CULTURE

Preface to Dangerous Ideas

Steven Pinker

[12.31.06]

I suggested to John Brockman that he devote his annual Edge question to dangerous ideas because I believe that they are likely to confront us at an increasing rate and that we are ill equipped to deal with them. When done right, science (together with other truth-seeking institutions, such as history and journalism) characterizes the world as it is, without regard to whose feelings get hurt. Science in particular has always been a source of heresy, and today the galloping advances in touchy areas like genetics, evolution, and the environment sciences are bound to throw unsettling possibilities at us. Moreover, the rise of globalization and the Internet are allowing heretics to find one another and work around the barriers of traditional media and academic journals. I also suspect that a change in generational sensibilities will hasten the process. The term "political correctness" captures the 1960s conception of moral rectitude that we baby boomers brought with us as we took over academia, journalism, and government. In my experience, today's students — black and white, male and female — are bewildered by the idea, common among their parents, that certain scientific opinions are immoral or certain questions too hot to handle.

STEVEN PINKER is a Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology; Harvard University. Author, The Better Angels Of Our Nature: How Violence Has Declined, The Language Instinct, and How the Mind Works.

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

Afterword to Dangerous Ideas

Richard Dawkins

[12.31.06]

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the former Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype, The Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (ScienceMasters Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, The Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale, The God Delusion, The Greatest Show on Earth, and The Magic of Reality.

Richard Dawkins's Edge Bio Page

GOD VS. SCIENCE: A Debate Between Natalie Angier and David Sloan Wilson, Moderated by Thomas A. Bass

Natalie Angier, David Sloan Wilson, Thomas A. Bass

[12.30.06]

I see some fundamental contradiction here. Everybody criticizes Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. But at least they're talking about how ludicrous some of these belief systems are. I know that David Sloan Wilson doesn't take issue with the way I've framed these questions, but to see religion as having a positive influence does not get at the fundamental question of what it means to have faith. What is so good about having faith when you don't have evidence? What is the real advantage to that? Why is this something that we want to encourage? Why not say, as I do with my daughter, "Let's see some proof." She asked her friend, who believes in Jesus, if she could wait up one night and see Him for herself, and it didn't happen. Why is that OK? Why is it OK for scientists to say that skepticism is the default position, except when it comes to mainstream religion? — Natalie Angier

With apologies to Natalie, I think there's a kind of a silliness to banging away at religious beliefs for their obvious falsehood, when in fact, if you're an evolutionist, the only way you would want to evaluate these beliefs is to examine what they cause people to do. Do they help people function in their communities? Then this might be an explanation for why they exist. It also makes it unnecessary to criticize these ideas, again and again, because they depart from factual reality. We should be more sophisticated in the way we evaluate beliefs. — David Sloan Wilson

Natalie Angier

Thomas A. Bass

David Sloan Wilson

NATALIE ANGIER is a Pulitzer prize winning science writer for The New York Times. Her most recent book is The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

Natalie Angier's Edge Bio Page

DAVID SLOAN WILSON is distinguished professor of biology and anthropology at Binghamton University. He also directs EvoS, a campus-wide program that relates evolution to all aspects of humanity in addition to the natural world. His most recent book is Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives.

David Sloan Wilson's Edge Bio Page

THOMAS A. BASS, a writer, is Professor of English at the University at Albany. His most recent book is The Predictors.

Thomas A. Bass's Edge Bio Page

GOD VS. SCIENCE

Topic:

CULTURE

http://vimeo.com/80938176

"I see some fundamental contradiction here. Everybody criticizes Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. But at least they're talking about how ludicrous some of these belief systems are. I know that David Sloan Wilson doesn't take issue with the way I've framed these questions, but to see religion as having a positive influence does not get at the fundamental question of what it means to have faith. What is so good about having faith when you don't have evidence?"
— Natalie Angier

10 myths—and 10 Truths—About Atheism

Sam Harris

[12.24.06]

In most cases, it seems that religion gives people bad reasons to behave well, when good reasons are actually available. Ask yourself, which is more moral, helping the poor out of concern for their suffering, or doing so because you think the creator of the universe wants you to do it, will reward you for doing it or will punish you for not doing it?

SAM HARRIS is a neuroscientist and the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Mr. Harris' writing has been published in over fifteen languages. He is the author of The Moral Landscape and Free Will.

Sam Harris's Edge Bio Page

MY GOD PROBLEM

Natalie Angier

[11.19.06]

So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion's core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate "magisteria," in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you'll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she'll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that's your private reliquary, and we're not here to jimmy the lock.

INTRODUCTION
by John Brockman

In a talk in London a few months ago, Ian McEwan noted that looking back at the mid-70s, "none of us ...would have thought [that] we'd be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed." Indeed, earlier this year sixteen scientists, all Edge contributors, dropped everything to write authoritative essays for a book published on a crash schedule to rebut the hoax known as "Intelligent Design". One of the most perceptive comments about the book, Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, was in an Orlando Weekly review:

The worst kind of argument to have, is one with someone who Just Doesn't Get It. The debates that find your well-reasoned points countered with the tautological equivalent of "nuh-uh" or "because, that's why" may not make you feel like you lost the argument, but you certainly don't feel like you won, either. Especially when the topic you're disagreeing on isn't even something that should be up for debate. ...

That's the overriding sense one suspects the writers of the essays in Intelligent Thought were experiencing when they put pen to paper. More than one of them, I'm sure, muttered to himself: "I can't fucking believe I'm having to write this".

("Science vs. Stupid" by Jason Ferguson)

We did not spend the time and take the trouble to publish the book to convert religious fundamentalists to science-based thinking, but simply to have a place marker to sit on the desks of educators, of newspaper and magazine editors, of politicians, which could, at a minimum, serve as a talisman for rational thinking and ideas. In a nation where, during a single week, the President of the United States, the Majority Leader of the Senate, the leading candidate (Senator John McCain) for the Republican nominee for the presidential election in 2008, all endorsed teaching Christian fundamentalist religious dogma in public school science classes, business as usual is off the table.

And now, more than ever, it's time for extreme voices.

Natalie Angier, the Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times science journalist understands this. It was her ringing endorsement of atheism in her widely discussed 2004 review of Sam Harris's first book, The End of Faith, in The New York Times Book Review (see "'The End of Faith': Against Toleration") that, in part, set the stage for the current conversation about the recent books of Daniel C. Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris. This resulted in something unthinkable just a few years ago: the two leading national news magazines, Time and Newsweek, both running cover stories during the same week presenting the ideas of leading atheists to the American reading public.

"There is something to be said for a revival of pagan peevishness and outspokenness," Angier wrote in 2001. "It's not that I would presume to do something as foolish and insulting as try to convert a believer. Arguments over the question of whether God exists are ancient, recurring, sometimes stimulating but more often tedious. Arrogance and righteousness are nondenominational vices that entice the churched and unchurched alike. ... Still, the current climate of religiosity can be stifling to nonbelievers, and it helps now and then to cry foul. "

Read on.

— JB

NATALIE ANGIER won the Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting as a science writer for The New York Times. She is the author of Natural Obsessions,The Beauty of the Beastly, Woman: An Intimate Geography, and the forthcoming The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science.

Natalie Angier's Edge Bio Page

BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED

Stuart A. Kauffman

[11.12.06]

Two fine authors, Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, have written recent books, The God Delusion and Breaking the Spell arguing against religion. Their views are based on contemporary science. But the largest convictions of contemporary science remain based on reductionism.

I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view — beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.

Introduction

Stuart A. Kauffman studies the origin of life and the origins of molecular organization. Thirty-five years ago, he developed the Kauffman models, which are random networks exhibiting a kind of self-organization that he terms "order for free." He asks a question that goes beyond those asked by other evolutionary theorists: if selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization (order for free) and selection? The answer lies in a "new" biology:

"While it may sound as if 'order for free' is a serious challenge to Darwinian evolution, it's not so much that I want to challenge Darwinism and say that Darwin was wrong. I don't think he was wrong at all. I have no doubt that natural selection is an overriding, brilliant idea and a major force in evolution, but there are parts of it that Darwin couldn't have gotten right. One is that if there is order for free — if you have complex systems with powerfully ordered properties — you have to ask a question that evolutionary theories have never asked: Granting that selection is operating all the time, how do we build a theory that combines self-organization of complex systems — that is, this order for free — and natural selection? There's no body of theory in science that does this. There's nothing in physics that does this, because there's no natural selection in physics — there's self organization. Biology hasn't done it, because although we have a theory of selection, we've never married it to ideas of self-organization. One thing we have to do is broaden evolutionary theory to describe what happens when selection acts on systems that already have robust self-organizing properties. This body of theory simply does not exist." (Chapter 20, "Order for Free", The Third Culture, 1995)

In the following essay, Kauffman frames a new scientific world view of emergence and ceaseless creativity, which, he notes, is "awesome in what has come to pass in reality, and God enough for me and many, where God is the creativity of the universe, yielding a global ethics of respect for all life, the planet, awe, wonder and spirituality cut free from a transcendent God."

— JB

STUART A. KAUFFMAN is a professor at the University of Calgary with a shared appointment between biological sciences and physics and astronomy. He is also the leader of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics (IBI) which conducts leading-edge interdisciplinary research in systems biology.

Dr. Kauffman is also an emeritus professor of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is the author of The Origins of Order, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization, and Investigations.

Stuart A. Kauffman's Edge Bio Page

HOW PEOPLE SEE THEMSELVES

Hubert Burda

[11.9.06]

According to Hubert Burda, "In today's media society, in which hundreds of different media compete for the attention of viewers, readers and listeners, a great deal of importance is attached to presenting oneself." In the following essay he goes much deeper than the typical discussions of visual representation in the Internet Age and writes about self-presentation in portraits from Jan van Eyck to Andy Warhol and examines the images people want to have of themselves.

Burda is eminently qualified to write on his subject. Trained as an art historian, he is himself a painter, in addition to being one of Germany's media moguls (see "Hubert Burda — Germany's Agent of Change"). In 1993, Burda, synthesizing his experience as an art historian and a connoisseur of fine arts with his understanding of New Media, recognized that the use of digital imaging technology changed the ratio of costs between photography and print in magazine publishing from 5-1 to 1-1. Armed with "Burda's Algorithm" he moved to quickly establish Focus Magazine, one of the great German economic success stories of the 1990s.

Today, Burda is the largest provider of German language content on the Internet. "The opportunities of personal representation and self-presentation have become democratised to an extent that would have been unimaginable many years ago," he writes. "Nowadays anyone who wants to draw attention to themselves and communicate to the public an image of themselves can to all intents and purposes do so."

Hubert Burda's Edge Bio Page

THANK GOODNESS!

Daniel C. Dennett

[11.2.06]

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God is that there really are lots of ways of repaying your debt to goodness—by setting out to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come. Goodness comes in many forms, not just medicine and science. Thank goodness for the music of, say, Randy Newman, which could not exist without all those wonderful pianos and recording studios, to say nothing of the musical contributions of every great composer from Bach through Wagner to Scott Joplin and the Beatles. Thank goodness for fresh drinking water in the tap, and food on our table. Thank goodness for fair elections and truthful journalism. If you want to express your gratitude to goodness, you can plant a tree, feed an orphan, buy books for schoolgirls in the Islamic world, or contribute in thousands of other ways to the manifest improvement of life on this planet now and in the near future.

DANIEL C. DENNETT is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of Content and Consciousness; Brainstorms; Elbow Room; The Intentional Stance; Consciousness Explained; Darwin's Dangerous Idea; Kinds of Minds; Brainchildren; Freedom Evolves; Sweet Dreams; and Breaking the Spell.

Daniel C. Dennett's Edge Bio Page

THE EXPANDING THIRD CULTURE

John Brockman

[10.25.06]

Just as science—that is, reliable methods for obtaining knowledge—has encroached on areas formerly considered to belong to the humanities (such as psychology), science is also encroaching on the social sciences, especially economics, geography, history, and political science. Not just the broad observation-based and statistical methods of the historical sciences but also detailed techniques of the conventional sciences (such as genetics and molecular biology and animal behavior) are proving essential for tackling problems in the social sciences. Science is the most accurate way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it is the human spirit, the role of great men and women in history, or the structure of DNA. Humanities scholars and historians who spurn it condemn themselves to second-rate status and produce unreliable results.

THE EXPANDING THIRD CULTURE
By John Brockman

JOHN BROCKMAN is publisher and editor of Edge.

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