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

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

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

Yochai Benkler's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

MUST WE ALWAYS CATER TO THE FAITHFUL WHEN TEACHING SCIENCE?
By Jerry Coyne

It seems to me that we can defend evolution without having to cater to the faithful at the same time. Why not just show that evolution is TRUE and its alternatives are not? Why kowtow to those whose beliefs many of us find unpalatable, just to sell our discipline? There are, in fact, two disadvantages to the "cater-to-religion" stance. ...

Jerry Coyne's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

ON "NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE" By Clay Shirky

NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
March 22, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

...

__

LINKS: "The Third Culture" (1991); the 277 Edge Editions published since December 21, 1996.

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

NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE [3.17.08]
By Clay Shirky

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

Clay Shirky's Edge Bio page

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

[...continue]

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

IS THERE A HIGGS?
A Talk With Brian Cox

INTRODUCTION
By Martin Rees

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

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

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

Brian Cox's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

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

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

INTRODUCTION
By Steven Pinker

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

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

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

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

~~

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

Denis Dutton's Edge Bio Page

[...continue]

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

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

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

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

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

Juan Enriquez's Edge Bio Page

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 9, 2009

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

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

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

[Continue to Edge Dinner 2009]

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

THE NEW YORKER
February 9, 2009

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

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

...

THE REALITY CLUB

On "Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? " by Jerry Coyne

Lawrence Krauss, Howard Gardner, Lisa Randall, Patrick Bateson, Daniel Everett, Daniel C. Dennett, Lee Smolin,George Dyson, Emanuel Derman, Karl. W. Giberson, Kenneth R. Miller, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, Michael Shemer

...

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

INTRODUCTION

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

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

—John Brockman

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

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

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

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

An EDGE @ DLD Event

FOCUS ONLINE January 28, 2009 ARE BANKERS CHARLATANS? Sind Banker Scharlatane? (German Original) At blame for the financial crisis is the nature of man, say two renowned scientists: Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and bestselling author Nassim Taleb ( "The Black Swan"). By Ansgar Siemens, FOCUS online editor Two men sitting on the stage. Left. Daniel Kahneman, 74, bright-eyed, Nobel Prize winner. Right Nassim Taleb, 49, former Wall Street banker, best-selling author. Both speak on the future of Digital Life Design Conference (DLD) in Munich on the financial crisis, about the beginning--mainly they talk about people. They say it is due to human nature, that the crisis has broken out. And they choose harsh words in discussing the scale of the disaster. Kahneman explains why there are bubbles in the financial markets, even though everyone knows that they eventually burst. The researchers used the comparison with the weather: If there is little rain for three years, people begin to believe that this is the normal situation. If over the years stocks only increase, people can't imagine a break in this trend. "Those responsible must go--today and not tomorrow" Taleb speaks out sharply against the bankers. The people in control of taxpayer's money are spending billions of dollars. "I want those responsible for the crisis gone today, today and not tomorrow," he says, leaning forward vigorously. The risk models of banks are a plague, he says, the bankers are charlatans. It is nonsense to think that we can assess risks and thus protect against a crash. Taleb has become famous with his theory of the black swan described in his eponymous bestsellers described. Black swans, which are events that are not previously seen--not even with the best model. "People will never be able to control a coincidence," he says. The early warning "Taleb had an early warning before the crisis. In 2003 he took note of the balance sheet of the U.S. mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae, and he saw "dynamite". In autumn last year, the U.S. government instituted A dramatic bailout. Taleb said in the "Sunday Times" in 2008: "Bankers are very dangerous." And even now, he sees a scandal: He provocatively asks what have the banks done with the government bailout money. "They have paid out more bonuses, and they have increased their risks." And it was not their own money. Taleb calls for rigorous changes: nationalize banks--and abolish financial models. Kahneman does not quite agree with him. Certainly, the models are not capable of predicting a collapse. But one should not ignore our human nature. People will always require and use models and get benefit from them--even if they are wrong.

...

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

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

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

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

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

...

OAF OF OFFICE [1.22.09]
By Steven Pinker

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

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

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

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

...

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

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

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

By Jerry Coyne

An Edge Special Event

Introduction

"The real question," writes biologist Jerry Coyne in his New Republic article "Seeing And Believing", is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic?

We no longer have President George W. Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, and Senator John McCain announcing in August 2006 their support for teaching Intelligent Design in pubic schools. That was a mobilizing moment for the champions of rational thinking such as Coyne, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and P.Z. Myers to mount an unrelenting campaign against superstition, supernaturalism, and ignorance. The dilemma as Coyne notes is that against the backdrop of scientific knowledge available to us today, these three words are applicable not only to the texts that inform literal fundamentalists but also to the rarefied theological mumbo-jumbo of the most refined, liberal theologians.

On inauguration day, President Obama announced the goal of "restoring science to its rightful place" while, in the same speech, acknowledging that nonbelievers are citizens of this nation in the same way as followers of religion. In light of the growing tendency of scientists to speak out about their lack of faith, isn't it now time to ask a few questions? Is "belief in belief" as defined by Dennett a good thing? Is there merit in the late Stephen Jay Gould's assertion that religion and science form "non-overlapping magisteria" (NOMA) which address two independent ways of arriving at truth? Isn't it now time for an honest discussion about whether science and belief are indeed compatible?

But as Coyne points out:

Would that it were that easy! True, there are religious scientists and Darwinian churchgoers. But this does not mean that faith and science are compatible, except in the trivial sense that both attitudes can be simultaneously embraced by a single human mind. (It is like saying that marriage and adultery are compatible because some married people are adulterers. ) It is also true that some of the tensions disappear when the literal reading of the Bible is renounced, as it is by all but the most primitive of JudeoChristian sensibilities. But tension remains. The real question is whether there is a philosophical incompatibility between religion and science. Does the empirical nature of science contradict the revelatory nature of faith? Are the gaps between them so great that the two institutions must be considered essentially antagonistic? The incessant stream of books dealing with this question suggests that the answer is not straightforward."

In the next few days, Edge plans to publish a series of brief responses by selected contributors addressing these issues.

—John Brockman

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

Jerry Coyne's Edge Bio page

...

THE SUNDAY TIMES
April 12, 200

LIVE AND LET DIE
Open Minds: Atheists can celebrate the soul at Easter too, says the psychologist Nicholas Humphrey

He died to save us all,” we’re told. But what if, like me, who does not believe a word of it, you are not one of this “all”? What do atheists have to look forward to on Easter morning? When I’m dead what’s going to happen to my soul?

You may think that as an atheist I obviously don’t have a soul (or at any rate, don’t deserve one). So why worry? But that’s not right. The soul is a biological invention that long predates religion. The human mind evolved by natural selection to have a conscious self at its centre: a self that, while a product of the material brain, thinks of itself as something else: an immaterial soul. My atheist soul is up there with the best of them. And the souls of atheists, no less than those of religious believers, aspire to live on indefinitely and fear oblivion. That’s a main part of the job for which natural selection has designed them. ...

...Thus the situation, if we choose to see it this way, has all the makings of tragedy (if not a tragic farce). Natural selection has, on the one hand, been shaping up individual human beings at the level of their souls to believe in themselves and their intrinsic worth, while it has on the other hand been taking steps to ensure that these same individuals, on the level of their bodies, grow old and die and — since by this stage of a life the genes no longer have any interest in ameliorating it — most likely die miserably and in a state of dreadful disillusion.

Given this betrayal of the soul by the genes, what consolation can Darwinian theory offer? Not perhaps as much as we would like. But as principal beneficiaries of natural selection, we humans should recognise what the deal is: since life on Earth began, the death of the individual has always been the precondition for evolutionary progress. If bodies did not die, we would not have souls at all. So, to wish for personal immortality
is to wish away the process responsible for everything else that we hold dear.

For Christian believers, Easter Sunday is a day when oblivion makes way for joy. Darwinian atheists, if they can see beyond the scandal of personal annihilation, have perhaps better reason to look on the bright side of starting life over again.

FRONT PAGE

MIRRORING THE WORLDSruthi Krishnan
Video becomes favoured medium with broadband growthVideo becomes favoured medium with broadband growth

Available online

..."Video has become a favoured means of consuming content primarily because of the growth of broadband … else it is too painful to stream and view,” says N. Udhay Shankar, who founded one of India’s earliest web companies and helped to kickstart the Linux movement in India.

While TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is the most well-known of its kind, you can listen to Salman Rushdie talk on the Enchantress at Authors @Google, of Florence or Brian Cox talking about the God Particle at Edge.Org. ...

KOREA TIMES
April 10, 2009

WHAT ARE YOU OPTIMISTIC ABOUT?

Translated from English to Korean by Jang Seok-bong and Kim Dae-yeon; Galleon; 563pp., 19,800 won

From global warming to economic crises, things seem to be turning worse. At this time of pessimism prevailing over optimism, the world needs some antidotes to this epidemic of negative views. But what's out there to be positive about?

This is the question that the author asked 160 scholars and scientific thinkers. John Brockman, the founder of Edge, the influential online salon, complied their answers in this book.

Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Harvard professors and other world class thinkers laid bare their minds about what they're positive about. They are neither blindly nor naively optimistic. Their optimism is based on logical, professional views and insight.

Topics are wide-ranging, from physics and medicine to education and religion or the end of the world. They illustrate diverse sides of the world's future and why they're optimistic about it.

These great thinkers also present tasks that we should tackle to make a better world and this book may help change readers' perceptions of the future of mankind in a more positive way.

-CHO JAE-HYON

That is still how science works, even as the technology for observing and analyzing natural phenomena have grown to a high level of sophistication.

It is not how religion works. Faith is a sense of human spirituality that does not rely wholly on empirical observations. It relies on a cognitive element not evident in other animals, but one that is biologically based, according to Marc Hauser, Harvard professor of psychology and biological anthropology ("Moral Minds: How nature designed our universal sense of right and wrong," HarperCollins, 2006).

Hauser says a human's moral sense results from a human's ability "to foresee future rewards" in making decisions about how to behave toward another human being. Religious beliefs are not a deciding factor in moral behavior, Hauser said. Rather, he said, moral decisions are based on the ability of the person to forecast an outcome.

Religion and science also forecast outcomes, but one relies on faith, the other on testable concepts.

University of Chicago ecology professor Jerry Coyne cites elements of scientific inquiry include having testable ideas and relying on evidence in testing a theory (www.edge.org "Must we always cater to the faithful when teaching science?")

The presence of God is not a testable idea, unless the faithful accept that God is only a theory.

Proponents of intelligent design appear to be fearful that individuals cannot exercise faith while they engage in scientific study. Matthew 8:26 offers: "Why are ye fearful, Oh ye of little faith?"

"Haku Mo'olelo," "writing stories," is about stories that are being written or have been written. It appears every Friday.

NPR — SCIENCE FRIDAY



National Public Radio's Ira Flatow broadcast Science Friday live from ASU's Origins Symposium. The show included a pair of science panels "Physicists and the Origin of the Universe" and "Origins and Evolution of Life."National Public Radio's Ira Flatow broadcast Science Friday live from ASU's Origins Symposium. The show included a pair of science panels "Physicists and the Origin of the Universe" and "Origins and Evolution of Life." ...

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
April 9, 2009

DO PARENTS MATTER
A researcher argues that peers are much more important than parents, that psychologists underestimate the power of genetics and that we have a lot to learn from Asian classrooms.

In 1998 Judith Rich Harris, an independent researcher and textbook author, published The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do. The book provocatively argued that parents matter much less, at least when it comes to determining the behavior of their children, than is typically assumed. Instead, Harris argued that a child’s peer group is far more important. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded and revised form. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Harris about her critics, the evolution of her ideas and why teachers can be more important than parents.

LEHRER: Freud famously blamed the problems of the child on the parents. (He was especially hard on mothers.) In The Nurture Assumption, an influential work that was published 10 years ago, you argued that parents are mostly innocent and that peers play a much more influential role. What led you to write the book?

HARRIS: It wasn’t just Freud! Psychologists of all persuasions, even behaviorists such as B. F. Skinner, thought the parents were responsible, one way or the other, for whatever went wrong with a child. One of my purposes in writing the book was to reassure parents. I wanted them to know that parenting didn’t have to be such a difficult, anxiety-producing job, that there are many different ways to rear a child, and no convincing evidence that one way produces better results than another.

But my primary motive was scientific. During the years I spent writing child development textbooks for college students, I never questioned the belief that parents have a good deal of power to shape the personalities of their children. (This is the belief I now call the “nurture assumption.”) When I finally began to have doubts and looked more closely at the evidence, I was appalled. Most of the research is so deeply flawed that it is meaningless. And studies using more rigorous methods produce results that do not support the assumption. ...

MEMORIES: GOOD BAD, AND ERASABLE

By Jim Dwyer

Word came this week that scientists at a laboratory in Brooklyn have found a chemical that can erase memories in rats. One day, we nonrats might be able to edit what we remember by taking a drug. The mind hardly knows where to begin boggling at such a prospect.

This advance, said the lead researcher on the discovery, Todd C. Sacktor, a neuroscientist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, raises the possibility of a drug that “gives you control over your own thoughts.”

“You would have more efficient control of your own memories.”

Memory, you will remember, is already subject to regular editing: the stories we tell ourselves and others are revised whenever they’re pulled out of storage. New coats of varnish are laid on. Imaging technology makes it possible to watch the brain firing as it summons a memory, and it shows that a single story — the joke told last Thanksgiving, an old friend’s rattling car, a quarrel between lovers — is chopped into pieces, stored in different areas of the brain and then reassembled, with new or different elements that have been added since the original event. ...

...The story begins with a young boy who grew up in Vienna, Eric Kandel. He turned 9 on Nov. 7, 1938, two days before the riotous Nazi assault of Kristallnacht on Jews in Austria and Germany. He and his family came home one day to discover that their apartment had been cleaned out, right down to the toys he had gotten for his birthday.

They moved to New York. At Erasmus Hall High School, he excelled as a student and athlete. Headed for Brooklyn College, he wound up at Harvard on a scholarship after a teacher gave him the $15 fee for the application.

There, Mr. Kandel began an exploration of the violence he had seen in Vienna. He studied the history of intellectuals who had backed the Nazis, and for graduate work, urged on by a girlfriend’s father, took up psychiatry, as a way of understanding the mind.

Neuroscience did not exist: the biological connections to the mind had almost never been explored. No one could say where you could find the id or the ego inside the head. Mr. Kandel found others who were interested in exploring the biology of the mind.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

THE END OF PHILOSOPHY

By David Brooks

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, "Human," is that "it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found." ...

...As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, "Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment." ...

...In other words, reasoning comes later and is often guided by the emotions that preceded it. Or as Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia memorably wrote, "The emotions are, in fact, in charge of the temple of morality, and ... moral reasoning is really just a servant masquerading as a high priest."

NEW SCIENTIST
APRIL 6, 2009

EXISTENTIAL VERTIGO OVER HUMAN ORIGINS
By Amanda Gefter

It's funny how pondering our origins – the origin of the universe, of life, of mind – leads us to question everything we thought we knew about ourselves in the here and now.

Here in Phoenix, Arizona, the Origins Symposium – the inaugural event of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State University, headed up by physicist Lawrence Krauss – has just wrapped up after four days of lectures and debates from the world's leading scientists.

Brian Greene spoke about string theory, AC Grayling anticipated the future of humanity, Steven Pinker explored behavioural genetics, Steven Weinberg pondered the multiverse, Craig Venter discussed the possibilities of synthetic life, and Stephen Hawking – who, unfortunately hospitalised, made a "virtual" and "genetic appearance" via a video screen and his daughter Lucy – argued for the colonisation of space.

INFINITE UNIVERSES

The conference covered a lot of ground, but it left with me a singular and profound existential vertigo: throughout the four days, I felt as if I could see myself – a small, strange Earth-bound creature – through the lens of a camera zooming in and out through space and time.

Zoom out: 13.7 billion years ago the universe found its origin in the big bang. Was this a lone creation event, or one of an infinite number of bangs, each birthing its own universe? What's that in the distance? Another copy of myself? An infinite number of me?

Back in this universe, I am nothing but a speck of dust. "You are cosmically insignificant," Krauss says. "We can get rid of you and all the aliens and all the stars and galaxies and the universe would be pretty much the same" – a sea of dark energy populated by islands of dark matter. "People should know that the world is not what it appears to be," Frank Wilczek says.

Zoom in: What am I? Richard Dawkins, Bert Hölldobler, Joan Strassman and David Queller discuss superorganisms – groups of creatures, like leaf-cutter ants, whose social organisation is so finely tuned that the colony functions as a single organism upon which Darwinian evolution and natural selection may act. ...

JESSE DYLAN EXPERIMENTS WITH SCIENCE
Bob Dylan's son, an accomplished director, turns his camera on medical research

By Amy Dockser Marcus



Jesse Dylan shot into public view last year when the celebrity-filled Barack Obama music video "Yes We Can" became an Internet sensation. Now, Mr. Dylan is emerging as a star in a more unusual field: catchy, MTV-style videos starring scientists and doctors discussing their research.


Watch Creative Commons' "A Shared Culture" video, directed by Jesse Dylan. 3:13

It's a personal crusade for the 43-year-old director (and eldest son of Bob Dylan) who's known for his music videos for Elvis Costello and Tom Waits, commercials for Nike and Nintendo, and mass-market movies like "American Wedding."


Watch Creative Commons' "Science Commons" video,
directed by Jesse Dylan.2:12

Mr. Dylan, who helped distill the Obama campaign's message into a series of striking images of celebrities and the words "yes we can," has found himself increasingly in demand to do something similar for scientists, researchers, and clinicians -- many of whom have trouble summarizing their work succinctly to laymen. So he's donated his time to make videos for research institutions, labs and nonprofit groups -- as well as continuing his usual lineup of commercials and music videos.

Mr. Dylan with his father, Bob, in 1968.

...Mr. Dylan found that medical and research institutions felt a need to connect more closely to the general public. For example, he met John Wilbanks, a young entrepreneur running a project called Science Commons, whose goal was to develop tools to make Web-based scientific research more efficient. For its mission in opening science to the public to succeed, someone should "be able to understand Science Commons in an instant,'' Mr. Dylan says. He offered to make a short video, which got 25,000 views in just a couple of weeks and was dubbed into Spanish and Japanese by enthusiastic viewers. ...

...Mr. Costello, who's seen Mr. Dylan's recent science videos, said he makes them "with the same ruthlessness you need trying to follow the rhythm of a song.'' As for Mr. Dylan, he sees a further connection, realizing as he worked on the science-video projects that there is -- just like in music -- "lyricism and poetry to science."

TIME
April 2, 2009

THE TIME 100

Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers is the most recent book by the best-selling author of Blink and The Tipping Point

Richard Nisbett's Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count is a devastating and persuasive refutation of all those who believe intellectual ability is fixed at birth. Few Americans have done as much to deepen our understanding of what it means to be human.

TIME
April 2, 2009

LURED TOWARD THE RIGHT CHOICE
By Barbara Kiviat

If you want people to use less energy, you could make it very expensive--or you could just let them know how much they use in comparison with their neighbors. When that bit of information was added to electric bills in San Marcos, Calif., heavy users quickly lowered their consumption, even though no one had asked them to. To borrow a term from behavioral economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, the good people of San Marcos had been nudged.

In NUDGE: IMPROVING DECISIONS ABOUT HEALTH, WEALTH, AND HAPPINESS (Yale University Press; 293 pages), the two University of Chicago professors sketch a new approach to public policy that takes into account the odd realities of human behavior, like the deep and unthinking tendency to conform, even in areas--like energy consumption--where conformity is irrelevant. For 30 years, Thaler has documented the ways people act illogically: we eat more from larger plates, care twice as much about losing money as about gaining it, fret over rare events like plane crashes instead of common ones like car accidents. That research underpins Nudge's argument that as policymakers go about their jobs--whether regulating the mortgage industry or organizing food in school cafeterias--they should design programs that give people choices but also invisibly coax them away from bad ones. Putting healthful food at the front of a cafeteria line, for example, leads kids to take more of it, even with nothing to stop them from picking the chips and cookies farther down.

Thaler and Sunstein, longtime colleagues and friends, dub this "libertarian paternalism." The deliberate oxymoron is meant to exalt individual freedom (the authors use their system to explain how one might structure school vouchers or privatize Social Security) while protecting people from cognitive and social forces that lead them to decisions that even they would describe as poor. We are all like houseguests who eat from a bowl of cashews, then thank our host for removing the nuts so that we don't spoil our dinner.

TIME
April 2, 2009

HOW OBAMA IS USING THE SCIENCE OF CHANGE
By Michael Grunwald

Two weeks before Election Day, Barack Obama's campaign was mobilizing millions of supporters; it was a bit late to start rewriting get-out-the-vote (GOTV) scripts. "BUT, BUT, BUT," deputy field director Mike Moffo wrote to Obama's GOTV operatives nationwide, "What if I told you a world-famous team of genius scientists, psychologists and economists wrote down the best techniques for GOTV scripting?!?! Would you be interested in at least taking a look? Of course you would!!"

Moffo then passed along guidelines and a sample script from the Consortium of Behavioral Scientists, a secret advisory group of 29 of the nation's leading behaviorists. The key guideline was a simple message: "A Record Turnout Is Expected." That's because studies by psychologist Robert Cialdini and other group members had found that the most powerful motivator for hotel guests to reuse towels, national-park visitors to stay on marked trails and citizens to vote is the suggestion that everyone is doing it. "People want to do what they think others will do," says Cialdini, author of the best seller Influence. "The Obama campaign really got that." (See pictures of Obama taken by everyday Americans.)

The existence of this behavioral dream team — which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton — has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals — among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama — came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. "It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it," Moffo tells TIME. "These guys really know what makes people tick."...

...Orszag has been an unabashed behavioral geek ever since he read that 401(k) study. His deputy, Jeff Liebman of Harvard, is a noted behavioral economist, as are White House economic adviser Austan Goolsbee of the University of Chicago, Assistant Treasury Secretary nominee Alan Krueger of Princeton and several other key aides. Sunstein has been nominated to be Obama's regulatory czar. Even National Economic Council director Larry Summers has done work on behavioral finance. And Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan is organizing an outside network of behavioral economists.

DANIEL EVERETT:

ENDANGERED LANGUAGES AND LOST KNOWLEDGE

...The late Ken Hale, linguist at MIT, was one of the greatest field workers who ever lived, said that when a single language is lost, it is worst than a bomb dropped on a Louvre, it is a museum it is a repository of knowledge that cannot be replaced, it is not written, most of these languages are not written at all. Linguists have to go there and develop writing systems, they are not written, there is no way to recover the knowledge once it is gone, once these languages are lost. We lose ways of life, and records of ways of life, we lose solutions to problems, we lose classifications of plants and animals and folk knowledge of the world. We lose myths, folktales, lullabies, songs, poetry, and literature.

Talk encodes ways of life. One of the groups that I worked on the Amazon are the Wari, who were until about 1962 cannibals and they practice exo- and endo- cannibalism, exo-cannibalism eat your enemies, endo-cannibalism eat your own dead. And the reason that they ate their dead, which is a very elaborate set of rituals, was among other things to give the dead immortality, they live on through us, as we eat them and consume our beloved and the first people to have consume the dead were immediate family. To be able to give them eternal life through us. The Wari discourse about death and immortality is fascinating, and teaches us a lot about how to face death and how to live life, unafraid of death in the world, and that is going as the Wari language is more endangered. ...

MEDIA DISTORTION DAMAGES BOTH SCIENCE AND JOURNALISM

By Simon Baron-Cohen

WHEN media reports state that scientist X of Y university has discovered that A is linked to B, we ought to be able to trust them. Sadly, as many researchers know, we can't.

This has three serious consequences. For starters, every time the media misreports science, it chips away at the credibility of both enterprises. Misreporting can also engender panic, as people start to fear the adverse consequences of the supposed new link between A and B. Lastly, there can be a damaging effect on researchers' behaviour. Funding agencies and science institutions rightly encourage scientists to communicate with the media, to keep the public informed about their research and so foster trust. If their work is misrepresented, they may withdraw into the lab rather than risk having to spend hours setting the record straight.

I work in one of those sensitive areas of research, autism, in which the facts are liable to be misreported or - sometimes worse - misinterpreted. Our problems go back to 1998 with a report in The Lancet by Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues of what appeared to them to be a link between autism and the MMR vaccine. Subsequent research failed to support this association, so given the huge potential risk to public health in raising parents' anxieties about the safety of the MMR vaccine - plus the fact that with hindsight most people thought the media had got it very wrong - I had expected responsible journalists would be reluctant to give the MMR/autism story much further coverage. I was wrong. The media kept the story alive, despite the fact that evidence supporting it was tenuous at best, or even downright contradictory/ ...

"It’s exactly like how a thermometer makes a patient look more sick," he said in a CNBC interview. "Eliminating the mark-to-market is exactly like putting your head in the sand."

Rather than taxpayers propping up large banks, Taleb said, the hedge fund model should be followed.

"Some go bust, some do okay, some have problems," he said. "We don’t care. It’s their problem. It’s not society’s problem."

Fixing the financial crisis requires a financial system with less debt and less complex derivatives, he said. The solution is not to alter the current financial structure, said Taleb, but rather, to look for "robustness" in the system.

"Complexity causes fragility," he said. "You’re no longer riding a horse—you’re flying a Concorde. A horse doesn’t explode but a Concorde can have a problem. We now have a Concorde in our hands."

TOTAL RECALL: THE WOMAN WHO CAN'T FORGET

By Gary Marcus

...For a scientist like me, the real test is to see how well Price can remember something new. I am especially interested in memory distortions. If you read an average person a list of words like thread, pin, eye, sewing, sharp, point, prick, thimble, haystack, thorn, hurt, injection, syringe, cloth, and knitting, and then ask them to repeat the words, they'll likely imagine they've heard needle even though it's not on the list.

Can Price sail past the trap of memory distortion? No, she can't. I read her five lists of words drawn from a psychological test known as the DRM, and not only does she miss a number of words, she also recalls hearing three I didn't say. Her performance may be a little above average, but no more than that.

If price's memory of her own history is so precise, why is it so average for everything else? Or, more to the point, if her memory for everything else is so ordinary, why is her memory of her own history so extraordinary? The answer has nothing to do with memory and everything to do with personality.

CULTURE

RAGE AGAINST THE ART GENE

Darwin revolutionized our understanding of mankind's origins. Now scientists think they can apply his theories to the source of our creativity without it sounding like a lot of monkey business

By Jeremy McCarter

The notion that the origin of the arts — crowning glory of the species, realm of such sublime masterworks as "Hamlet," Beethoven's Ninth and the "Mona Lisa" — can be traced to the living and mating routines of our subliterate nomad ancestors sounds like some kind of joke. In fact, it was treated as a joke by Stephen Colbert a few weeks ago, when he invited Denis Dutton, the author of a new book about creativity and evolution, on to "The Colbert Report." Dutton was explaining why our love of string quartets and Jane Austen began hundreds of thousands of years ago in the Pleistocene epoch when Colbert cut in: "How many cavemen were reading 'Emma'?"

Colbert being Colbert, the objection was pretty obnoxious. (Moments earlier, he'd begun the interview by asking Dutton to stipulate that "evolution is a fraud.") But his comically overstated question helps pinpoint one of the more fascinating debates within Darwinism in this, the 200th anniversary year of Charles Darwin's birth. Since "The Origin of Species" appeared in 1859, scientists have succeeded in explaining more and more aspects of the natural world as products of evolution by natural selection, the process by which some features, because they enhance survival and reproduction, become more prevalent over the generations. Their progress has led scholars to poke around in the human mind itself. Researchers such as Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett have tried to explain the way we think and act in modern society in terms of faculties that helped our ancestors survive on the East African savannas of prehistory—a form of analysis that often sounds, as Colbert's question suggests, kind of preposterous. ...

...Second, on those long, dull savanna nights after the day's hunting and/or gathering was done, a big vocabulary and a creative streak would have improved a man's chances of wooing a lover (and thereby passing on his genes to a child)—just as an amusing woman would have been more likely to entice the guy to stay (thereby boosting the child's odds of survival). According to this view, which Dutton derives from the psychologist Geoffrey Miller, evolution turns the brain into "a gaudy, overpowered Pleistocene home-entertainment system" for winning and keeping lovers. ...

...Because, really, who knows? In his lucid and authoritative new book, "Why Evolution Is True," Jerry A. Coyne, a biologist from the University of Chicago, decries the "scientific parlor game" of trying to find Darwinian explanations for every form of behavior. ...

...All this, I realize, sounds like the romantic nonsense of a culture writer whose field is being encroached upon by the guys in lab coats. I'll cop to the romantic part, but not to the nonsense. After all, evolutionary psychology has received its sharpest criticism from no less a Darwinian than Stephen Jay Gould. Until his death in 2002, he stood as one of the great champions and evangelists of science, as well as one of the most exacting critics of its tendency to overreach. He was also my teacher. When I tried to pinpoint why Dutton's book left me unsatisfied, his lessons kept coming to mind.

ECONOMIST DEBATES

THE ETHICS OF DNA DATABASING

This house believes that people's DNA sequences are their business, and nobody else's.

Defending the proposition: Professor Arthur Caplan
Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics and Director, Centre for Bioethics, Penn University

There are, it is increasingly said, plenty of reasons why people you know and many you don't ought to have access to your DNA or data that are derived from it. Have you ever had sexual relations outside a single, monogamous relationship? Well then, any children who resulted from your hanky-panky might legitimately want access to your DNA to establish paternity or maternity. ...

Against the proposition: Professor J. Craig Venter
Founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute and founder and CEO of Synthetic Genomic

As I suspected he would, Art Caplan raised the fear argument. "The police, government, medical system, researchers and prosecutors … the military, your out-of-wedlock children, your parents, your boss, doctor, hospital, universities, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and the immigration service etc.," are all out to get your DNA and control you. "They know that they can track you, control you and even profit from you." ...

The moderator's opening remarks
Mr Geoff Carr
Science and Technology Editor of The Economist

Clarke's Third Law (the Clarke in question being Sir Arthur C., a distinguished writer of science fiction) is that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That law applies nicely to the modern science and technology of genetics. On the one hand, understanding and eventually manipulating genes may lead to the treatment and even abolition of many diseases by white-magical (or, at least, white-coated) sorcerer-priests. On the other, dark necromancers plot to use the knowledge that genetics brings to regulate and manipulate people on behalf of commercial and political princes. ...

Book Review: Questions of Truth: God, Science and Belief by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale

AC Grayling rips into the latest attempt to bridge the God-science gap

AC Grayling

...This is the strategy adopted by the Templeton Foundation too, of sidling up to proper scientists and scientific establishments and getting their sticky religious fingers on to respectable coat-sleeves in the hope of furthering their agenda - which, to repeat what must endlessly be repeated in these circumstances, is to have the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research.

MODELS
By Emanuel Derman

To confuse the model with the world is to embrace a future disaster driven by the belief that humans obey mathematical rules.

...Financial models are therefore best regarded as a collection of parallel, inanimate "thought universes" available for exploration. Each universe should be internally consistent, but the financial/human world, unlike the world of matter, is vastly more complex and vivacious than any model we could ever make of it. The right way to engage with a model is to be like a reader of fiction — to suspend disbelief and then push ahead with the model as far as possible.". ...

NATURE V NURTURE? PLEASE DON'T ASK

The question has fuelled some of history's fiercest scientific and political feuds. Now we have an answer

Mark Henderson

...Though well-intentioned, and in some respects an important antidote to pseudoscientific genetic determinism, this view was dangerously inflexible. Any evidence that genetics might be seriously influential after all would threaten the very foundations of liberty and equality - so it would have to be resisted, as would research that might provide it.

The result was that scientists who investigated effects on human behaviour found their positions caricatured and their politics demonised as reactionary, even fascist. E.O.Wilson, the great evolutionary theorist and conservationist, is no man of the Right. Yet when he dared in the 1970s to suggest that human nature, like that of other animals, has a biological basis that might fruitfully be studied, his lectures were picketed and students doused him with water. The left-wing biologists Steven Rose, Leon Kamin and Richard Lewontin responded with a book entitled Not in Our Genes, which accused Wilson, Richard Dawkins and other sociobiologists of a crude determinism designed to legitimise the status quo. "Its adherents claim, first, that the details of present and past social arrangements are the inevitable manifestations of the specific action of genes," they wrote.

Such attacks were misconceived. First, as Steven Pinker has pointed out, they set up a straw man. It is simply impossible to find serious biologists who believe that behaviour and social structure are "the inevitable manifestations of the specific action of genes". Those who reject cultural determinism make a much more modest proposal - that genes, as well as the environment, make a contribution. As Dawkins wrote in a review of Not in Our Genes: "Reductionism, in the ‘sum of the parts' sense, is obviously daft, and is nowhere to be found in the writings of real biologists."

[From 50 Genetics Ideas You Really Need to Know by Mark Henderson]

FRONT PAGE

VAST SPY SYSTEM LOOTS COMPUTERS IN 103 COUNTRIES

By John Markoff

TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.

In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved.

The researchers, who are based at the Munk Center for International Studies at the University of Toronto, had been asked by the office of the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces, to examine its computers for signs of malicious software, or malware.

Their sleuthing opened a window into a broader operation that, in less than two years, has infiltrated at least 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including many belonging to embassies, foreign ministries and other government offices, as well as the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan exile centers in India, Brussels, London and New York.

The researchers, who have a record of detecting computer espionage, said they believed that in addition to the spying on the Dalai Lama, the system, which they called GhostNet, was focused on the governments of South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

Intelligence analysts say many governments, including those of China, Russia and the United States, and other parties use sophisticated computer programs to covertly gather information.

The newly reported spying operation is by far the largest to come to light in terms of countries affected. ...

SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW

GET SMART
By Jim Holt

Richard E. Nisbett, a prominent cognitive psychologist who teaches at the University of Michigan, doesn't shirk the hard work. In "Intelligence and How to Get It," he offers a meticulous and eye-opening critique of hereditarianism. True to its self-helplike title, the book does contain a few tips on how to boost your child's I.Q. — like exercising during pregnancy (mothers who work out tend to have bigger babies who grow up smarter, possibly because of greater brain size). But its real value lies in Nisbett's forceful marshaling of the evidence, much of it recent, favoring what he calls "the new environmentalism," which stresses the importance of nonhereditary factors in determining I.Q. So fascinating is this evidence — drawn from neuroscience and genetics, as well as from studies of educational interventions and parenting styles — that the author's slightly academic prose style can be forgiven.

Intellectually, the I.Q. debate is a treacherous one. Concepts like heritability are so tricky that even experts stumble into fallacy. Moreover, the relevant data come mostly come from "natural experiments," which can harbor subtle biases. When the evidence is ambiguous, it is all the easier for ideology to influence one's scientific judgment. Liberals hope that social policy can redress life's unfairness. Conservatives hold that natural inequality must be accepted as inevitable. When each side wants to believe certain scientific conclusions for extra-scientific reasons, skepticism is the better part of rigor.

Nisbett himself proceeds with due caution. He grants that I.Q. tests — which gauge both "fluid" intelligence (abstract reasoning skills) and "crystallized" intelligence (knowledge) — measure something real. They also measure something important: even within the same family, higher-I.Q. children go on to make more money than their less-bright siblings. ...

COVER STORY

THE CIVIL HERETIC
By Nicholas Dawidoff

FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country's most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming "out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned," as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors' letter boxes and Dyson's own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as "a pompous twit," "a blowhard," "a cesspool of misinformation," "an old coot riding into the sunset" and, perhaps inevitably, "a mad scientist." Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred "carbon-eating trees," whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that "perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers." Dyson's son, George, a technology historian, says his father's views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind. ...

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LINK: Heretical Thoughts About Science And Society
By Freeman Dyson [8.8.07]

WIKIPEDIA EXPLORING FACT CITY
By Noam Cohen

Contributors to Wikipedia have wondered aloud lately if — perish the thought — they are running out of topics. The obvious articles, low-hanging fruit like "China," "Moses" and "Homer Simpson," have been written and rewritten hundreds of times. There are more than 2.8 million articles on the English version of Wikipedia alone. Already looking back, Wikipedia this month got its first serious memoir, "The Wikipedia Revolution," by Andrew Lih, an early Wikipedian (yes, that is what they call themselves), who writes about how "a bunch of nobodies created the world’s greatest encyclopedia."

But these concerns seem misplaced — Wikipedia can no more be completed than can New York City, which O. Henry predicted would be "a great place if they ever finish it." In fact, with its millions of visitors and hundreds of thousands of volunteers, its ever-expanding total of articles and languages spoken, Wikipedia may be the closest thing to a metropolis yet seen online. ...

TALKS NATHAN WOLFE: HUNTING THE NEXT KILLER VIRUS

Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives

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

Nathan Wolfe's Edge Bio Page

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LINK: Waiting For the Final Plague: A Talk with Nathan Wolfe [1.30.09]

YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN

We have become too reductive in understanding ourselves, argues philosopher Alva Noe. Our thoughts and desires are shaped by more than neurons firing inside our heads.

By Gordy Slack

There's a kind of temporal lobe epilepsy that causes people to experience deeply religious feelings. Couldn't the relevance of that association tell us something about, say, the roots or essence of religious experience?

I'm pessimistic. A lot is context; things always happen in a setting. Imagine how you feel after a run. Out of breath, rapid heartbeat, sweaty? Now imagine you just woke up feeling like that. It would be terrifying. But after a run it makes sense and it feels good. Meaning is not intrinsic, it's relational. It's only in context that an intense feeling means one thing or the other. Again, we need to look outside neuroscience to understand what that significance is.

If someone had a seizure that caused a sensation like they imagine they might have if they were meeting God, that would be very confusing. But it would be a mistake to conclude from that that religious experience is only a brain state.

I'm not a religious person. And putting aside the fact I don't believe in God, I don't think the impulse of religion can be thought of as a kind of biological feature of us, or that there's something about our brains that makes us apt for that. I think of religions as communal and as literary traditions, both things existing outside the brain. I don't think of religious belief as something we can understand individualistically. When someone says they believe in God, you've got to understand the practices, customs, backgrounds and social realities that are part of that. None of it is going to reduce to anything individual inside of that person's brain. ...

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LINK: Life Is The Way The Animal Is In The World: A Talk With Alva Noë [11.20.08]

'CHIEFS, THIEVES, AND PRIESTS'

Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity

By Ronald Bailey

...It's very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you've got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. That's what happens in west Asia around 50,000 years ago: the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.

The only institution that really counts is trust, if you like. And something's got to allow that to build. Property rights are just another expression of trust, aren't they? I trust you to deliver this property to me. I trust somebody else to allow me to keep this property if I acquire it from you.

But human beings are spectacularly good at destroying trust-generating institutions. They do this through three creatures: chiefs, thieves, and priests. ...

THE THINKING READ

WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
By A. C. Grayling

Understanding science is hard for non-scientists because of the technicalities involved, especially the mathematics. But no intellectually responsible non- scientist can get away with ignorance about the sciences, which collectively constitute humanity's greatest achievement. There is no excuse for lacking at least a broad-brush sense of what is happening in fundamental physics, cosmology and biology -- just to take the major areas of contemporary interest -- not least because there are so many good books for the general reader by first-rate practitioners in these fields.

A paradigm case is Jerry Coyne's lucidly brilliant account of evolutionary theory, Why Evolution Is True. For many reasons, among them the rapid advances we are witnessing in contemporary biological science, an understanding of evolution as the central principle of biology is crucial. If we are to be informed participants in the debate about what we want from the applied biological sciences, across the range from medicine to cloning to genetic modification of crops to the saving of endangered species, we need a proper understanding of evolution as the living world's organising principle.

Everyone who reads Coyne's book with attention will acquire this understanding. It is a model of expository clarity and intellectual rigour, a point for other science writers to note; all that readers need note is how accessible it is, and how fascinating. Moreover in it Coyne carefully and conclusively refutes efforts by "intelligent design" creationists to contest evolutionary biology. This, given the state of the debate over biology, is by no means the least important aspect of his book.

Religion-motivated efforts to derail serious biological enquiry, and therefore to interfere with responsible science education, are worse than merely a time-and-energy wasting distraction. They arise in connection with all three of the main nodes of contention between religious and non-religious outlooks in today's society. One is the question of the intrinsic credibility of the claims made by revealed religions, another is the question of how much influence religious viewpoints should have in the public square, and the third is the overall question of the relation between religion and science.

In this last domain two different, indeed inconsistent, strategies are open to religious apologists, some of whom nevertheless combine them. One is to say that religion and science speak different kinds of truth because they address different realities, the spiritual and material. The other is to say that religion and science are direct competitors for the truth about the one and only reality, namely, this world; which is what creationists claim. ...

...Coyne shows science carefully, responsibly, testably, profoundly at work on the glory that is the natural world. It starts with no prejudices (it is not trying to prove that there is no Fred, having decided at the outset that this is its aim), but is open and self-critical. What you see in Coyne's account is science as the enterprise that seeks to understand, and always stands ready to revise itself in the face of contrary evidence. It is a beautiful process, and the results are literally wonderful. Coyne's book is a testament to this. It seems almost coincidental to say that it is also a brilliant introduction to evolution which should be required reading: in its blaze of illumination the ID case melts like summer snow. ...

The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces by Frank Wilczek

Frank Wilczek is one of the most brilliant practitioners of particle physics. Particle physics is the science that tries to understand the smallest building blocks of earth and sky, just as biol-ogy tries to understand living creatures. Particle physics is running about two hundred years behind biology. In the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus started systematic biology by giving Latin names to species of plants and animals, Homo sapiens for humans and Pan troglodytes for chimpanzees. In the nineteenth century, Darwin created a unified theory for biology by explaining the origin of species. In the twentieth century, Ernest Rutherford laid the ground for particle physics by discovering that every atom has a nucleus that is vastly smaller than the atom itself, and that the nucleus is made of particles that are smaller still. In the twenty-first century, particle physicists are hoping for a new Darwin who will explain the origin of particles.

It is too soon to tell whether Wilczek will be the new Darwin. His book is not the new Origin of Species. It is more like Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle, a popular account of a voyage of exploration, describing the landscape and the newly discovered creatures that still have to be explained. Wilczek is a theoretician and not an experimenter. His strength lies in leaps of the imagination rather than in heavy hardware or heavy calculations. He shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the concept that he called "Asymptotic Freedom." He writes as he thinks, with a lightness of touch that can come only to one who is absolute master of his subject. He borrowed his title from Milan Kundera, the Czech writer whose novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being takes a gloomier view of lightness. For Wilczek, the lightness of being is not only bearable but exhilarating. ...

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LINK: The Nobel Prize and After: A Talk WithFrank Wilczek [1.15.09]

THE HINDU
March 22, 2009

FRONT PAGE
MIRRORING THE WORLD
Video becomes favoured medium with broadband growth

Sruthi Krishnan

..."Video has become a favoured means of consuming content primarily because of the growth of broadband … else it is too painful to stream and view," says N. Udhay Shankar, who founded one of India's earliest web companies and helped to kickstart the Linux movement in India.

While TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is the most well-known of its kind, you can listen to Salman Rushdie talk on the Enchantress at Authors@Google, of Florence or Brian Cox talking about the God Particle at Edge.Org. ...

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
March 17, 2009

HOW TO PREVENT THE NEXT PANDEMIC
An international network for monitoring the flow of viruses from animals to humans might help scientists head off global epidemics

By Nathan Wolfe

Sweat streamed down my back, thorny shrubs cut my arms, and we were losing them again. The wild chimpanzees my colleagues and I had been following for nearly five hours had stopped their grunting, hooting and screeching. Usually these calls helped us follow the animals through Uganda's Kibale Forest. For three large males to quiet abruptly surely meant trouble. Suddenly, as we approached a small clearing, we spotted them standing below a massive fig tree and looking up at a troop of red colobus monkeys eating and playing in the treetop.

The monkeys carried on with their morning meal, oblivious to the three apes below. After appearing for a moment to confer with one another, the chimps split up. While the leader crept toward the fig tree, his compatriots made their way up two neighboring trees in silence. Then, in an instant, the leader rushed up his tree screaming. Leaves showered down as the monkeys frantically tried to evade their attacker. But the chimp had calculated his bluster well: although he failed to capture a monkey himself, one of his partners grabbed a juvenile and made his way down to the forest floor with the young monkey in tow, ready to share his catch.

As the chimps feasted on the monkey's raw flesh and entrails, I thought about how this scene contained all the elements of a perfect storm for allowing microorganisms to jump from one species to the next, akin to space travelers leaping at warp speed from one galaxy to another. Any disease-causing agent present in that monkey now had the ideal conditions under which to enter a new type of host: the chimps were handling and consuming fresh organs; their hands were covered with blood, saliva and feces, all of which can carry pathogens; blood and other fluids splattered into their eyes and noses. Any sores or cuts on the hunters' bodies could provide a bug with direct entry into the bloodstream. Indeed, work conducted by my group and others has shown that hunting, by animals such as chimpanzees as well as by humans, does provide a bridge allowing viruses to jump from prey to predator. The pandemic form of HIV began in this way, by moving from monkeys into chimpanzees and, later, from chimpanzees into humans. ...

WHO PROTECTS THE INTERNET?
Pull up the wrong undersea cable, and the Internet goes dark in Berlin or Dubai. See our animated infographics of how the web works!

By James Geary

...The Beast is like a lunar lander on steroids. Working at depths of more than a mile, it can trundle along the seabed on caterpillar treads or, when its thrusters kick in, skim above canyons like a hovercraft, at a top speed of three knots. Rennie and his team of six control the Beast via a joystick, using its sonar, video cameras and metal detector to locate damaged cables. Plucking a cable from the ocean floor is akin to picking up a piece of thread in a blizzard while wearing a catcher's mitt. Currents can be fierce, which makes it difficult to hold the Beast steady above the cable. Visibility can be close to nil, which means that even finding the cable in the first place can be a long and frustrating process of trial and error. But according to Rennie, "gripping and cutting is the trickiest." This delicate piece of submarine surgery has to be performed quickly and cleanly, using only a murky video image as a guide.

When Rennie found the U.K.-Ireland cable--fishermen had cut it after it became entangled in a dragnet--the Beast's manipulator arm grabbed it, sliced it clean, and brought each end to the surface. On board the ship, the cable was repaired and x-rayed (Rennie needed to make sure the splice was set right, as with a broken bone), then tested and lowered to the seafloor. "There is no time for celebration when we fix a cable," Rennie says. "There is lots of pressure from cable owners to move quickly. They are losing revenue."

Most cable breaks go unnoticed by users. Maybe a YouTube clip will take someone a nanosecond longer to download, but that's about all anyone might notice when a single cable snaps. There are so many different lines connecting so many different places—a map of the network looks like the inside of a baby grand: strand after strand of cable stretching across the ocean floor like so many piano wires that service providers can usually reroute around any break. But if several cables snap in chorus, as they did several times in the past two years, big problems result. ...

LET IT DIE
Rushkoff on the economy
By Douglas Rushkoff

... If you had spent the last decade, as I have, reviewing the way a centralized economic plan ravaged the real world over the past 500 years, you would appreciate the current financial meltdown for what it is: a comeuppance. This is the sound of the other shoe dropping; it's what happens when the chickens come home to roost; it's justice, equilibrium reasserting itself, and ultimately a good thing.

I started writing a book three years ago through which I hoped to help people see the artificial and ultimately dehumanizing landscape of corporatism on which we conduct so much of our lives. It's not just that I saw the downturn coming—it's that I feared it wouldn't come quickly or clearly enough to help us wake up from the self-destructive fantasy of an eternally expanding economic frontier. The planet, and its people, were being taxed beyond their capacity to produce. Try arguing that to a banker whose livelihood is based on perpetuating that illusion, or to people whose retirement incomes depend on just one more generation falling for the scam. It's like arguing to Brooklyn's latest crop of brownstone buyers that they've invested in real estate at the very moment the whole market is about to tank. (I did; it wasn't pretty.)

Now that the scheme we have mistaken for the real economy is collapsing under its own weight, however, it's a whole lot easier to make these arguments. And, if anything, it's even more important for us to come to grips with the fact that the system in peril is not a natural one, or even one that we should be attempting to revive and restore. The thing that is dying—the corporatized model of commerce — has not, nor has it ever been, supportive of the real economy. It wasn't meant to be. And before we start lamenting its demise or, worse, spending good money after bad to resuscitate it, we had better understand what it was for, how it nearly sucked us all dry, and why we should put it out of our misery. ...

TALKS DAN DENNETT: CUTE, SEXY, SWEET AND FUNNY -- AN EVOLUTIONARY RIDDLE

Why are babies cute? Why is cake sweet? Philosopher Dan Dennett has answers you wouldn't expect, as he shares evolution's counterintuitive reasoning on cute, sweet and sexy things. For a topping, try his new theory on why jokes are funny.

DANIEL C. DENNETT is University Professor, Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His most recent book is Breaking the Spell.

Daniel C. Dennett's Edge Bio Page

COSMIC VISIONS

With the International Year of Astronomy now in full swing, leading figures from the world of astronomy reveal what they think are the biggest challenges for the subject...

Martin Rees is at the University of Cambridge in the UK and holds the title of Astronomer Royal

A quarter of a century ago, plans for the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck telescopes were well advanced, and both these instruments are still doing great science. If we look 25 years ahead, the projects that are now at the concept or planning stage will be the major instruments then. The timescale is very long — depressingly so. However, we can be optimistic that rapid advances in computer power will allow realistic modelling of how galaxies, stars and planets formed. Simulations in "virtual universes" will play an ever larger role in our subject.

I would highlight three main challenges for astronomy. The first concerns black holes. These are now recognized as the engines for active galactic nuclei. But we still do not know if they obey the "Kerr metric", which describes the geometry of space–time around a massive rotating body, although I would be astonished if they did not, given the vindication of general relativity. I am hopeful for better probes (and simulations) of flow patterns and magnetic effects in the innermost regions of active galaxies, plus the direct detection of gravitational waves from coalescing black holes. ...

THE FERTILIZED EGG IS NOT A HUMAN LIFE
By PZ Myers

...Now this person wants a specific quote from a biology text that has the words "human life does not begin at conception" in it. That would be tough, because it's a sentence that rather boggles the brain of any developmental biologist — we also tend not to write sentences like, "human beings are not flies". We kind of expect that anyone intelligent enough to read the textbook doesn't need their hand held in superfluous explications of the bleedin' obvious. But you will find us saying simple things like that in email and conversations and even popular lectures to lay people…such as this talk by Lewis Wolpert.

Wolpert is, of course, one of the best known developmental biologists on the planet. He is also the author of a very good introductory text in developmental biology (Principles of Development, one that I use in my classes at UMM, and in this lecture (which you really should watch and listen to in its entirety, it's very good), he does come right out and say the bleedin' obvious.

What I'm concerned with is how you develop. I know that you all think about it perpetually that you come from one single cell of a fertilized egg. I don't want to get involved in religion but that is not a human being. I've spoken to these eggs many times and they make it quite clear ... they are not a human being.

There, that should help. When you go reaching for an authority in development, a professor at a small liberal arts college isn't the sine qua non of the field (well, unless maybe you're talking about Scott Gilbert…), but you really can't pull rank higher than Lewis Wolpert.

THE BIG BANG THEORY
Doctor George Smoot

Go behind the scenes with famous Nobel Laureate Doctor George Smoot on the set of The Big Bang Theory.

CULTURAL CONVERSATION

RICHARD FOREMAN AND JOHN ZORN
TWO AVANT-GARDISTS JOIN ARTISTIC FORCES
By Larry Blumenfeld

Two guys meet on a corner in Manhattan's East Village. First guy says to the second: "Why don't you write me an opera?" Second guy shrugs and says "OK."

"It was that simple," said director Richard Foreman of the spark that led to "Astronome: A Night at the Opera," his collaborative work with composer John Zorn that runs through April 5 at Mr. Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theater. Seated beside him in Mr. Foreman's book-lined loft, a week before the premiere, Mr. Zorn smiled. "I love that story," he said, "because it's at the heart of downtown, as far as I'm concerned. Things happen by chance all the time, between friends." ...

...Mr. Foreman created a vivid environment for "Astronome": Walls are littered with Hebrew letters, the floor with Tarot cards. Veiled women stare intently. A man with a painted-green face, a black-feathered headdress, and a keenly expressive tongue occasionally tightens a microphone cord around his throat. Bright red strawberries appear and are quickly devoured. Mr. Foreman's offstage voice chimes in here and there: "There lives within me an avenging angel named not"; "It is easy to choose the negative path to avoid things that are painful."

Prior to the production, a woman's voice warns of music "as loud as a rock concert," then offers instructions on the proper use of previously distributed earplugs. "But of course," she adds, "you may prefer to experience the full aural effect the composer intended." The crunching chords, wailing screams, and densely layered sound of Mr. Zorn's score are not all that loud. Yet the effect is decidedly full. The music's intensity belies a slowly unfolding structure that, at points, veers into gently ruminative playing and even pleasing melody.

Mr. Foreman has challenged audiences with audacious spectacles that are equal parts existential dread, cunning wit and avant-garde ingenuity ever since founding his theater in 1968. Mr. Zorn's score ups his ante, yielding a production that stuns with its intricacy, rigor and long-lasting psychic effect. ...

SEED MAGAZINE
March 22, 2009

PAUL STEINHARDT + PETER GALISON
THE PHYSICIST AND THE HISTORIAN DISCUSS THE NATURE OF TRUTH AS THEORETICAL MODELS OF THE UNIVERSE BECOME INCREASINGLY DIFFICULT TO TEST.

Paul Steinhardt's "cyclic model," a radical alternative to the big bang and inflationary cosmology, proposes that the universe's evolution is periodic and that key events shaping its structure occurred before the bang. Peter Galison studies historic fundamental shifts in physics and what types of evidence count as truth. Having first met during their graduate-school days at Harvard, they were quick to accept Seed's invitation to consider: Where is the line between physics and metaphysics? Is infinity unscientific? What is it, ultimately, that we want from science?

Howard Gardner is a professor of cognition and education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He's also the author of over 20 books and several hundred scholarly articles. Gardner is probably best known in educational circles for his theory of multiple intelligences, which is a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. His most recent book, Five Minds for the Future, offers some advice for policy-makers on how to do a better job of preparing students for the 21st century. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Gardner about his new book, the possibility of teaching ethics and how his concept of multiple intelligences has changed over time. ...