristic-works were ephemeral and even immaterial.

WORLD QUESTION CENTER
WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?
"What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"

151 Contributors: Alan Alda, Chris Anderson, Alun Anderson, Stephon H. Alexander, Mahzarin R. Banaji, John D. Barrow, Patrick Bateson, Gregory Benford, Yochai Benkler, Jesse Bering, David Berreby, Jamshed Bharucha, Susan Blackmore, David Bodanis, Stefano Boeri, Lera Boroditsky, Nick Bostrom, Stewart Brand, Rodney Brooks, David Buss, William Calvin, Leo Chalupa, Nicholas A. Christakis, Andy Clark, Gregory Cochran, M. Csikszentmihalyi, Austin Dacey, David Dalrymple, Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Aubrey de Grey, Emanuel Derman, Daniel C. Dennett, Keith Devlin, Betsy Devine, Eric Drexler, Freeman Dyson, George Dyson, David Eagleman, Brian Eno, Juan Enriquez, Daniel Everett, Paul Ewald, Christine Finn, Eric Fischl, Helen Fisher, Kenneth W. Ford, Richard Foreman, Howard Gardner, Joel Garreau, James Geary, David Gelernter, Neil Gershenfeld, Marcelo Gleiser, Daniel Goleman, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Brian Goodwin, Alison Gopnik, April Gornik, John Gottman, Jonathan Haidt, Haim Harari, Henry Harpending, Sam Harris, Marc D. Hauser, Marti Hearst, Roger Highfield, W. Daniel Hillis, Gerald Holton, Donald D. Hoffman, Verena Huber-Dyson, Nicholas Humphrey, Marco Iacoboni, Eric Kandel, Stuart Kauffman, Kevin Kelly, Marcel Kinsbourne, MD, Brian Knutson, Terence Koh, Bart Kosko, Stephen M. Kosslyn, Kai Krause, Laurence Krauss, Andrian Kreye, A. Garrett Lisi, Seth Lloyd, Gary Marcus, Ian McEwan, Thomas Metzinger, Oliver Morton, David G. Myers, P.Z. Myers, Steve Nadis, Monica Narula, Randolph Nesse, Tor Nørretranders, Hans Ulrich Obrist, James J. O'Donnell, Gloria Origgi, Dean Ornish, M.D., Mark Pagel, Bruce Parker, Philippe Parreno, Gregory Paul, Irene Pepperberg, Clifford A. Pickover, Steven Pinker, Ernst Pöppel, Corey S. Powell, Robert R. Provine, Lisa Randall, Ed Regis, Howard Rheingold, Carlo Rovelli, Douglas Rushkoff, Karl Sabbagh, Paul Saffo, Scott Sampson, Robert Sapolsky, Dimitar Sasselov, Roger Schank, Stephen H. Schneider, Peter Schwartz, Charles Seife, Gino Segrè, Tino Sehgal, Terrence Sejnowski, Martin Seligman, Robert Shapiro, Rupert Sheldrake, Michael Shermer, Kevin Slavin, Barry Smith, Laurence C. Smith, Lee Smolin, Dan Sperber, Maria Spiropulu, Paul J. Steinhardt, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Timothy Taylor, Max Tegmark, Frank J. Tipler, John Tooby & Leda Cosmides, Joseph F. Traub, Sherry Turkle, Alexander Vilenkin, J. Craig Venter, Frank Wilczek, Ian Wilmut, Anton Zeilinger