Jaron Lanier [12.28.06] • Sam Harris [12.28.06] • Natalie Angier [11.20.06] • Stuart A. Kauffman [11.13.06] • Hubert Burda [11.10.06] • George Smoot [11.10.06] • Daniel C. Dennett [11.3.06] • John Brockman [10.26.06] • Richard Dawkins [10.26.06] • Brian Greene [10.23.06] • Tuesday Night Is Sacred [10.12.06] • 2nd World Conference Venice [10.12.06] • Fred Turner [10.12.06] • Scott Atran [10.12.06] • Alexander Vilenkin [9.18.06] • Hauser, Smolin, Trivers [9.5.06] • My Einstein [8.12.06] • Lee Smolin [8.12.06] • Rebecca Newberger Goldstein [7.29.06] • Lawrence Krauss [7.6.06] • George Church [6.26.06] • Letter to Members of Congress [6.22.06] • Lawrence Krauss [6.22.06] • Martin Rees [6.13.06] • Jaron Lanier [5.30.06] • Daniel Gilbert [5.22.06] • Verena Huber-Dyson [5.14.06] • The New View [5.19.06] • Neil H. Shubin [5.8.06] • Gloria Origgi [5.1.06] • John Horgan [4.7.06] • Kevin Kelly [4.7.06] • The Selfish Gene - Thirty Years On [3.23.06] • Larry Brilliant [2.23.06] • Edge Annual Dinner 2006 [2.27.06] • Marco Iacoboni [2.6.06] • THE entertainment gathering [2.1.06] • Edge London Science Dinner 2006 [4.14.05] • V.S. Ramachandran [1.12.06] • World Question Center [1.01.06]

BEWARE THE ONLINE COLLECTIVE [12.28.06]
by Jaron Lanier

What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis.

10 MYTHS — AND 10 TRUTHS — ABOUT ATHEISM [12.28.06]
by Sam Harris

When scientists don't know something — like why the universe came into being or how the first self-replicating molecules formed — they admit it. Pretending to know things one doesn't know is a profound liability in science. And yet it is the life-blood of faith-based religion. One of the monumental ironies of religious discourse can be found in the frequency with which people of faith praise themselves for their humility, while claiming to know facts about cosmology, chemistry and biology that no scientist knows. When considering questions about the nature of the cosmos and our place within it, atheists tend to draw their opinions from science. This isn't arrogance; it is intellectual honesty.

MY GOD PROBLEM [11.20.06]
by Natalie Angier

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

BEYOND REDUCTIONISM: REINVENTING THE SACRED [11.13.06]
by Stuart A. Kauffman

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

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

HOW PEOPLE SEE THEMSELVES [11.10.06]
by Hubert Burda

More than two thousand years after a ruler, Augustus, used for the very first time the minting technique to bring his face to the people, the possibilities for getting one's picture shown in public have increased many fold. Print media, TV and the Internet have teamed up and have made the motto of the hippie generation of late 60s San Francisco — "Expose yourself!" — a reality.

MY EINSTEIN SUSPENDERS [11.10.06]
by George Smoot, Recipient, The 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics

Aesthetic arguments, while useful as development tools, especially when there are no observations to guide the effort, made me uneasy—seemed a throwback to Greek reasoning about the celestial spheres. More recently, I came to realize that Einstein based special relativity not on pure thought alone but upon a great deal of physical observation and codifying theory—in particular, electromagnetism and the theory of light via James Clerk Maxwell's equations. Einstein was certainly aware of Lorentz's work, but was coming from the Maxwell side, not the Michelson-Morley results. He was reducing these ideas down to two essential postulates added onto the existing physics: (1) The speed of light is definite and independent of the speed of the source or of the observer, and (2) the laws of physics are the same in every inertial frame. From these two postulates and thought experiments, one can derive all the consequences of special relativity, including the Lorentz transformations, time dilation, length contraction, loss of simultaneity, E=mc2, and the lot!

THANK GOODNESS! [11.3.06]
by Daniel C. Dennett

Two weeks ago, I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital where it was determined by c-t scan that I had a "dissection of the aorta"—the lining of the main output vessel carrying blood from my heart had been torn up, creating a two-channel pipe where there should only be one. Fortunately for me, the fact that I'd had a coronary artery bypass graft seven years ago probably saved my life.....

THE EXPANDING THIRD CULTURE [10.26.06]
by John Brockman

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

WHY THERE ALMOST CERTAINLY IS NO GOD [10.26.06]
by Richard Dawkins

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

THE UNIVERSE ON A STRING [10.12.06]
by Brian Greene

...some have argued that if, after decades of research involving thousands of scientists, the theory is still a work in progress, it's time to give up. But to suggest dropping research on the most promising approach to unification because the work has failed to meet an arbitrary timetable for complete success is, well, silly.

I have worked on string theory for more than 20 years because I believe it provides the most powerful framework for constructing the long-sought unified theory. Nonetheless, should an inconsistency be found, or should future studies reveal an insuperable barrier to making contact with experimental data, or should new discoveries reveal a superior approach, I'd change my research focus, and I have little doubt that most string theorists would too.

But this hasn't happened.

THE ANNUAL THIRD CULTURE PUBLISHERS DINNER IN FRANKFURT [10.12.06]
"Tuesday Night Is Sacred"

Once a year, on the night prior to the commencement of the Frankfurt Book Fair, international publishers of third culture books gather for the annual ritual dinner known "Tuesday Night Is Sacred".

THE FUTURE OF SCIENCE [10.12.06]
2nd World Conference Venice — 2006

Edge was recently in Venice for the 2nd World Conference on the Future of Science which was held on September 20th-23rd 2006, at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the Isle of San Giorgio Maggiore. The Isle of San Giorgio lies in the St. Mark’s Basin, facing the Doges’ Palace (Palazzo Ducale, Opening Ceremony), the main city’s monument. A number of the members of the Edge community were in attendance including Lisa Randall, Steven Pinker, Marc D. Hauser, Michael Gazzaniga, Antonio Damasio, and Daniel C. Dennett. The participated in the three day program that covered Evolution of Matter: The Universe from the Big Bang to the Future; Evolution of Life: Darwinism in the Light of Modern Genetics; and Evolution of Mind: A Natural History of Culture. The videotaped talks are now available online.

STEWART BRAND MEETS THE CYBERNETIC COUNTERCULTURE [10.12.06]
By Fred Turner

Brand worked off and on with USCO as a photographer and a technician between 1963 and 1966, living at the Garnerville church for short periods between his travels. Within USCO, he encountered the first stirrings of the New Communalist movement. Like Cage and Rauschenberg, the members of USCO created art intended to transform the audience's consciousness. They also drew on many diverse electronic technologies to achieve their effects. Strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters—for USCO, the products of the technocratic industry served as handy tools for transforming their viewers' collective mind-set. So did psychedelic drugs. Marijuana and peyote and, later, LSD offered members of USCO, including Brand, a chance to engage in a mystical experience of togetherness. And USCO's work did not stop at the end of each performance. Gathering at their church in Garnerville, and then again at performance sites around the country, the members of USCO lived and worked together steadily for a period of years. Like a cross between a touring rock entourage and a commune, USCO was more than a performance team. It was a social system unto itself. Through it, Brand encountered the works of Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan, and Buckminster Fuller—all of whom would become key influences on the Whole Earth community—and began to imagine a new synthesis of cybernetic theory and countercultural politics.

DEVOTED ACTOR VERSUS RATIONAL ACTOR MODELS FOR UNDERSTANDING WORLD CONFLICT [10.12.06]
Presented by Scott Atran to the National Security Council at the White House, 14, September 2006, 3:30 pm

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

THE PRINCIPLE OF MEDIOCRITY [9.18.06]
By Alexander Vilenkin

A striking consequence of the new picture of the world is that there should be an infinity of regions with histories absolutely identical to ours. That's right, scores of your duplicates are now reading copies of this article. They live on planets exactly like Earth, with all its mountains, cities, trees, and butterflies. There should also be regions where histories are somewhat different from ours, with all possible variations. For example, some readers will be pleased to know that there are infinitely many O-regions where Al Gore is the President of the United States.

In this astonishing world view, our Earth and our civilization are anything but unique. Instead, countless identical civilizations are scattered across the infinite expanse of the cosmos. With humankind reduced to absolute cosmic insignificance, our descent from the center of the world, a process begun by Copernicus, is now complete.

"DARWIN Y LA TERCERA CULTURA" IN BARCELONA [9.5.06]
Hauser, Smolin, Trivers

...there is a deep relation between Einstein's notion that everything is just a network of relations and Darwin's notion because what is an ecological community but a network of individuals and species in relationship which evolve? There's no need in the modern way of talking about biology for any absolute concepts for any things that were always true and will always be true. —Lee Smolin

...what I'm interested in is how science can now come together with moral philosophy and do some interesting work at the overlap areas. This is not to say that science takes over philosophy, by no means. It works together with philosophy, to figure out what the deep issues are, what the overlapping areas are, and how we can meet together. —Marc D. Hauser

I believe that self-deception evolves in the service of deceit. That is, that the major function of self-deception is to better deceive others. Both make it harder for others to detect your deception, and also allow you to deceive with less immediate cognitive cost. So if I'm lying to you now about something you actually care about, you might pay attention to my shifty eyes if I'm consciously lying, or the quality of my voice, or some other behavioral cue that's associated with conscious knowledge of deception and nervousness about being detected. But if I'm unaware of the fact that I'm lying to you, those avenues of detection will be unavailable to you. —Robert Trivers

MY EINSTEIN [8.15.06]

My Einstein: Essays by Twenty-Four of the World’s Leading Thinkers on the Man, His Work, and His Legacy
Edited by John Brockman

BRAIDS [8.12.06]
By Lee Smolin

Theoretical physicists working in the rarefied field of loop quantum gravity have developed a way to describe elementary particles as merely tangles in space. If they are right, it could be the most profound scientific generalisation of all time, in which everything in the universe emerges from a simple network of relationships, with no fundamental building blocks at all. — New Scientist, Editorial [12 August 06]

REASONABLE DOUBT [7.29.06]
By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein

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

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

THE ENERGY OF EMPTY SPACE THAT ISN'T ZERO [7.6.06]
By Lawrence Krauss

I invited a group of cosmologists, experimentalists, theorists, and particle physicists and cosmologists. Stephen Hawking came; we had three Nobel laureates, Gerard 'tHooft, David Gross, Frank Wilczek; well-known cosmologists and physicists such as Jim Peebles at Princeton, Alan Guth at MIT, Kip Thorne at Caltech, Lisa Randall at Harvard; experimentalists, such as Barry Barish of LIGO, the gravitational wave observatory; we had observational cosmologists, people looking at the cosmic microwave background; we had Maria Spiropulu from CERN, who's working on the Large Hadron Collider — which a decade ago people wouldn't have thought it was a probe of gravity, but now due to recent work in the possibility of extra dimensions it might be.

CONSTRUCTIVE BIOLOGY [6.26.06]
By George Church

As creative as we become, and as industrious and as good as we are at designing and manufacturing living things, which we've been doing since the stone age — no matter how good we get at that, it's like calling a candle a supernova. A candle is not a super nova; it's not even in the same league. And we, as intelligent designers, are not in the same league as the "Intelligent Designer" that designed the whole shebang. We're not designing sub-atomic particles from scratch; we're not designing the Big Bang. We're really not even designing life; we're just manipulating it.

LETTER TO MEMBERS OF CONGRESS RE: INTELLIGENT THOUGHT [6.22.06]

[ED. NOTE:] Last week, the sixteen scientists who contributed essays to Intelligent Thought: Science versus the Intelligent Design Movement, wrote a letter that was addressed individually and sent with a copy of the book to every member of Congress. — JB

It is vitally important, however, that in these difficult and contentious times the Catholic Church not build a new divide, long ago eradicated, between the scientific method and religious belief. We are writing to you today to request that you clarify once again the Church's position on Evolution and Science, that you reaffirm the remarkable statements of Pope John Paul II and the International Theological Commission, so that it will be clear that Cardinal Schönborn's remarks do not reflect the views of the Holy See.

Can civilisation be safeguarded, without humanity having to sacrifice its diversity and individualism? This is a stark question, but I think it's a serious one.

The hive mind is for the most part stupid and boring. Why pay attention to it?

The problem is in the way the Wikipedia has come to be regarded and used; how it's been elevated to such importance so quickly. And that is part of the larger pattern of the appeal of a new online collectivism that is nothing less than a resurgence of the idea that the collective is all-wise, that it is desirable to have influence concentrated in a bottleneck that can channel the collective with the most verity and force. This is different from representative democracy, or meritocracy. This idea has had dreadful consequences when thrust upon us from the extreme Right or the extreme Left in various historical periods. The fact that it's now being re-introduced today by prominent technologists and futurists, people who in many cases I know and like, doesn't make it any less dangerous.

Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy, Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, Cory Doctorow, Kevin Kelly, Esther Dyson, Larry Sanger, Fernanda Viegas & Martin Wattenberg, Jimmy Wales, George Dyson, Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold

When people think of "science," they naturally think of atoms, planets, robots — things they can touch and see. They know that subjective experiences such as happiness are important, but they believe that such experiences can't be studied scientifically. That belief is dead wrong.

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

Nathan Myhrvold, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jurvetson, Linda Stone,
Steve Lohr, John C. Dvorak, Jaron Lanier

When we look back after 370 million years of evolution, the invasion of land by fish appears special. However, if we could transport ourselves by time machine to this early period, it isn't clear whether we would notice anything extraordinary. We would see a lot of fish, some of them big and some of them small, all of them struggling to survive and reproduce. Only now, 370 million years later, do we see that one of those fish sat at the base of a huge branch of the tree of life—a branch that includes everything from salamanders to humans. It would have taken an uncanny sixth sense for us to have predicted this outcome when our time machine deposited us in the middle of the Devonian.

Ramachandran, Freedberg, Dennett, Atran, Elster: new approaches in the study of society, art, and religion

Anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, disciplines that have based their autonomy on the claim that the system of social actions and human cultures is largely independent from their biological foundation, today make way for naturalistic research programs and the methods of the natural sciences.

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

Daniel C. Dennett, George Johnson, Freeman Dyson, Richard Dawkins, Marc D. Hauser, Dan Sperber, Jerry Coyne, Leonard Susskind, Lee Smolin, Scott Atran, Dan Sperber, Daniel C. Dennett

Science will continue to surprise us with what it discovers and creates; then it will astound us by devising new methods to surprises us. At the core of science's self-modification is technology. New tools enable new structures of knowledge and new ways of discovery. The achievement of science is to know new things; the evolution of science is to know them in new ways. What evolves is less the body of what we know and more the nature of our knowing.

It is thirty years since The Selfish Gene revolutionised our understanding of living things. Since then, Richard Dawkins' pursuit of the implications of science has informed areas as diverse as biology, psychology, philosophy and religion. His work has made an outstanding contribution to the understanding of science in society; and it has shown how science deepens our appreciation of the natural world.

I wish that you would help build a powerful new early warning system to protect our world from some of its worst nightmares.

Edge Annual Dinner 2006 [2.27.06]

Monterey, California (during the TED Conference)— February 27, 2006

This year, at the UCLA Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center, Marco Iacoboni and his group used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure brain responses in a group of subjects while they were watching the Super Bowl ads.

eg | THE entertainment gathering - Los Angeles [2.1.06]

Edge London Science Dinner 2006 [1.24.06]

World Question Center [1.01.06]
WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?

The history of science is replete with discoveries that were considered socially, morally, or emotionally dangerous in their time; the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions are the most obvious. What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?