"Certainly, human nature is fixed. It's universal and unchanging — common to every baby that's born, down through the history of our species. But human behavior — which is generated by that nature — is endlessly variable and diverse. After all, fixed rules can give rise to an inexhaustible range of outcomes. Natural selection equipped us with the fixed rules — the rules that constitute our human nature. And it designed those rules to generate behavior that's sensitive to the environment. So, the answer to 'genetic determinism' is simple. If you want to change behavior, just change the environment. And, of course, to know which changes would be appropriate and effective, you have to know those Darwinian rules. You need only to understand human nature, not to change it."

Introduction

Helena Cronin achieved prominence in the early 90's as the author of The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today, named one of the Nine Best Books of the Year by the New York Times Book Review in 1992, and widely considered the definitive history and integrative summary of altruism and sexual selection in modern evolutionary biology. It is also unusual in being as well informed in the history and philosophy of the subject as it is up-to-date with modern evolutionary theory.

For several years she ran a highly influential program of public lectures and debates at the London School of Economics which thrust evolutionary biology, psychology, medicine, and social science onto center stage. In convening the intellectual salon known as the [email protected] seminars “ the "hottest intellectual ticket in London" “ Cronin carved for herself a unique niche as the convener of a cutting edge intellectual salon of worldwide repute and, in so doing, she has become an important public intellectual in the UK.

Cronin, who is also co-editor of the Darwinism Today book series, has become a renowned champion of Darwinian theory, especially as it applies to the human species and can be used to inform social policy. Through many articles, interviews, and appearances in the British media, she has become known as an eloquent and tough-minded spokesperson for the importance of Darwinism in modern intellectual life. 

HELENA CRONIN is a Co-Director of London School of Economic's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, where she runs the wide ranging and successful program "[email protected]" which fosters research at the forefront of evolutionary theory. She is the author of The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today.

Helena Cronin's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: J. Doyne Farmer

Steve Jones is a highly regarded geneticist and snail biologist. He is interested in why so much diversity exists in animals and plants: why no two individuals are alike. Surely, it can be argued, natural selection should instead inevitably lead to the evolution of one perfect form for each species. He works on the striking variety of shell color and banding patterns in the land snail Cepaea nemoralis. Cepaea has been seen as an archetype of diversity since the nineteenth century. In the 1950s, the English biologists Arthur Cain and Phillip Sheppard argued that such apparently trivial differences were under the action of natural selection (in this case because birds would attack the conspicuous forms). Jones finds that climate is also involved and — most important — that differences in microclimate on the scale of a few inches can alter the behavior and survival of snails of different pattern. Ecologically complex habitats hence foster genetic diversity. Jones has been writing and lecturing about science to a general audience for fifteen years. His book, The Language of the Genes won the 1994 Science Book Prize.

W D Hamilton is a good candidate for the title of most distinguished Darwinian since Darwin. Other candidates would have to include R A Fisher, whom Hamilton revered as a young student at Cambridge. Hamilton resembled Fisher in his penetrating biological intuition and his ability to render it in mathematics. But, like Darwin and unlike Fisher, he was also a superb field naturalist and explorer. I suspect that, of all his twentieth century successors, Darwin would most have enjoyed talking to Hamilton. Partly because they could have swapped jungle tales and beetle lore, partly because both were gentle and deep, but mostly because Hamilton the theorist was responsible for clearing up so many of the very problems that had intrigued and tantalised Darwin.

William Donald Hamilton FRS was Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Zoology at Oxford, and a Professorial Fellow of New College. He was born in 1936, spent a happy childhood botanising and collecting butterflies in Kent, was educated at Tonbridge, then Cambridge where he read Genetics. For his Ph.D. he moved to London where he was jointly enrolled at University College and LSE. He became a Lecturer at Imperial College in 1964, where his teaching skills were not highly rated. After a brief Visiting Professorship at Harvard, he accepted a Museum Professorship at the University of Michigan in 1977. Finally, in 1984 he moved to Oxford at the invitation of Richard Southwood, who had been his Professor at Imperial.

Hamilton was showered with medals and honours by the academies and learned societies of the world. He won the Kyoto Prize, the Fyssen Prize, the Wander Prize, and the Crafoord Prize - instituted by the Swedish Academy because Alfred Nobel unaccountably failed to include non-medical Biology in his list of eligible subjects. But honours and recognition did not come early. The autobiographical chapters of Hamilton's collection of papers, Narrow Roads of Gene Land, reveal a lonely young man driven to self-doubt by lack of comprehension among his peers and superiors. To epitomise the Cambridge of his undergraduate days, where "many biologists hardly seemed to believe in evolution" he quotes one senior professor: "Insects do not live for themselves alone. Their lives are devoted to the survival of the species . . ." This is "Group Selection", a solecism which would cause today's biology undergraduates to wince, but they have the advantage of a post-Hamilton education. The young Hamilton felt that in Cambridge he was wincing alone. Only the cantankerous Fisher made sense to him, and he had been advised that Fisher "was good with statistics but knew nothing about biology."

For his doctoral work he proposed a difficult mathematical model with a simple conclusion now known as "Hamilton's Rule." It states that a gene for altruistic self sacrifice will spread through a population if the cost to the altruist is outweighed by the benefit to the recipient devalued by a fraction representing the genetic relatedness between the two. Hamilton's original paper was so difficult and innovative that it almost failed to be published, and was largely ignored for a decade. When finally noticed, its influence spread exponentially until it became one of the most cited papers in all of biology. It is the key to understanding half the altruistic cooperation in nature. The key to the other half - reciprocation among unrelated individuals - is a theory to which Hamilton was later to make a major contribution, in collaboration with the social scientist Robert Axelrod.

The great obsession of his later career was parasites - their evolutionary rather than their medical impact. Over twenty years, Hamilton convinced more and more biologists that parasites are the key to many outstanding problems left by Darwin, including the baffling riddle of the evolution of sex. The sexual shuffling of the genetic pack is an elaborate trick for outrunning parasites in the endless race through evolutionary time. This work led Hamilton into the arcane world of computer simulation, where his models were as richly textured, in their way, as his beloved Brazilian jungle. His spin off theory of sexual selection (how Darwin would have relished it!) was that bird of paradise tails and similar male extravaganzas are driven by the evolution of female diagnostic skills: females are like sceptical doctors, actively seeking parasite-free males to supply genes for their shared posterity. Male advertisement is an honest boast of health.

Hamilton's mathematical models never became arid; they were laced with, and often inspired by, bizarre natural history. Would that every mathematical lump were leavened, as Hamilton's were, by eye-witness accounts of, say, the male mite who copulates with all his sisters and then dies before any of them are born. Or of aphid females who give live birth to their daughters and granddaughters simultaneously.

For most scientists, good ideas are a scarce commodity, to be milked for everything they are worth. Hamilton, by contrast, would bury, in little throwaway asides, ideas for which others would kill. Sometimes he buried them so deeply that he overlooked them himself. Extreme social life in termites poses a particular evolutionary problem not shared by the equally social ants, bees and wasps. An ingenious theory exists, widely attributed to an author whom I shall call X. Hamilton and I were once talking termites, and he spoke favourably of X's theory. "But Bill", I protested, "That isn't X's theory. It's your theory. You thought of it first." He gloomily denied it, so I asked him to wait while I ran to the library. I returned with a bound journal volume and shoved under his nose his own discreetly buried paragraph on termites. Eeyorishly, he conceded that, yes, it did appear to be his own theory after all, but X had explained it much better. In a world where scientists vie for priority, Hamilton was endearingly unique.

Those who loved him saw a Felix with nine lives. Charmingly accident-prone, Bill would always bounce back. A childhood experiment with explosives cost him several finger joints of his right hand. He was frequently knocked off his bicycle, probably because of misjudgements by Oxford motorists who couldn't believe a man of his age with a great shock of white hair could possibly cycle so fast. And he travelled dangerously in wilder and more remote places than Oxford. He hiked through Rwanda at the height of the civil war, and was treated as a spy, so implausible was his (true) story that he was looking for ants. Held up at knife point in Brazil, he made the mistake of fighting back, and was viciously wounded. He jumped into an Amazon tributary when his boat was sinking, in order to plug the hole, like the little Dutch boy, with his thumb (the ferocity of Piranha fish, he explained, is over-rated). Finally, to gather indirect evidence for the theory (of which he was a strong supporter) that the AIDS virus was originally introduced into the human population in an oral polio vaccine tested in Africa in the 1950s, Hamilton went, with two brave companions, to the depths of the Congo jungle in January this year. He was rushed back to London, apparently with severe malaria, seemed to recover, then collapsed into complications and coma. This time, he didn't bounce back.

He is survived by his wife, Christine, from whom he had been amicably separated for some time, by their three daughters Helen, Ruth and Rowena, and by his devoted companion of recent years, Luisa Bozzi. 

Now a third one of Darwin's great contributions was that he replaced theological, or supernatural, science with secular science. Laplace, of course, had already done this some 50 years earlier when he explained the whole world to Napoleon. After his explanation, Napoleon replied, "where is God in your theory?" And Laplace answered, "I don't need that hypothesis." Darwin's explanation that all things have a natural cause made the belief in a creatively superior mind quite unnecessary. He created a secular world, more so than anyone before him. Certainly many forces were verging in that same direction, but Darwin's work was the crashing arrival of this idea and from that point on, the secular viewpoint of the world became virtually universal.

ERNST MAYR is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the recipient of numerous honorary degrees and awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Balzan Prize, and the Japan Prize.

Mayr is one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. His work has contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution, and to the development of the biological species concept. His theory of peripatric speciation has become widely accepted as one of the standard modes of speciation, and is the basis of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. Furthermore, his writings reflect, not only a technical expertise in biological subjects, but also a broad and penetrating understanding of the deeper philosophical issues involved.

Among his many books are Animal Species and Evolution; Evolution and the Diversity of Life; Systematics and the Origin of Species; The Growth of Biological Thought; One Long Argument; Population, Species, and Evolution; This Is Biology; and Toward a New Philosophy of Biology.

Mayr, born Kempten, Germany in 1904, began his studies of ornithology at the University of Berlin where, in June, 1926, at the age of 21, he received his Ph.D. In June, 2001, to honor the 75th anniversary of this event, the Humboldt University of Berlin awarded him a second (and honorary) Ph.D. Ernst Mayr's Edge Bio Page

INTRODUCTION
by Jared Diamond

When the first bird survey of the Cyclops Mountains was carried out. I found it hard to imagine how anyone could have survived the difficulties of that first survey of 1928, considering the already-severe difficulties of my second survey in 1990.

That 1928 survey was carried out by the then-23-year-old Ernst Mayr, who had just pulled off the remarkable achievement of completing his Ph.D. thesis in zoology while simultaneously completing his pre-clinical studies at medical school. Like Darwin, Ernst had been passionately devoted to outdoor natural history as a boy, and he had thereby come to the attention of Erwin Stresemann, a famous ornithologist at Berlin's Zoological Museum. In 1928 Stresemann, together with ornithologists at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and at Lord Rothschild's Museum near London, came up with a bold scheme to "clean up" the outstanding remaining ornithological mysteries of New Guinea, by tracking down all of the perplexing birds of paradise known only from specimens collected by natives and not yet traced to their home grounds by European collectors. Ernst, who had never been outside Europe, was the person selected for this daunting research program.

Ernst's "clean-up" consisted of thorough bird surveys of New Guinea's five most important north coastal mountains, a task whose difficulties are impossible to conceive today in these days when bird explorers and their field assistants are at least not at acute risk of being ambushed by the natives. Ernst managed to befriend the local tribes, was officially but incorrectly reported to have been killed by them, survived severe attacks of malaria and dengue and dysentery and other tropical diseases plus a forced descent down a waterfall and a near-drowning in an overturned canoe, succeeded in reaching the summits of all five mountains, and amassed large collections of birds with many new species and subspecies. Despite the thoroughness of his collections, they proved to contain not a single one of the mysterious "missing" birds of paradise. That astonishing negative discovery provided Stresemann with the decisive clue to the mystery's solution: all of those missing birds were hybrids between known species of birds of paradise, hence their rarity.

From New Guinea, Ernst went on to the Solomon Islands in the Southwest Pacific, where as a member of the Whitney South Sea Expedition he participated in bird surveys of several islands, including the notorious Malaita (even more dangerous in those days than was New Guinea). A telegram then invited him to come in 1930 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York to identify the tens of thousands of bird specimens collected by the Whitney Expedition on dozens of Pacific Islands. Just as Darwin's "explorations," sitting at home, of collections of barnacles were as important to Darwin in forming his insights as was his visit to the Galapagos Islands, so too Ernst Mayr's "explorations" of bird specimens in museums were as important as his fieldwork in New Guinea and the Solomons in forming his own insights into geographic variation and evolution. In 1953 Ernst moved from New York to Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, where even today he continues to work at the age of 97, still writing a new book every year or two. For scholars studying evolution and the history and philosophy of biology, Ernst's hundreds of technical articles and dozens of technical books have been for a long time the standard reference works.

But in addition to gaining insights from his own fieldwork in the Pacific and from his own studies of museum bird specimens, Ernst has collaborated with many other scientists to extract insights from other species, ranging from flies and flowering plants to snails and people. One of those collaborations transformed my own life, just as the meeting with Erwin Stresemann transformed Ernst's life. While I was a teenaged schoolboy, my father, a physician studying human blood groups, collaborated with Ernst in the first study proving that human blood groups evolve subject to natural selection. I thereby met Ernst at dinner at my parents' house, was later instructed by him in the identification of Pacific island birds, began in 1964 the first of 19 ornithological expeditions of my own to New Guinea and the Solomons, and in 1971 began to collaborate with Ernst on a massive book about Solomon and Bismarck birds that we completed only this year, after 30 years of work. My career, like that of so many other scientists today, thus exemplifies how Ernst Mayr has shaped the lives of 20th-century scientists: through his ideas, his writings, his collaborations, his example, his lifelong warm friendships, and his encouragement.

— Jared Diamond

[Excerpted from Jared Diamond's Introduction to What Evolution Is by Ernst Mayr — Science Masters Series /Basic Books; October 2001]

In my book, The Third Culture (1995), philosopher Daniel C. Dennett talks about his friend and colleague Nicholas Humphrey, a research psychologist.

"Nick Humphrey is a great romantic scientist," Dan noted, "which sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it isn't....It's very clear that for Nick the Shakespeare style of creativity is more enticing than the Newton style, which is an unusual attitude in a scientist."

Recently, I suggested to Dan that "Would you rather be a Shakespeare or a Newton?" might be an interesting feature forEdge's "World Question Center".

"But it's not the right question," said the feisty philosopher. Let me tell you about 'Dennett's Deal.' " .....

—John Brockman

DANIEL C. DENNETT is a Philosopher; University Professor, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, Breaking the Spell. Daniel C. Dennett's Edge Bio Page.

"We are neural beings," states Berkeley cognitive scientist George Lakoff. "Our brains take their input from the rest of our bodies. What our bodies are like and how they function in the world thus structures the very concepts we can use to think. We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit."

His new book Philosophy In The Flesh, coauthored by Mark Johnson, makes the following points: "The mind is inherently embodied. Thought is mostly unconscious. Abstract concepts are largely metaphorical."

Lakoff believes that new empirical evidence concerning these finding of cognitive science have taken us over the epistemological divide: we are in a new place and our philosophical assumptions are all up for grabs.

He and Johnson write: "When taken together and considered in detail, these three findings from the science of the mind are inconsistent with central parts of Western philosophy, and require a thorough rethinking of the most popular current approaches, namely, Anglo-American analytic philosophy and postmodernist philosophy."

According to Lakoff, metaphor appears to be a neural mechanism that allows us to adapt the neural systems used in sensory-motor activity to create forms of abstract reason. "If this is correct, as it seems to be," he says, "our sensory-motor systems thus limit the abstract reasoning that we can perform. Anything we can think or understand is shaped by, made possible by, and limited by our bodies, brains, and our embodied interactions in the world. This is what we have to theorize with."

He then raises the interesting question: "Is it adequate to understand the world scientifically?

The Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction category was awarded yesterday to Jared Diamond for Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

Introduction
By John Brockman

During the 1970s at Xerox PARC, Charles Simonyi led a team of programmers in the development of Bravo, the first WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) word-processing editor. Bravo was a fundamental departure from the way information was previously displayed and organized and it was part of PARC's contribution that changed the face of computing and ultimately led to personal computing.

Simonyi, born in Budapest, Hungary, holds a bachelor of science degree in engineering mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley and a doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. He worked for the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center from 1972-80 and joined Microsoft in 1981 to start the development of microcomputer application programs. He hired and managed teams who developed Microsoft Multiplan, Word, Excel, and other applications. In 1991, he moved to Microsoft Research where he has been focusing on Intentional Programming. He is generally thought of as one of the most talented programmers at Microsoft.

Dr. Simonyi, whose long career has made him independently wealthy, has endowed two chairs: the Charles Simonyi Professorship For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University which is held by the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins; and the Charles Simonyi Professorship in Theoretical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study.

John Markoff, writing in The New York Times (12 Nov 1990), relates the following anecdote: "He enjoys taking visitors to the machine shop in the basement of his new home, complete with lathe and drill press. 'In Hungary,' he said, 'they told us that the workers would never own the means of production.'"

Charles Simonyi is "The WYSIWYG."   

—JB