We're beginning to get some revolutionary new ideas about how social behavior originated, and also how to construct a superorganism. If we can define a set of assembly rules for superorganisms then we have a model system for how to construct an organism. How do you put an ant colony together? You start with a queen ant, which digs a hole in the ground, starts laying eggs, and goes through a series of operations that raise the first brood. The first brood then goes through a series of operations to breed more workers, and before long you've got soldier ants, worker ants, and foragers, and you've got a teeming colony. That's because they follow a series of genetically prescribed rules of interaction, behavior, and physical development. If we can fully understand how a superorganism is put together, we'll come much closer to general principles of how an organism is put together. There are two different levels—the cells put together to make an organism, organisms put together to make a superorganism. Right now I'm examining what we know to see if there are rules of how superorganisms are put together.

Introduction by Steven Pinker

Fifty years ago the molecular structure of DNA was discovered and a new academic specialty came into existence. Though it was called "molecular biology," it was very different from the field that traditionally was called biology and that most people think of when they hear the word. Today the split is so pervasive that many universities have separate departments for molecular biology and traditional kind, which the molecular types denigrate as "birdsy-woodsy" biology.

Today no one personifies traditional biology more than E. O. Wilson. For more than 45 years he has fought to unify it, revitalize it, and keep it in the public eye. The public may think of "ecology" as a romantic movement to save charismatic mammals, but it was Wilson's pioneering studies of island biogeography that helped to make it a rigorous science. Most people today consider it obvious that humans have a nature as well as a history, and that the study of our species cannot be conducted in ignorance of evolutionary biology. But it was far from obvious when Wilson first advocated that idea in 1975, at considerable personal cost. Nor should it be shocking to think that all human knowledge is connected in a single web of explanation, but it took Wilson to give this idea a name—consilience—and to become its public advocate. Few people realize that the central activities of biology—classifying species and preserving specimens—have been endangered by the molecular juggernaut; Wilson is the most visible activist dedicated to saving them. Wilson has also called attention to the deep human need to be surrounded by other living things and has made it a key argument for preserving the diversity of life in the face of today's massive human-caused extinctions. And on top of all this, Wilson's most specialized research activity—the study of ants—has made the subject so familiar to the public that two full-length animated movies have relied on ant facts for their humor.

Wilson has a restless intellect and never fails to come up with interesting new ideas. This interview promises still more revelations on the nature of living things from the man who has personified the science that studies them.

—Steven Pinker

EDWARD O.WILSON is Pellegrino University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. In addition to two Pulitzer Prizes (one of which he shares with Bert Hölldobler), Wilson has won many scientific awards, including the National Medal of Science and the Crafoord Prize of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

His books include The Future of Life; Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge; Diversity of Life; Ants; On Human Nature; Naturalist; Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition; (with Bert Hölldobler) Journey to the Ants: A Story of Scientific Exploration; and The Insect Societies.

E.O. Wilson's Edge Bio page

Steven Pinker's Edge Bio Page

Dolly
1996-2003

In the year Dolly was born, 1996, scientists and technologists celebrated the centenary of JJ Thompson's discovery of the electron. If civilisation survives until 2096, what anniversary will then attract more attention: the electron's bicentenary? Or Dolly's centenary? —Martin Rees

"The area to which I've given the greatest attention is a new phenomenon in molecular biology called genomic imprinting, which is a situation in which a DNA sequence can have conditional behavior depending on whether it is maternally inherited—coming from an egg—or paternally inherited—coming through a sperm. The phenomenon is called imprinting because the basic idea is that there is some imprint that is put on the DNA in the mother's ovary or in the father's testes which marks that DNA as being maternal or paternal, and influences its pattern of expression—what the gene does in the next generation in both male and female offspring."

Introduction

David Haig is an evolutionary geneticist/theorist interested in conflicts and conflict resolution within the genome, with a particular interest in genomic imprinting and relations between parents and offspring. The area to which I've given the greatest attention," he says, "is a new phenomenon in molecular biology called genomic imprinting, which is a situation in which a DNA sequence can have conditional behavior depending on whether it is maternally inherited—coming from an egg—or paternally inherited—coming through a sperm." Haig's work intersects with that of the evolutionary psychologists whose ideas have been presented on Edge. "A true psychology," Haig says, "has got to be an evolutionary psychology... We are evolved beings and therefore our psychology will have to be understood in terms of natural selection, among other factors."

— JB

DAVID HAIG is Associate Professor of Biology in Harvard's Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and author of Genomic Imprinting and Kinship.

David Haig's Edge Bio Page

"As a theoretical physicist, my main concern is space, time and cosmology. The metaphor about information and computation is interesting. There are some people in physics who have begun to talk as if we all know that what's really behind physics is computation and information, who find it very natural to say things like anything that's happening in the world is a computation, and all of physics can be understood in terms of information. There's another set of physicists who have no idea what those people are talking about. And there's a third set — and I'm among them — who begin by saying we have no idea what you're talking about, but we have reasons why it would be nice if it was useful to talk about physics in terms of information."

LEE SMOLIN, a theoretical physicist, is a founding member and research physicist at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo Canada. He is the author of The Life of The Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

[Click here for Lee Smolin's Edge Bio page]

There is no progress in evolution. The fact of evolutionary change through time doesn't represent progress as we know it. Progress isn't inevitable. Much of evolution is downward in terms of morphological complexity, rather than upward. We're not marching toward some greater thing.

Introduction

Stephen Jay Gould died on May 20 at his home in New York City. To remember and honor Steve, to think about his ideas, I present "The Pattern of Life's History", Chapter 2 in The Third Culture (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Included in the chapter are commentaries on Steve and his work by many other participants in the book such as Stewart Kauffman, Marvin Minsky, Niles Eldredge, Murray Gell-Mann, Francisco Varela, J. Doyne Farmer, Steven Pinker, Nicholas Humphrey, Brian Goodwin, Steve Jones, George C. Williams, and Daniel C. Dennett.

— JB

STEPHEN JAY GOULD was an evolutionary biologist, a paleontologist, and a snail geneticist; professor of zoology at Harvard University; MacArthur Fellow; author of, among others, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, The Mismeasure of Man, The Flamingo's Smile, Wonderful Life, Bully for Brontosaurus, Dinosaur in a Haystack, Rock of Ages, Full House, I Have Landed, and The Structure of Evolutionary Theory.

Stephen Jay Gould's Edge Bio Page

"The Digital Planet": Douglas Adams at the Muffathalle in Munich, November, 1998

"What else is there? Sex and physics." 

Introduction

Ten years ago at the AAAS, Dennis Overbye, author of the classic Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos, found himself on a rainy Sunday afternoon in an auditorium watching a handful of historians and physicists arguing about whether Einstein's first wife Mileva had actually invented relativity. This was an eye opener to him, to put it mildly. He was astounded that there could be any mystery about either the origin of relativity or about Einstein's life. He had just assumed that he was so famous and so recent that everything that could be known about him was known.

What followed was a 10-year investigation in which Overbye immersed himself in Einstein's life and wrote his recently published book, Einstein In Love.

"Romantically speaking, Einstein always felt — and always told his girlfriends — that Paradise was just around the corner," he says," but as soon as he got there, it started looking a little shabby and something better appeared. I've known a lot of people like Albert in my time. During this project I have felt lots of shocks of recognition. I feel like I got to know Albert as a person, and I have more respect for him as a physicist than I did when I started, simply because I have more a sense of what he actually did — and how hard it was — than before. If he was around now, I'd love to buy him a beer ..... but I don't know if I'd introduce him to my sister."

— JB

DENNIS OVERBYE is Deputy Science Editor of The New York Times and author of the critically acclaimed Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos and the recently published Einstein in Love.

Click here for Dennis Overbye's Edge Bio page.

THE REALITY CLUB: Leon Lederman, Jeremy Bernstein