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STEWART BRAND is the Founder of the "The Whole Earth Catalog" and Co-founder of The Long Now Foundation and Revive and Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline. Stewart Brand's Edge Bio Page
RICHARD PRUM is an Evolutionary Ornithologist at Yale University, where he is the Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. He is working on a book about duck sex, aesthetic evolution, and the origin of beauty. Richard Prum's Edge Bio Page
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: We are very, very delighted to now introduce the next section. It’s a whole entire section. We call it the Edge-Serpentine section. It’s our long-time, long-term collaboration with John Brockman. We’re incredibly grateful for John. Ever since the Experiment Marathon in 2007, we have regular collaborations between the Serpentine marathons and Edge. In 2007, with Experiment Marathon and Olafur Eliasson, we asked the participants to come up with a formula for the 21st century and John Brockman asked the entire Edge community to do so, and it created a wonderful collaboration.
We have an entire section guest curated by John, bridging our marathon to science. We are very, very delighted that this continues here today, for the first time, not only with one section, but with two sections. John suggested for the Extinction Marathon, first of all, a conversation between Stewart Brand and Richard Prum, which he and I will moderate. Then we’d have a second chapter, which will involve different scientists who are part of the Edge community: Chiara Marletto, Helena Cronin, Steve Jones, Jennifer Jacquet, and also Molly Crockett, who will be in conversation and also make presentations connected to the topic of extinction.
John Brockman is a cultural impresario who has worked in the art world with science, with software, and the Internet. In the ‘60s he coined the word "intermedia" and pioneered the notion of intermedia connecting environments in art, theater, and commerce. It’s very interesting that in 2014 his seminal book, By the Late John Brockman, has been re-edited and re-published and exists now as an e-book, and soon is also again available as a printed book. In ’73, Brockman founded Brockman, Inc., the literary agency, and then in ’96 he founded the nonprofit Edge Foundation. He is the publisher and the editor of Edge: "To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge" as he always says. We really believe Edge is one of the great platforms to go beyond the fear of scientific knowledge, which, as you know, is also what the marathons try to do.
John invited Stewart Brand. Stewart doesn't need an introduction. He is one of the most well-known, great thinkers of our time. He finds things and found things. He’s the co-founder of Revive and Restore, the serial inventor of so many, many things he's founded. It’s a long list: The Long Now Foundation, The Well, the Global Business Network. He’s also the founder and editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, which is a very big inspiration for the art world. Recently there has been an exhibition in the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, which completely was inspired by The Whole Earth Catalog. He’s also one of the co-founders of the Clock of the Long Now, which is also a book. His many books include also the Whole Earth Discipline, How Buildings Learn and The Media Lab. He is trained as a biologist and, as he told me earlier today very importantly, also as an ecologist at Stanford, and we are very excited that he is here.
We are also very excited that John invited Richard Prum, who is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, and the Curator of Ornithology at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. His research interests include avian evolution, mating behavior, song, feather evolution, and also development as well as mate choice. He has conducted fieldwork throughout the world, and he is currently working on a book on the aesthetic evolution. Together with Brand and Prum and John Brockman we will now be discussing the topic of de-extinction. Please give a very, very warm welcome to John Brockman, to Stewart Brand, to Richard Prum.
... A strange thing happened on the way to a better world in pursuit of an admirable quest, that is, a world free of sex discrimination where you’re judged on your own qualities and not your sex. Truth and falsity went topsy-turvy. The truth—the silence of sex differences—became dangerous, unmentionable, and in its place the conventional wisdom, which is a ragbag of ideas that have long been extinct but are kept ghoulishly alive by popularity, became the entrenched orthodoxy influencing public thinking, agendas and policy-making, and completely crowding out science and sense.
There is a new fundamental theory of physics that's called constructor theory, and was proposed by David Deutsch who pioneered the theory of the universe of quantum computer. David and I are working this theory together. The fundamental idea in this theory is that we forumlate all laws of physics in terms of what tasks are possible, what are impossible, and why. In this theory we have an exact physical characterization of an object that has those properties, and we call that knowledge. Note that knowledge here means knowledge without knowing the subject, as in the thoery of knowledge of the philosopher, Karl Popper.
I dream about the sea cow or imagine what they would be like to see in the wild, but the case of the Pinta Island giant tortoise was a particularly strange feeling for me personally because I had spent many afternoons in the Galapagos Islands when I was a volunteer with the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in Lonesome George’s den with him. If any of you visited the Galapagos, you know that you can even feed the giant tortoises that are in the Charles Darwin Research Station. This is Lonesome George here.
What I wanted to talk about is somewhat of a parallel of that in human populations. If you were to go to a textbook on human biology from the time of Darwin or a bit later, you would certainly get an image that looked a bit like this. This is an image of the so-called races of humankind—racial types, as they called them. I’m not going to go into the question of whether there are real races of humankind because there aren’t. It’s interesting to note that until quite recently people assumed, and scientists assumed too, that the human species was divided into distinct groups that were biologically different from each other and had been isolated from each other for a long, long time.
MOLLY CROCKETT is an Associate Professor in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford; Wellcome Trust Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging.
