CULTURE

WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD

Richard Dawkins
[10.25.06]

Either Jesus had a father or he didn't. The question is a scientific one, and scientific evidence, if any were available, would be used to settle it. The same is true of any miracle — and the deliberate and intentional creation of the universe would have to have been the mother and father of all miracles. Either it happened or it didn't. It is a fact, one way or the other, and in our state of uncertainty we can put a probability on it — an estimate that may change as more information comes in. Humanity's best estimate of the probability of divine creation dropped steeply in 1859 when The Origin of Species was published, and it has declined steadily during the subsequent decades, as evolution consolidated itself from plausible theory in the nineteenth century to established fact today.

The Chamberlain tactic of snuggling up to 'sensible' religion, in order to present a united front against ('intelligent design') creationists, is fine if your central concern is the battle for evolution. That is a valid central concern, and I salute those who press it, such as Eugenie Scott in Evolution versus Creationism. But if you are concerned with the stupendous scientific question of whether the universe was created by a supernatural intelligence or not, the lines are drawn completely differently. On this larger issue, fundamentalists are united with 'moderate' religion on one side, and I find myself on the other.

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 

DEVOTED ACTOR VERSUS RATIONAL ACTOR MODELS FOR UNDERSTANDING WORLD CONFLICT

To The National Security Council At The White House, 14 September 2006, 3:30 pm
Scott Atran
[10.2.06]

From extensive personal interviews and controlled psychological experiments with Israeli settlers, Palestinian refugees, leaders of Hamas, radical Islamic groups in Pakistan and Indonesia, and (ongoing pilot work) with certain non-Muslim fundamentalist groups, I (together with a research team including Jeremy Ginges, Douglas Medin, and Khalil Shikaki) find that when disputed issues are transformed into sacred values, as when land ceases to be a mere resource and becomes "holy" or when structures of brick and mortar become "sacred sites," then standard political and economic proposals for resolving conflicts don't suffice and can be counterproductive by raising levels of outrage and disgust. But even token symbolic concessions, such as an apology for a perceived wrong that touches a sacred value, can be more important than material trade-offs in making peace.

Introduction

Recently I heard from anthropologist Scott Atran, who was calling on his mobile phone from Ramallah to talk about some of his ideas that point to a new science-based paradigm for dealing with some of the difficult issues in the Mideast. He followed up the call with an email in which he wrote:

"As you know my ideas and research have been getting lots of media attention of late—see Sharon Begley's Wall Street Journal Science Journal ("The Key to Peace In Mideast May Be 'Sacred Beliefs'", August 25), and my New York Times OpEd a week before ("Is Hamas Ready To Deal?", August 17), etc. — and I am taking you up on your suggestion to present some of these ideas to the Edge community."

In this regard, Sharon Begley, in her weekly Wall Street Journal Science column wrote:

"If suicide bombings and intractable conflicts make you think the world has gone mad, Scott Atran can confirm your impression is correct: In many conflicts, reason and rationality have left the building.

"For instance, rational cost-benefit analysis says the Palestinians "should" agree to forgo sovereignty over Jerusalem and the Jordan River in return for an autonomous state encompassing their other pre-1967 lands because they would gain more land and more sovereignty than they would renounce.

"They should support such an agreement even more if the U.S. and Europe sweetened the deal by giving every Palestinian family substantial economic assistance for a decade. Instead, the financial sweetener makes Palestinians more opposed to the deal.

"The reason is the existence of "sacred values," which make a hash of standard analyses, explains Prof. Atran, an expert on Islamic terrorism who teaches at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, at the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris and at John Jay School of Criminal Justice in New York.

"From extensive interviews with Palestinian refugees, leaders of Hamas and radical Islamic groups in Indonesia, he has developed a new lens through which to view the proverbial clash of civilization, and sacred values lie at its core.

"Although White House sessions with Middle East experts have been widely reported, less well known is that social scientists have a seat at the table, too. Prof. Atran, for instance, has briefed the Homeland Security and National Security councils on his research. Social science, he says, "has the attention of policy makers."

Atran believes that "a new paradigm is needed to manage the kinds of cultural clashes underlying present world conflict, and that is what I'm trying to get across.It actually is producing practical results but I can't talk about these for now."

Atran met with the National Security Council at the White House on September 14th. Here are his preliminary remarks for that meeting.

—JB

 

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.

Scott Atran's Edge Bio Page

REASONABLE DOUBT

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein
[7.28.06]

Spinoza had argued that our capacity for reason is what makes each of us a thing of inestimable worth, demonstrably deserving of dignity and compassion. That each individual is worthy of ethical consideration is itself a discoverable law of nature, obviating the appeal to divine revelation. An idea that had caused outrage when Spinoza first proposed it in the 17th century, adding fire to the denunciation of him as a godless immoralist, had found its way into the minds of men who set out to create a government the likes of which had never before been seen on this earth.

Spinoza's dream of making us susceptible to the voice of reason might seem hopelessly quixotic at this moment, with religion-infested politics on the march. But imagine how much more impossible a dream it would have seemed on that day 350 years ago. And imagine, too, how much even sorrier our sorry world would have been without it.

Introduction

History illuminates our origins and keeps us from reinventing the wheel. But the question arises: History of what? Do we want the center of culture to be based on a closed system, a process of text in/text out, and no empirical contact with the real world? One can only marvel at, for example, art critics who know nothing about visual perception; "social constructionist" literary critics uninterested in the human universals documented by anthropologists; opponents of genetically modified foods, additives, and pesticide residues who are ignorant of genetics and evolutionary biology.

In the seventeenth century, people not only believed in that constricted past but thought that history was near its end: The apocalypse was coming. A realization that time may well be endless leads us to a new view of the human species—as not being in any sense the culmination but perhaps a fairly early stage of the process of evolution. We arrive at this concept through detailed observation and analysis, through science-based thinking; it allows us to see life playing an ever greater role in the future of the universe.

There are encouraging signs that the third culture now 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.

As the Italian scholar Gloria Origgi, writes:

No matter what your attitude is towards science, no one in the humanities can ignore that something has changed in the way we think about a number of key oppositions such as: nature-nurture, rational-irrational, conscious-unconscious, individual-social, mind-body, digital-analogical, masculine-feminine, etc. To discuss such matters today, we have to overcome the Freudian-Lacanian-Foucaultian vulgata and take a look at what science has to tell us.

Enter Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a novelist trained as a philosopher, who is one of the leading science-based humanities scholars: intellectually eclectic, seeking ideas from a variety of sources and adopting the ones that prove their worth, rather than working within "systems" or "schools." Goldstein knows science, and easily communicates with scientists. Her novels, and her studies of nonfiction studies of Gödel and Spinoza, are excellent examples of science-based thinking by an enlightened humanities scholar.

And now, Rebecca Goldstein on Spinoza and the voice of reason.

—JB

HOW DO YOU FED-EX THE POPE?

Lawrence M. Krauss
[6.21.06]

Introduction

If you woke up on July 7, 2005 to a strange grinding noise, you may have been in the proximity of one of those scientists who were gnashing their teeth over breakfast that morning while reading the New York Times OpEd page essay "Finding Design in Nature" by Christoph Schönborn, the Roman Catholic cardinal archbishop of Vienna, and a close colleague of the current Pope. The loudest sounds probably came from a Cleveland suburb where Lawrence Krauss was reading the Cardinal's endorsement of "Intelligent Design" as an alternative theory to the fact of evolution.

Krauss, a physicist/cosmologist, at Case Western is an activist with regard to promoting science and rational thought in American schools. He is willing and able to go into the belly of the beast and lecture at conservative and religious colleges and universities where he the presents the case for science. Usually, he says, the response is on of appreciation.

He is the right scientist to take on the task of communicating on an important scientific matter with the Pope as his words and his tone will be such that the letter may have a positive effect.

In the case of Christoph Schönborn's OpEd piece, Krauss decided that something had to be done. He wrote a letter to Pope Benedict with two coauthors, the eminent biologists Francisco Ayala and Kenneth Miller, both devout catholics.

"I knew The Times was planning to write a story on the letter," Krauss says, "so I knew I had to get it to the Pope before the Times ran the story. I discovered that the Pope had an email address, so that was very helpful.  Most of the difficulty in trying to write the hard copy letter was trying to figure out how to address the Pope, both literally and metaphorically — what do I call him? And where do I send the Fed-Ex?" 

"I found what I thought was the right address, and the right salutation, and I got it off in a Fed-Ex box but I realized I forgot to put the attachment in the Fed-Ex box. I went back to the box and waited for the Fed-Ex driver — and had it all made up, new attachments and everything, ready for him, and said, "please let me just put these things in. This is important; it's going to be in the Times tomorrow, it's going to the Pope and it's about evolution".

I quickly found out the Fed-Ex driver was a creationist. We had a long discussion. At the conclusion, I said, "please send it". He replied: "Of course I'll send it. Believe me, I take my job seriously."

—JB

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS, professor of physics and astronomy at Case Western Reserve University and chair of the Physics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is on the steering committee of ScienceDebate2008. His most recent book is Hiding in the Mirror.

Lawrence M Krauss's Edge Bio Page

THE NEW VIEW

John Brockman
[5.19.06]

THE NEW VIEW [5.19.06]

The Opening Of The 24/7 New York City Apple Store Viewed From the Terrace at Edge Global Headquarters at Grand Army Plaza

GÖDEL IN A NUTSHELL

Verena Huber-Dyson
[5.13.06]


The essence of Gödel's incompleteness theorem is that you cannot have both completeness and consistency. A bold anthropomorphic conclusion is that there are three types of people; those that must have answers to everything; those that panic in the face of inconsistencies; and those that plod along taking the gaps of incompleteness as well as the clashes of inconsistencies in stride if they notice them at all, or else they succumb to the tragedy of the human condition.

Introduction

Verena Huber-Dyson, a Swiss national born in Naples in 1923, was educated in Athens before returning to Zurich to study mathematics (with minors in physics and philosophy). She moved to the United States in 1948, where she pursued her two particular areas of interest — group theory and formal logic. She got to know Kurt Gödel while living in Princeton, and for the last fifty years she has been actively encouraging a correct interpretation of his work.

-JB

VERENA HUBER-DYSON is emeritus professor of the Philosophy department of the University of Calgary, Alberta Canada, where she taught graduate courses on the Foundations of Mathematics, the Philosophy and Methodology of the sciences.

Before the Vietnam war she was an associate professor in the Mathematics department of the University of Illinois. She taught in the Mathematics department at the University of California in Berkeley. She is the author or a monograph, Gödel's theorems: a workbook on formalization, which is based on her experience of teaching graduate courses and seminars on mathematical logic, formalization and its limitations to mathematics, philosophy and interdisciplinary students at the Universities of Calgary, Zürich and Monash.

She lives in Berkeley, California. 


WHO'S AFRAID OF THE THIRD CULTURE?

Gloria Origgi
[4.30.06]

So, is a third culture possible, as defined by John Brockman, in which the natural sciences take part in making sense of ourselves and our actions?

Introduction

A few months ago, during a visit to Paris, I was invited to dinner at the home of philosopher Gloria Origgi and social and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber which was attended by half a dozen researchers attending a mirror neuron conference on the outskirts of Paris.

During the dinner, Origgi made a number of interesting observations regarding the growing presence of the third culture in France. She pointed out that the mirror neuron conference was an example of how the "naturalistic" scientists — those who are engaged in a realistic biology of mind — are gaining sway over the scientists and others in disciplines that rely on studying social actions and human cultures independent from their biological foundation.

This began in the early seventies, when, as a graduate student at Harvard, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers wrote five papers that set forth an agenda for a new field: the scientific study of human nature. In the past thirty-odd years which has spawned thousands of scientific experiments, new and important evidence, and exciting new ideas about who and what we are presented in books by scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, and Edward O. Wilson among many others.

Recognition of this development can cause pain to those not participating in the conversation. "Anthropology, linguistics, and sociology," Origgi writes, "disciplines that have based their autonomy on the claim that the system of social actions and human cultures is largely independent from their biological foundation, today make way for naturalistic research programs and the methods of the natural sciences. "Is a third culture possible," she asks, "in which the natural sciences take part in making sense of ourselves and our actions?"

Origgi points out that there is ongoing discussion and debate among the third culture scientists on how to consider the social and cultural aspects of our lives as part of the the new scientific conversation. For example, see the robust discussion in "The Reality Club" comments regarding John Horgan's essay on The Templeton Foundation.

Origgi's essay was originally published in the "Scienza e Filosofia" section of the Italian newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore. (Click here for the PDF file.)

—JB

GLORIA ORIGGI is a philosopher and a researcher at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris. Her areas of research are philosophy of mind, epistemology, and cognitive sciences applied to new technologies. She is based at the Ecole Nationale des Télécommunications. Origgi is the editor of the www.interdisciplines.org project, a portal for virtual conferences in social and cognitive sciences, and is the author of Text-E: Text in the Age of the Internet.

Gloria Origgi's Edge Bio Page

THE TEMPLETON FOUNDATION: A SKEPTIC'S TAKE

John Horgan
[4.4.06]

I rationalized that taking the foundation's money did not mean that it had bought me, as long as I remained true to my views. Yes, I used the same justification as a congressman accepting a golf junket from the lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But I'd already written freelance pieces for two Templeton publications, so declining this more-lucrative gig seemed silly. In for a dime, in for a dollar.

Introduction

In the previous edition of Edge, which reported on the celebration of the 30th anniversary of the publication of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, Ian McEwan noted the following:

"None of us, I think, in the mid-'70s, when The Selfish Gene was published, would have thought we'd be devoting so much mental space now to confront religion. We thought that matter had long been closed."

But the matter is far from closed.

John Horgan, in his essay below, has something new to say on the subject as he explores what he considers to be troublesome aspects of the so-called "reconciliation of science and religion". He writes:

Since many Edgies, like me, have been beneficiaries in one way or the other of the Templeton Foundation, which promotes reconciliation of science and religion, I thought they might be interested in my critique of the foundation, which was just published by the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's already stirring up quite a ruckus.

Quite a few Edgies have been the beneficiaries of Templeton Foundation financial support, from $15,000 fees for attending a conference, to the $1,500,000 Temple Prize. It would be interesting to hear from some of these individuals in an Edge Reality Club discussion based on Horgan's essay.

—JB

JOHN HORGAN is director of the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He is the author of The End of Science;The Undiscovered Mind; and, most recently, Rational Mysticism: Dispatches From the Border Between Science and Spirituality.

John Horgan's Edge Bio Page 

THE OPIATES OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
[9.25.05]

We humans are naturally gullible — disbelieving requires an extraordinary expenditure of energy. It is a limited resource. I suggest ranking the skepticism by its consequences on our lives. True, the dangers of organized religion used to be there — but they have been gradually replaced with considerably ruthless and unintrospective social-science ideology.

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, an essayist and mathematical trader, is the author of Fooled By Randomness.

Nassim Taleb's Edge Bio Page

DANGLING PARTICLES

Lisa Randall
[9.18.05]

The very different uses of the word "theory" provide a field day for advocates of "intelligent design." By conflating a scientific theory with the colloquial use of the word, creationists instantly diminish the significance of science in general and evolution's supporting scientific evidence in particular. Admittedly, the debate is complicated by the less precise nature of evolutionary theory and our inability to perform experiments to test the progression of a particular species. Moreover, evolution is by no means a complete theory. We have yet to learn how the initial conditions for evolution came about — why we have 23 pairs of chromosomes and at which level evolution operates are only two of the things we don't understand. But such gaps should serve as incentives for questions and further scientific advances, not for abandoning the scientific enterprise.

This debate might be tamed if scientists clearly acknowledged both the successes and limitations of the current theory, so that the indisputable elements are clearly isolated. But skeptics have to acknowledge that the way to progress is by scientifically addressing the missing elements, not by ignoring evidence. The current controversy over what to teach is just embarrassing.

LISA RANDALL, a professor of physics at Harvard, is the author of Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions.

She was the 1st tenured woman in physics at Princeton; the 1st tenured woman theorist in science at Harvard and at MIT. She's the most cited theoretical physicist in the world in the last five years as of last autumn — a total of about 10,000 citations. In this regard, she is most known for two papers: "A Large mass Hierarchy From a Small Extra Dimension" (2500 citations); and "An Alternative to Compactification" (about 2500 citations). Both concern "Warped Geometry/Spacetime" and show that infinite extra dimension and weakness of gravity can be explained with an extra dimension.

Lisa Randall’s research in theoretical high energy physics is primarily related to the question of what is the physics underlying the standard model of particle physics. This has involved studies of strongly interacting theories, supersymmetry, and most recently, extra dimensions of space. In this latter work, she investigates "warped" geometries. The study of further implications of this work has involved string theory, holography, and cosmology. Lisa Randall also continues to work on supersymmetry and other beyond-the-standard-model physics.

Within a year of her work on extra dimensions, it was featured on the front page of the Science Times section of The New York Times. It has also been featured in the Economist, the New Scientist, Science, Nature, The Los Angeles Times, The Dallas Daily News, a BBC Horizons television program, BBC radio, and other news sources. She has also been also been interviewed because Science Watch and the ISI Essential Science Indicators have indicated her research as some of the best cited in all of science.

Lisa Randall's Edge Bio Page 

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