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New
EDGE
BOOKS PAGE
[5.28.03]
Edge is
inaugurating a new, ongoing page featuring third culture
books by members of the Edge community...books by
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.
Here's
the Edge-like mandate for the page (suggested by
Daniel C. Dennett):
You
walk into a room full of Edge contributors—your
peers, your colleagues. You have your new, and as yet
unpublished book, in which you have marked a page, and,
on that page, highlighted a single paragraph which you
believe best represents the big ideas in your book. You
pass the book around...
Participants:
Richard Dawkins, Simon Baron-Cohen, Charles Seife, Andy Clark,
Peter Galison, Clifford A. Pickover, William Poundstone, John Allen Paulos,
Matt Ridley, Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Karl Sabbagh,
Richard Nisbett, Martin Rees, Steven Strogatz, Daniel
C. Dennett, George Johnson, Nicholas Humphrey, John D. Barrow,
John Horgan, Dylan Evans, Bruce Sterling, Keith Devlin,
Scott Atran, Steven R. Quartz &Terrence J. Sejnowski, Howard
Rheingold, Steven Pinker, Martin E. P. Seligman, Timothy Taylor,
David G. Myers, Oliver Morton, Gino Segre, Robert Aunger, Lynn
Margulis & Dorion Sagan, Albert-Lászlo Barabási,
Michael Sherrmer, Gerd Gigerenzer, John Brockman, William
H Calvin, Tom Standage, Janna Levin, George B. Dyson, Rodney
Brooks, Paul Davies, Joseph LeDoux, John McWhorter.
|
| [by publication date - January 2002
through present] |
 "What a book a Devil's
Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering
low and horridly cruel works of nature" (Charles Darwin,
1856). A process of trial and error, completely unplanned and
on the massive scale of natural selection, can be expected
to be clumsy, wasteful and blundering. The racing elegance
of cheetahs and gazelles is bought at huge cost in blood and
the suffering of countless antecedents on both sides. Clumsy
and blundering though the process undoubtedly is, its results
are opposite. There is nothing clumsy about a swallow; nothing
blundering about a shark. What is clumsy and blundering is
the Darwinian algorithm that led to their evolution. As an
academic scientist I am a passionate Darwinian. But I am a
passionate anti-Darwinian when it comes to politics and how
we should conduct our human affairs. It is as though the Chaplain
matured and offered a second half to the sermon. Yes, says
the matured Chaplain, the historic process that caused you
to exist is wasteful, cruel and low. But exult in your existence,
because that very process has blundered unwittingly on its
own negation. Only a small, local negation, to be sure: only
one species, and only a minority of that species; but there
lies hope. So, the Devil's Chaplain might conclude, Stand tall,
Bipedal Ape. The shark may outswim you, the cheetah outrun
you, the swift outfly you, the capuchin outclimb you, the elephant
outpower you, the redwood outlast you. But you have the biggest
gifts of all: the gift of understanding the ruthlessly cruel
process that gave us all existence; the gift of revulsion against
its implications; the gift of foresight—something utterly
foreign to the blundering short-term ways of natural selection—and
the gift of internalising the very cosmos. |
 Psychologists
would say your brain type is a description at the 'cognitive'
level, whilst behaviour is what you can be observed to do...Your
genetic sex is set at the point of conception, and is straight-forward
to determine. Until now, most people interested in asking "is
this person male or female?" have stopped at this first level...But
even if you are genetically female, and even if you are genitally
female, you could be more male gonadally, and have a male brain
and male sex-typical behaviour. Conversely, even if you are genetically
male, and genitally male, you could be more female gonadally,
or you could have a female brain and female sex-typical behaviour.
And pre-natal testosterone, oozing from your testes if you are
genetically and gonadally male, or dripping out of your adrenal
glands if you are genetically and gonadally female, appears be
one important variable in determining how you end up in terms
of your brain type or your sex-typical behaviour. |
 Cosmologists
are shaking their heads in disbelief, because experiment after
experiment is showing that the universe is entirely different from what astronomers
had assumed since the beginning of modern science. Ordinary matter is the exception,
and unknown, exotic matter is the norm. Our universe is mostly dark, and most
of that dark matter is unknown, ineffable stuff that has never been seen directly.
Had there not been so many experiments forcing cosmologists to accept this picture,
it would seem utterly ridiculous. |
 What
we really need to reject, I suggest, is the seductive idea
that all these various neural and non-neural tools need a kind
of privileged user. Instead, it is tools all the way down.
Some of those tools are indeed more closely implicated in our
conscious awareness of the world than
others. But those elements, taken on their own, would fall embarrassingly
short of re-constituting any recognizable version of a human
mind or of an individual person. Some elements, likewise, are
more important to our sense
of self and identity than others. And some elements play larger
roles in control and decision-making than others. But this
divide, like the ones before it, tends to cross-cut the inner
and the outer, the biological and the
non-biological. Different neural circuits provide different capacities,
and all contribute in different ways to our sense of self,
of where we are, of what we can do, and to decision-making
and choice. External, non-biological elements provide still
further capacities, and contribute in additional ways to our
sense of who we are, where we are, what we can do, and to decision-making
and choice. But no single tool amongst this complex kit is
intrinsically thoughtful, ultimately in control, or the 'seat
of the self'. We (we human individuals) just are these shifting
coalitions of tools. We are "soft-selves," continuously open
to change and driven to leak through the confines of skin and
skull, annexing more and more non-biological elements as aspects
of the machinery of mind itself. |
|
 True time would never be revealed by mere clocks—of
this Newton was sure. Even a master clockmaker's finest work
would offer only pale reflections of the absolute time that
belonged not to our human world, but to the "sensorium
of God." Tides, planets, moons—everything changed,
Newton believed, against the universal background of a single,
constantly flowing river of time. In Einstein's electro-technical
world, there was no place for such a "universally audible
tick-tock" that we can call time, no way to define time
meaningfully except in reference to a definite system of linked
clocks...Two events simultaneous for a clock-observer at rest
are not simultaneous for one in motion. With that shock, the
foundation of Newtonian physics cracked; Einstein knew it. Late
in life, he interrupted his autobiographical notes to apostrophize
Sir Isaac as if the intervening centuries had vanished; reflecting
on the absolutes of space and time that his theory of relativity
had shattered, Einstein wrote: "Newton, forgive me; you
found the only way which, in your age, was just about possible
for a man of highest thought and creative power."...At
the heart of this radical upheaval in time lay an extraordinary
yet easily stated idea that has remained dead-center in physics,
philosophy, and technology ever since: To talk about simultaneity,
you have to synchronize clocks with a flash from one clock to
another, adjusting for the time that the flash takes to arrive.
What could be simpler? Yet with this definition of time, the
last piece of the relativity puzzle fell into place, changing
physics forever.
|
|
 English
mathematician Isaac Newton (1642-1727) and German mathematician
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) are generally credited
with the invention of calculus. Both Newton and Leibniz puzzled
over problems of tangents, rates of change, minima, maxima,
and infinitesimals (unimaginably tiny quantities that are almost
but not quite zero). Both men understood that differentiation
(finding tangents to curves) and integration (finding areas
under curves) are inverse processes. Debates raged for many
years on how to divide the credit for the discovery of calculus,
and, as a result, progress in calculus was delayed...The simultaneous
discovery of calculus by Newton and Leibniz makes me wonder
why so many discoveries in science were made at the same time
by people working independently. For example, Charles Darwin
(1809-1882) and Alfred Wallace (1823-1913) both developed the
theory of evolution independently. Mathematicians János
Bolyai (1802-1860) and Nikolai Lobaschevcky (1793-1856) developed
hyperbolic geometry independently and at the same time. Mystics
have suggests that there is a deeper meaning to such coincidences.
Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer (1880-1926) compared events
in our world to the tops of ocean waves that seem isolated and
unrelated. According to his controversial theory, we notice
the tops of the waves, but beneath the surface there may be
some kind of synchronistic mechanism that mysteriously connects
events in our world and causes them to cluster. Whatever the
reason for such simultaneity in science and in other fields,
since the time of Newton and Leibniz, calculus has made an indelible
impact on science and society.
|
 Puzzle interviews are the
most visible reflection of this climate of uncertainty (desperation?).
Today's hirers are looking for something that resists being put
into words. It is not intelligence, not solely. Confidence and
motivation figure into it. The ability to accept uncertainty,
question assumptions, and bring projects to completion is one
way of putting it. There is a strong element of critical judgment,
too. "Question assumptions" is as much a platitude
as the IBM "THINK" sign unless you also have the knack
of knowing which assumptions to question when. No one really knows
how talented people manage to do all this so well. We are left,
for the time being, with more provisional assessments. The road
ahead forks, and there's not even one of those helpful truth-tellers
or liars to give you directions. How do you find your destination? |
|
 Stocks
move up and they move down, but the movements are not exactly
described by a normal bell-shaped curve. The tails are too fat.
Why? What do the disparate fields of chaos theory and network
theory say about the issue. Investors study stock movements
and try to discern patterns that presage the future. They also
look at company fundamentals for the same reason. To what extent
are they deluding themselves? The efficient market hypothesis
maintains that investors react immediately to new information
and that this is reflected in its price, making future price
movements the consequence of random, unpredictable events. To
what extent is this true? What sort of logical status does the
efficient market hypothesis have? People are subject to all
sorts of psychological foibles from the anchoring effect to
confirmation bias. How does this affect their particular investments
and what does it say about the market in general? Most of us
wish to avoid risk in the market. What's the best way to define
and minimize risk? What is the role of common (as opposed to
mutual) knowledge and how does the notion clarify investor behavior?
|
 Human nature is indeed a
combination of Darwin's universals, Galton's heredity, James's
instincts, De Vries's genes, Pavlov's reflexes, Watson's associations,
Kraepelin's history, Freud's formative experience, Boas's culture,
Durkheim's division of labor, Piaget's development, and Lorenz's
imprinting. You can find all these things going on in the human
mind. No account of human nature would be complete without them
all .... But—and here is where I begin to tread new ground—it
is entirely misleading to place these phenomena on a spectrum
from nature to nurture, from genetic to environmental. Instead,
to understand each and every one of them, you need to understand
genes. It is genes that allow the human mind to learn, to remember,
to imitate, to imprint, to absorb culture, and to express instincts.
Genes are not puppet masters or blueprints. Nor are they just
the carriers of heredity. They are active during life; they switch
each other on and off; they respond to the environment. They may
direct the construction of the body and brain in the womb, but
then they set about dismantling and rebuilding what they have
made almost at once—in response to experience. They are
both cause and consequence of our actions. Somehow the adherents
of the "nurture" side of the argument have scared themselves
silly at the power and inevitability of genes and missed the greatest
lesson of all: the genes are on their side. |
 It would be easy to take a cynical
perspective and conclude that human nature being what it is, greed will
inevitably prevail, and today's financial leaders will keep accumulating
wealth until either the internal discrepancies in income become too blatant
for the social fabric to withstand, or until a global desperation proves
that Karl Marx was actually right (even though he could not foresee a
truly international proletariat lashing out against the capitalist nations,
who have now taken up the role of the capitalist classes once occupied
within nations in the nineteenth century). Yet however dispiriting the
historical record may seem to be, human nature is not, in fact, based
on greed alone. In every historical period there have been individuals
who care for more than their own profit, who find fulfillment in dedicating
themselves to the advancement of the common good. The struggle between
selfishness and altruism has run through history like periods of sunlight
and shade on a summer afternoon. |
 Mathematicians
form a kind of tribe, with its own language and customs. They have
a veneer of civilisation, the type of "civilisation" that
forms the framework of the lives of the rest of us. They go to work in
offices or departments, do the washing up, walk the hills, and—not
very often—watch television. But their inner lives are very different
from those of the rest of us. It is given to them to see truths with
a clarity that is sometimes breathtaking, although there is some argument
over whether the stuff of mathematics is out there—facts and
relationships waiting to be discovered—or in here—creations
of the human mind that are akin to inventions, paintings or poems.
If you believe—as I do—that it is out there, then
a mathematician proving a hypothesis is discovering something which is true
forever and a truth that he or she may well be the first to appreciate. Living
on the surface of a planet that is rapidly running out of unexplored territory,
the mathematical explorer believes that there is no limit to the new findings
he might make. It seems, if the history of mathematics is anything to go
by, that he will never run out of territory to explore, new discoveries to
savour. But just as modern social anthropology teaches us how much we have
in common with supposedly exotic peoples, I hope this book will suggest that
mathematicians are not as different as we might think from the rest of us.
|
 My
research has led me to the conviction that two utterly different
approaches to the world have maintained themselves for thousands
of years. These approaches include profoundly different social
relations, views about the nature of the world, and characteristic
thought processes. Each of these orientations—the Western
and the Eastern—is a self-reinforcing, homeostatic system.
The social practices promote the worldviews; the worldviews dictate
the appropriate thought processes; and the thought processes both
justify the worldviews and support the social practices. Understanding
these homeostatic systems has implications for grasping the fundamental
nature of the mind, for beliefs about how we ought ideally to
reason, and for appropriate educational strategies for different
peoples. |
 A race of
scientifically advanced extraterrestrials watching our solar system
could confidently predict that Earth would face doom in another six
billion years, when the Sun, in its death throes, swells up into a
"red giant" and vaporises everything remaining on our planet's
surface. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spasm less
than halfway through Earth's life—these human-induced alterations
occupying, overall, less than a millionth of our planet's elapsed
lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed?...If they continued
to keep watch, what might these hypothetical aliens witness in the next
hundred years? Will a final squeal be followed by silence? Or will the
planet itself stabilise? And will some of the small metallic objects
launched from Earth spawn new oases of life elsewhere in the solar
system, eventually extending their influences, via exotic life,
machines, or sophisticated signals, far beyond the solar system,
creating an expanding "green sphere" that eventually pervades
the entire Galaxy?...It may not be absurd hyperbole—indeed, it may
not even be an overstatement—to assert that the most crucial
location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be
here and now. I think the odds are no better than fifty-fifty that our
present civilisation on Earth will survive to the end of the present
century. Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of
life (not just on Earth, but perhaps far beyond it, too). Or in
contrast, through malign intent, or through misadventure, twenty-first
century technology could jeopardise life's potential, foreclosing its
human and posthuman future. What happens here on Earth, in this century,
could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled
with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with
nothing but base matter. |
 For reasons we don't yet understand, the tendency
to synchronize is one of the most pervasive drives in the universe,
extending from atoms to animals, from people to planets. Female friends
or coworkers who spend a great deal of time together often find that
their menstrual periods tend to start around the same day. Sperm
swimming side by side en route to the egg beat their tails in unison, in
a primordial display of synchronized swimming. Sometimes sync can be
pernicious: Epilepsy is caused by millions of brain cells discharging in
pathological lockstep, causing the rhythmic convulsions associated with
seizures. Even lifeless things can synchronize. The astounding coherence
of a laser beam comes from trillions of atoms pulsing in concert, all
emitting photons of the same phase and frequency. Over the course of
millennia, the incessant effects of the tides have locked the moon's
spin to its orbit. It now turns on its axis at precisely the same rate
as it circles the earth, which is why we always see the man in the moon
and never its dark side. On the surface, these phenomena might seem
unrelated. After all, the forces that synchronize brain cells have
nothing to do with those in a laser. But at a deeper level, there is a
connection, one that transcends the details of any particular mechanism.
That connection is mathematics. All the examples are variations on the
same mathematical theme: self-organization, the spontaneous emergence of
order out of chaos. |
 Whales roam the
oceans, birds soar blithely overhead, and according to an old joke, a
five hundred pound gorilla sits wherever it wants, but none of these
creatures is free in the way human beings can be free. Human freedom is
not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other
biological conditions and found in only one species, us. The differences
between autonomous human agents and the other assemblages of nature are
visible not just from an anthropocentric perspective but also from the
most objective standpoints (the plural is important) achievable. Human
freedom is real—as real as language, music, and money—so it
can be studied objectively from a no-nonsense, scientific point of view.
But like language, music, money, and other products of society, its
persistence is affected by what we believe about it. So it is not
surprising that our attempts to study it dispassionately are distorted
by anxiety that we will clumsily kill the specimen under the microscope.
Human freedom is younger than the species. Its most important features
are only several thousand years old—an eyeblink in evolutionary
history—but in that short time it has transformed the planet in
ways that are as salient as such great biological transitions as the
creation of an oxygen-rich atmosphere and the creation of multi-cellular
life. Freedom had to evolve like every other feature of the biosphere,
and it continues to evolve today. Freedom is real now, in some happy
parts of the world, and those who love it, love wisely, but it is far
from inevitable, far from universal. If we understand better how freedom
arose, we can do a better job of preserving it for the future, and
protecting it from its many natural enemies." |
 However you think about quantum parallelism,
the promise is machines that are immune to the exponential explosion.
Remember that with a classical computer, each extra digit causes the
factoring time to multiply. A number with 155 decimal digits took dozens
of computers months to process; one with hundreds of digits could take
billions of years—or billions of Turing machines churning side
by side. With the quantum computer, handling longer numbers just means
adding a few more qubits to a single row of atoms and then performing
all the calculations in tandem. Solution time hardly increases at all.
Here is another way to look at it: each time a qubit is added to the
string, it is the number of computations that can be done simultaneously
that increases at an exponential rate. The explosion works in the machine's
favor. When it comes to computation, quantum mechanics suggests a way
for taking a shortcut through time. |
 D.H. Lawrence, the novelist, once
remarked that if anyone presumes to ask why the midday sky is blue
rather than red, we should not even attempt to give a scientific answer
but should simply reply: "Because it is." And if anyone were
to go still further, and to ask why his own conscious sensation when
he looks at the midday sky is characterised by blue qualia rather than
red qualia, I've no doubt that Lawrence if he were still around—along
with several contemporary philosophers of mind—would be just
as adamant that the last place we should look for enlightenment is
science. But this is not my view. The poet William Empson wrote: "Critics
are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves against the flower
of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up.
I myself, I must confess, aspire to the second of these classes; unexplained
beauty arouses an irritation in me". And equally, I'd say, unexplained
subjective experience arouses an irritation in me. It is the irritation
of someone who is an unabashed Darwinian: one who holds that the theory
of evolution by natural selection has given us the licence to ask "why" questions
about almost every aspect of the design of living nature.
|
 Some things never change.
And this is a book about those things. Long ago, the happenings
that made it into histories were the irregularities of experience:
the unexpected, the catastrophic, and the ominous. Gradually,
scientists came to appreciate the mystery of the regularity and
predictability of the world. Despite the concatenation of chaotically
unpredictable movements of atoms and molecules, our experience
is of a world that possesses a deep-laid consistency and continuity.
Our search for the source of that consistency looked first to
the 'laws' of Nature that govern how things change. But gradually
we have identified a collection of mysterious numbers which lie
at the root of the consistency of experience. These are the constants
of Nature. They give the Universe its distinctive character and
distinguish it from others we might imagine. They capture at once
our greatest knowledge and our greatest ignorance about the Universe.
For, while we measure them to ever greater precision, we cannot
explain their values. We have never been able to calculate the
numerical value of any of the constants of Nature. The reasons
for their values remains a deeply hidden secret. Do they arise
at random? How different could they be if life is to be possible
in the Universe? And are they truly constant? The answer, unexpected
and shocking, raises new possibilities for the Universe and the
laws that govern it. This book will tell you about them. |
 Clearly, in the
so-called age of science, many of us still look to mysticism for truth
and consolation. But can mystical spirituality be reconciled with
science and, more broadly, with reason? To paraphrase the mystical
philosopher Ken Wilber, is the east's version of enlightenment
compatible with that of the west? If so, what sort of truth would a
rational mysticism give us? What sort of consolation? These, I believe,
are the most important issues confronting mystical scholars and the
millions who are following mystical paths. While attempting to resolve
these basic issues, I will touch on many other questions that motivate
today's mystical inquiries: What can neuroscience, psychiatry, and other
mind-related fields tell us about the causes of mystical states? Are
there any risks in following the mystical path, whether by meditating or
ingesting peyote? What is the link between mysticism, madness, and
morality? Why does belief in mysticism so often go hand in hand with
belief in parapsychology? What is the nature of the supreme mystical
state, sometimes called enlightenment? Will science ever produce a
mystical technology powerful enough to deliver enlightenment on
demand? |
 Dramatic
claims have been made for placebos. According to Dr Robert
Buckman and Karl Sabbagh, "they seem to have some effect on
almost every symptom known to mankind". Another authority writes
of placebos that "the range of susceptible conditions appears
to be limitless". At the other extreme there are those who
argue that the placebo effect is largely or even totally illusory.
Arthur Shapiro, who spent forty years researching the topic
from the mid 1950's until his death in 1995, concluded that
there was little evidence for the view that placebos could
have a direct and permanent effect on medical disorders. Gunver
Kienle and Helmut Kiene have probed the literature on placebos
in great depth and found it to be full of misquotation, blind
repetition of poorly substantiated claims and the uncritical
reporting of anecdotes. The placebo effect, they claim, is
no more than a myth...So much for the claims; what of the evidence?
It is true that placebos have been used in thousands of clinical
trials, but—as we saw in the last chapter—most of these studies
do not include a no-treatment group. As a result, we cannot
be sure
that the placebo made any difference. The improvement shown by
the patients in the placebo group might have occurred anyway
as they recovered their health naturally, even if they hadn't
received a dummy treatment.
|
 In normal circumstances,
I'm not the sober, serious futurist that you will see in this work. This
is me as
a full-blown pundit, a brow-wrinkled journalist who attends the Davos
Forum, networks with Californian corporate forecasters, and reads learned
briefings from Edge.org. Most of the time, I really don't care to work
that hard. Because I'm a science fiction writer...Sci-fi is supposed
to be entertainment, yet futurism is a serious enterprise.
Let me
pull you behind the ol' Wizard of Oz curtain, and explain how futurists
go about their work...First, you have to find somebody who'll pay you to do it.
This stark reality
immediately splits "futurism" into interest groups...In corporate futurism
(which pays the best), you're concerned with new markets and new products. In
government futurism (the most dignified), it's about investment in basic R&D,
the changing demographics of the political base, and new demands for bureaucratic
public service. Military futurism is about
new weapons platforms and new security threats: "thinking the unthinkable," as
Herman Kahn aptly used to put it. Police futurism—(and yes, there are a few of
those)—is about figuring out how to apprehend, prosecute and jail people
involved in wicked activities not yet formally defined as crimes. Ethical futurism
is about the moral conundrums posed by possible future actions such as cloning
and genetic alteration. And so forth...The future is the largest of all possible
subjects. It encompasses everything on the far side of the ever-ticking clock.
But professional futurists tend to
work within narrow parameters. In Tomorrow Now, I'm combining approaches.
Thanks to my independent economic base as a pop entertainer, I can mess with
the
future in seven different ways all at once! |
 In May 2000, at a
highly publicized meeting in Paris, the Clay Mathematics Institute
announced that seven $1 million prizes were being offered for the
solutions to any of seven unsolved problems of
mathematics—problems that an international committee of
mathematicians had judged to be the seven most difficult and most
important in the field today...In my book describing
these seven problems, I do not aim at a detailed description. It is just
not possible to describe most of them accurately in lay terms. Rather,
my goal is to provide the background to each problem, to describe how it
arose, explain what makes it particularly difficult, and give you some
sense of why mathematicians regard it as important....I
am writing not for those who want to tackle one of the problems, but for
readers—mathematician and nonmathematician alike—who are
curious about the current state at the frontiers of humankind's oldest
body of scientific knowledge. After three thousand years of intellectual
development, what are the limits of our mathematical
knowledge?...The Millennium Problems are the
Mount Everests of mathematics, the hardest and most important unsolved
mathematics problems in the world. They have resisted numerous attempts
at solution, over many years, by the best mathematical minds around.
Even achieving a layperson's appreciation of what they are
about takes considerable effort. I believe the effort, however,
is worthwhile. Aren't all pinnacles of human achievement of
interest? |
 Through
recent advances in cognitive science, evolutionary psychology
has gained entrance to mental structure, and so potentially
to the brain’s evolved neural architecture. It has a long
way to go: much less is currently known about how the mind/brain
works than how body cells function. Perhaps, in the end, evolutionary
psychology’s interpretations of complex mental designs
as telltale signs of ancient environments will prove no truer
than phrenology’s readings of bumps and other conformations
of the skull as indications of mental faculties and character
(phrenology was a very serious and hotly debated discipline a
century ago). Then again perhaps not, which makes the effort
worthwhile. Religion is a hard test for this gambit. Sincere
expressions of belief in supernatural agents, sacred rites and
other aspects of devout faith and practice seem to vary as much
as anything possibly could in human imagination. And it isn’t
easy to see what biological advantages or ecological functions
bodiless spirits or costly sacrifices may have afforded simian
ancestors in Pleistocene scrub. What follows is an attempt
to show that in all cultures supernatural agents behave, and
sacred
rites are performed, in ways predictable under evolved cognitive
(inferential) and emotional constraints. This implies some
humbling truths about our kind, in the limits of our reason,
the chaos
behind moral choice, and the fatality of our anxieties and passions.
|
 The idea that nature and nurture are two
competing forces is so deeply entrenched in nearly every facet of how we
understand ourselves that it has obscured any possibility of a rich
collaboration between these two elements. Yet our research has found
that humans are the result of the most complex collaborative project in
history, whose two equal partners are our biology and the human culture
we are immersed in. As you will see, they form a tangled web of forces
whose interconnections we are only now starting to
appreciate using
the dynamic tool of computer simulation... Appreciating the far-reaching
interplay between biology and culture has prompted us to call our view
"cultural biology." We'll show you why cultural biology points
to a very different conception of who we are than does the outdated
"modern" image, and why the modern image was mistaken in some
of its basic assumptions. We'll also explain why we think this new
understanding offers a far more fascinating view of who we are, one
containing both exciting new possibilities and lurking vulnerabilities
that we should all be aware of as we shape the next millennium. To that
end, our journey will go far beyond the laboratory and into everyday
life to extract the answers to the most basic questions that arise as we
all try to make sense of our world and our place in it. |
 Smart mobs consist of people who are able to act
in concert even if they don't know each other. The people who make up
smart mobs cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry
devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities.
Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the
environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap
microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are
beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighborhoods, products with
invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible
objects and places of our daily lives with the Internet, handheld
communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the
physical world. When you piece together these different technological,
economic, and social components, the result is an infrastructure that
makes certain kinds of human actions possible that were never possible
before: The killer apps of tomorrow's mobile infocom industry won't be
hardware devices or software programs but social practices. The most
far-reaching changes will come, as they often do, from the kinds of
relationships, enterprises, communities and markets that the
infrastructure makes possible. |
 Scientists and public intellectuals are not the only people
who have pondered how the mind works. We are all psychologists, and some
people, without the benefit of credentials, are great psychologists.
Among them are poets and novelists, whose business, as we saw in the
preceding chapter, is to create "just representations of general
nature." Paradoxically, in today's intellectual climate novelists
may have a clearer mandate than scientists to speak the truth about
human nature. Sophisticated people sneer at feel-good comedies and
saccharine romances in which all loose ends are tied and everyone lives
happily ever after. Life is nothing like that, we note, and we look to
the arts for edification about the painful dilemmas of the human
condition...Yet when it comes to the
science of human beings, this same audience says: Give us schmaltz!
"Pessimism" is considered a legitimate criticism of
observations of human nature, and people expect theories to be a source
of sentimental uplift. "Shakespeare had no conscience; neither do
I," said George Bernard Shaw. This was not a confession of
psychopathy but an affirmation of a good playwright's obligation to take
every character's point of view seriously. Scientists of human behavior
have the same obligation, and it does not require them to turn off their
consciences in the spheres in which they must be exercised.
|
 For
the last half century psychology has been consumed with a single topic
only—mental illness—and it has
done fairly well with it. Psychologists can now measure with considerable
precision such formerly fuzzy concepts as depression, schizophrenia,
and alcoholism. We now know a good deal about how these troubles develop
across the lifespan, and about their genetics, their biochemistry,
and their psychological causes. Best of all we have learned how to
relieve
these disorders. By my last count, fourteen out of the several dozen
major mental illnesses could be effectively treated—and two of them
cured—with medications and with specific forms of psychotherapy...But
this
progress
has come at a high cost. Relieving the states that make life miserable
has pushed building the states that make life worth living into a
distant back seat. This is a time, however, when people want more positive
emotion, not just less negative emotion, in their lives. This is a time when
people want to build their strengths, not just correct their weaknesses.
This is a time when people want their lives imbued with meaning, and
not just fidget
until they die. Lying awake at night, you probably ponder, as I have, how
to go from plus two to plus seven in your life, not just how to go
from minus
five to minus three and feel a little less miserable day-by-day. If you are
such a person, you will have found the field of psychology, until now, a
puzzling disappointment. The time has finally arrived for a Positive
Psychology, a science
that seeks to understand positive emotion, that seeks to build strength and
virtue, and that seeks to provide guideposts for enabling you to find what
Aristotle called the "Good life".
|
 The idea of burying the dead can now be seen as the opposite of cannibalism.
Alongside the edible dead who were absorbed were the toxic dead who were
isolated. The first uneaten burials, placed in caves either whole or
in bits and pieces, were ostracized. Caves, with no dawn or dusk, are
symbolic limbo. I think of these first burials of the Mousterian, with
partial bodies and few grave goods, as 'isolating'. They are more characteristic
of the Neanderthals than the modern humans from this same Middle Paleolithic
period, but they occur among both. They do not show cut marks, and any
elaboration—flowers, antlers,
and so on—is part of a magic aimed at keeping scavengers, whether people
or animals, away from these bodies and body parts so that they cannot be reabsorbed,
transformed and given cosmic posterity. The people may have been prototypical
scapegoats. Their location after death in the timeless space of caves echoes
and emphasizes their exclusion from the
normal cycle of life and death. |
 Reduced to a sentence,
this book's message is that psychological science reveals some astounding
powers and notable perils of unchecked intuition, and that creative yet
critical thinkers will appreciate both. . . . Does comprehending the
powers and perils of intuition matter? I contend that it matters greatly.
Judges' and jurors' intuitions determine the fate of lives. (Is she telling
the truth? Will he do it again if released? Does applying the death penalty
deter homicide?) Investors' intuitions affect fortunes. (Has the market
bottomed? Are tech stocks due for another plunge? Is it time to shift
into bonds?) Coaches' intuitions guide their decisions about whom to
play. (Does she have the hot hand tonight? Is he in a batting slump?)
Clinicians' intuitions steer their practice. (Is he at risk for suicide?
Was she sexually abused?) Intuitions shape our fears (do we fear the
right things?), impressions (are our stereotypes accurate?), and relationships
(does she like me?). Intuitions influence presidents in times of crisis,
gamblers at the table, and personnel directors when eyeing applicants. |
 Only after our
spacecraft reached its orbit could we see Mars for what it is, a planet
with a surface area as great as that of the earth's continents, all of
it as measurable, as real as the stones in the pavement outside your
door. After millennia of talking about worlds beyond our own, of Heavens
and Hells and the Isles of the Hesperides, humanity now has such a world
fixed in its sights, solid and sure. For the moment it is a world of
science, untouchable but inspectable and oddly accessible, if only
through the most complex of tools. But unlike the other worlds that
scientists create with their imaginations and instruments—the
worlds of molecular dynamics and of inflationary cosmology and all the
rest of them—this one is on the edge of being a world in the
oldest, truest, sense. A world of places and views, a world that would
graze your knees if you fell on it, a world with winds and sunsets and
the palest of moonlight. Almost a world like ours, except for the
emptiness. This book is about how ideas from our full and complex planet
are projected on to the rocks of that simpler, empty one. The ideas
discussed are mostly scientific, because it is the scientists who have
thought hardest and best about the realities of Mars. It is the
scientists who have fathomed the ages of its rocks, measured its
resemblance to the earth, searched for its missing waters
and—always—wondered about the life it might be home to. The
stories they tell about the planet must have pride of place. But there
are artists in here, too, and writers, and poets, and people whose
dreams take no such articulated form, but still focus themselves on the
same red rocks in the sky. They illuminate Mars; Mars illuminates
them. |
 Most of us are likely to start our day
with a series of questions: where do I have to go? What time is? How
cold is it? In going to sleep, we anticipate tomorrow’s answers
to those same questions. The measurements of length, time and temperature,
implicit or explicit, set our life’s rhythms. I’m fascinated
by temperature, the subtlest of the three. While new ideas expand our
horizons, the everyday understanding of length and time has not changed
appreciably in millennia. We’ve had rulers and clocks for a long
time. This is not the case with temperature. Even though we can agree
that a baby immediately knows hot from cold, our ability to measure temperature
is only a few hundred years old...Traditionally science books intended
for the general public describe a specific discipline or a particular
problem. Books on cosmology or genetics or neuroscience
are useful and often wonderful. I’m taking a different path, using the
measurement of temperature as a guide in exploring many aspects of science. Such
a wide sweep inevitably entails selection; the ensuing choices reflect my own
background and taste, ignorance and knowledge. This book raises many puzzles.
Some of the contents may seem paradoxical: for instance it’s surprising
we know the temperature at the center of the Sun with greater precision than
the center of the Earth. However many of the problems addressed have explanations
that seem almost obvious upon reflection. While I don’t claim to offer
an overarching view of science, I stress the connections of the approaches as
well as of the solutions. Temperature is the thread. |
 Many have found the idea of memes attractively logical
and run with it. However, much of this speculation has been irresponsible,
since the existence of memes remains to be established. Nevertheless,
if it could be shown that social intercourse regularly involves
the replication of information, such a discovery would have important
implications for the nature of human psychology and society. A
concerted attempt to sort out what memes must be like is therefore
warranted. In this book, I take seriously the notion that such
cultural replicators exist. By identifying what memes must be
like and where they can be found, I hope to hasten an end to the
continuing rounds of conjecture about memes. If the possibility
of memes is confirmed, an era of "hard" findings in
the new science of memetics could then be initiated… Currently,
then, memes exist only as hypothetical functional entities, with
the express purpose of explaining observable similarities in cultural
traits over time. I argue that developments similar to those which
occurred in genetics must now take place for memetics to be established
as a science. We must find out where memes are hiding…For
memes to become real, we have to find out just how they operate
and, if possible, see them in action. It's time for a new scientific
revolution, for the beginning of a "molecular memetics"
to mirror the revolution in biology which occurred with the identification
of physical genes. |
|
 The
language of evolutionary change is neither mathematics nor computer-generated
morphology. Certainly it is not statistics. Rather, natural
history, ecology, genetics, and metabolism must be supplemented
with accurate knowledge of microbes. Microbial physiology, ecology,
and protistology are essential to understand the evolutionary
process. The behavior of microbes within their own populations
and in their interactions with others determined life's winding,
expanding evolutionary course. The living subvisible world ultimately
underlies the behavior, development, ecology and evolution of
the much larger world of which we are a part and with which
we co-evolved. While some may feel belittled by this perspective
of evolution punctuated and driven forward by microbial mergers,
we believe, echoing Darwin, that there is grandeur, too, in
this view of life. Numberless forms and variation come not just
gradually and at random, but suddenly and forcefully, by the
co-opting of strangers, the involvement and infolding of others—viral,
bacterial, and eukaryotic—into ever more complex and miscegenous
genomes. The acquisition of the reproducing other, of the microbe
and its genome, is no mere sideshow. Attraction, merger, fusion,
incorporation, cohabitation, recombination—both permanent
and cyclical—and other forbidden couplings, are the main
sources of Darwin's missing variation. Indeed, as Wallin said
in 1927, "It is a rather startling proposal that bacteria,
the organisms which are popularly associated with disease, may
represent the fundamental causative factor in the origins of
species." We agree.
|
 Today
we increasingly recognize that nothing happens in isolation. Most events
and phenomena are connected, caused by, and interacting with a huge number
of other pieces of a complex universal puzzle. We have come to see that
we live in a small world, where everything is linked to everything else.
We are witnessing a revolution in the making as scientists from all different
disciplines discover that complexity has a strict architecture. We have
come to grasp the importance of networks...With the Internet dominating
our life, the word network is on everybody's lips these days, featured
in company names and popular journal titles. After September 11, witnessing
the deadly power of terrorist networks, we had to get used to yet another
meaning of it. Very few people realize, however, that the rapidly unfolding
science of networks is uncovering phenomena that are far more exciting
and revealing than the casual use of the word network could ever convey.
Some of these discoveries are so fresh that many of the key results still
circulate as unpublished papers within the scientific community. They open
up a novel perspective on the interconnected world around us. It is clear
that networks will dominate the new century to a much greater degree than
most people are yet ready to acknowledge. They will drive the fundamental
questions that form our view of the world will drive our understanding
of this in the coming era...This book has a simple aim: to get you to think
networks. It is about how networks emerge, what they look like, and how
they evolve. It shows you a web-based view of nature, society, and business,
a new framework for understanding issues ranging from the democracy on
the web to the vulnerability of the Internet and the spread of deadly viruses.
|
|
 To
naturalists who came before Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel
Wallace, nature seemed as enigmatic and complex as human personality,
but it was precisely because Darwin and Wallace pinned, boxed
and labelled nature that they were able to discern the pattern
within the noise. We can do no better than follow the precepts
of such eminent naturalists in our exploration of the natural
history of personality, starting with a heretic personality,
or "the unique pattern of relatively permanent traits that
makes an individual open to subjects at variance with those
considered authoritative." This description well fits Wallace,
who routinely maintained opinions on a variety of subjects typically
at odds with the received authorities. A heretic personality
is an individual, like Wallace, who differs from the majority
in his openness to and support of ideas considered heretical,
while also maintaining anti-authoritarian, pro-radical sympathies.
These traits, being "relatively permanent," are
not temporary conditions, or "states" of the environment,
the altering of which changes the personality. The heretic personality,
like any other personality trait, tends to act consistently
over most environmental settings, throughout much of a lifetime...Wallace
became interested in heretical theories as a very young man,
investigating, for example, phrenology, and considered controversial
biological problems such as the mutability of species. This
was not, however, a temporary flirtation with anti-authoritative
ideas by a young, undisciplined mind. In mid life, after codiscovering
with Darwin their innovative (and at the time moderately heretical)
theory on the origin of species by means of natural selection,
Wallace began experimenting with spiritualism and many other
controversial
beliefs. What establishes Wallace as a genuine heretic personality
was that he demonstrated a unique pattern of relatively permanent
traits that caused him to maintain opinions upon a variety of
subjects throughout his life at variance with those considered
authoritative.
|
 Learning to live with
uncertainty is a daring task for individuals as well as societies. Much
of human
history
has been shaped by people who were absolutely certain that their kin,
race, or religion was the one most valued by God or destiny, which made
them believe they were entitled to get rid of conflicting ideas along
with the bodies polluted with them. Modern societies have come a long
way toward greater tolerance of uncertainty and diversity. Nevertheless,
we are still far from being the courageous and informed citizens whom
Kant envisaged––a goal that can be expressed in just two
Latin words: Sapere aude. Or in three English words: "Dare to know."...Living
with uncertainty involves understanding risk, which in turn involves
understanding statistics. Yet many have argued that sound statistical
thinking is not easily turned into a "habit of mind" and
have used this claim to justify withholding information from the general
public. I disagree with this habit-of-mind story. The central | |
