SHERMER: Newton made analogies with tennis balls, Maxwell made analogies of these little machines that light pass through, how they're ether and like little wheels and cogs. Right now we don't have the right metaphor to under stand how neurons generate consciousness. At the moment, one of the limitations of understanding consciousness and how it arises is that we're using computer metaphors but our computers aren't sophisticated enough to figure out how to get this sort of self-organized complexity out of neurons . How do you get consciousness?

It's not working, that's the problem.

We're going to have to swap metaphors at some point. I mean consciousness is really still studied as much by philosophers as by cognitive scientists, and that tells you we're still in that borderlands area. We haven't figured it out yet.

EDGE: John Lilly had a fail-safe, foolproof method of changing consciousness: hit someone over the head with a baseball bat.

SHERMER: Things like hypnosis won't be explained until we understand how all these different modules are coordinated and how they interact. I think the explanation for hypnosis will be a dissociation theory of the mind where some modules are operating and some are suppressed. Like, for example, in Buddhist monks, part of the parietal lobes are suppressed which makes it more difficult for the individual to tell self from non self, and that's why people feel at one with the universe when they meditate. The whole brain's going to be like that, it's going to be a series of modules turning off and on, being suppressed and being stimulated, but there's still something else going on. There's a central processor underneath that runs it, because we do have pretty good data on G, or general intelligence. There is some general thing that's coordinating the whole thing.

EDGE: Are you still working on your biography of Wallace?

SHERMER: Yes. Alfred Russell Wallace is an interesting study because he's one of these borderlands scientists in the sense that he fooled around with fringe movements and beliefs, such as phrenology, spiritualism, land nationalization, anti-vaccination and women's rights. Some of these movements we might fully accept or reject, but in his time it wasn't clear. Again, it helps us understand a little bit better what science is when we look at movements during a historical period when it wasn't clear whether such ideas were science or nonsense.

For some people, like Darwin and Huxley, this spiritualism stuff was just plain nonsense, but Wallace actually had a number of prominent supporters who were completely in his league. Prominent physicists, physiologists, crooks, and others who founded a society for psychical research. Now we look back on it and it seems like pretty silly stuff, but a hundred years ago it wasn't. So how is it that these movement change? What happens to them? I think what happens is that data and theory interact within the context of a society. At some point, when there's not enough data to support it, the movement goes away, leaving only a handful of true believers. You can see that today. Cold fusion is a great example. About the same time cold fusion came out, same time superconductivity was taking off. Now superconductivity is still practiced, because the data ended up supporting it. However the data didn't support cold fusion, and now it's left to a handful of people who are the true believers and everybody else has given up. So that's how science works.

Wallace is interesting because of his co-discovery of natural selection with Darwin. The story is that it was not quite simultaneous but independent discovery. Wallace is younger than Darwin; Darwin was born in 1809, Wallace in 1823. When Wallace was in the Malay archipelago, he reasoned out that geographic isolation of species lead varieties to become permanently separated from their original kind.

He had a great moment in the archipelago, when he was on a little island called Arru and discovered there a variety of butterfly that has two green patches on the rear half of its wing with three black dots on the green patches. A nearly identical butterfly existed on Borneo but it had two black spots, and there was another one exactly like it on Papua New Guinea, but it had four black spots. His had three black spots. He writes all this down, he's reasoning his way through. Now if the Creator created one particular kind, then what's with these varieties? Clearly a creator would not create all these varieties; nature is doing that. Therefore, if nature can create these different varieties, why couldn't it create a new species, which is only just a little bit more different still? That's when he realizes that through natural selection, geographic isolation over time leads to permanent separation. So he pens this all down ­ it's a great story ­ in February 1858 in an essay on the steamer and probably on March 9th, he sends it to Darwin. Darwin gets it, and remember he had been working on the same problem for over twenty years, but he's very cautious, because of all the controversy over Robert Chambers' book The Vestiges, which was considered just theoretical and speculative with no supporting data. Darwin had been compiling blocks of data when he got the paper and so he was encouraged to publish right away.

The strange thing about all of this is that Darwin was very thorough. He kept virtually every letter anyone ever wrote him and he had copies of all the letters he wrote back, some 16,000 letters in all. And that particular letter and paper are missing. They're gone which lead some people to speculate that Darwin had not actually finished figuring out natural selection — maybe he didn't understand diversity or geographic isolation — and he got it from Wallace when he saw the paper. I don't think that's true. However, it's an interesting mystery in the history of science. What happened to this paper and this letter? We have everything Wallace every wrote him­except for that one item. It's rather strange.