LA TERCERA CULTURA. LA VERSIÓN 'IBÉRICA' [THE THIRD CULTURE. THE 'IBERIAN VERSION']

[ Sat. Feb. 19. 2011 ]

 

[Google Translation:] During the last decades we have witnessed the emergence of a scientific art, known as the Third Culture, Media and marked nature aroused the interest of intellectuals of various kinds but all of them for science to be judge and jury in decisions of profound social and political depth. A tentatively argue that some of the collaborations and statements sympathetic to the Third Culture in the Spanish context help visualize a complex web of socio-political affinities and Evolutive thinking expansion.

The first manifestations of the Third Culture dating from the late fifties when CP Snow notices the gap between science and literature and the possibility of bridging. To see how this approach would make it was not until the nineties when a group of scientists from such diverse areas as biology, mathematics, physics, paleontology, cognitive science, computer science and psychology, decided to take by assault the land occupied by the letters considered. These initiatives included the editorial work of John Brockman , an artist interested in scientific progress who informative interviews with scientists together leading representatives of these disciplines in the book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution .

One of the background closer to the Third Culture in his attempt to pooling of different branches of knowledge we find in the cyber revolution. The ultimate ambition of cybernetics was to describe and predict the behavior of any system or anything, human or nonhuman. Despite his grandstanding behavior was interested primarily in "things" instead of his deepest nature.

The Third Culture goes beyond when it proposes to unravel the great enigmas of humanity, from the origin of life and the creation of the universe to an accurate and objective understanding of the mind or even the deepest meaning of our life. This self-proclaimed new natural philosophyraises the need to realize the complexity of the evolution of systems, whether organisms, brains, the biosphere or the universe itself. To achieve such an objective seeks to avoid middlemen and ally with the means to express their findings in a direct and accessible to the public.

Such is the importance of the Third Culture means that some science communicators as Javier Sampedro, in an interview granted to the journal Mètode in 2004, reported the error that is left in the hands of science other than science communicators themselves as -according to this regular contributor to the El Pais — hot topics such as human cloning, embryo research or genetically modified organisms "can not be left to scientists, politicians or scientists. Are matters on which society should act, and that needs to be properly informed. Science can not be understood if it is disclosed ".

In addition to the new power they claim for themselves the scientific writer, scientific advances from the Third Culture appear engaged in high dose of sensationalism. Their findings, to specialized and opaque they are, always have something to say about the way we live and behave. In fact the interest of the third culture issues in the general public would be unthinkable outside the growing desire to know who and how we are, why we do this or that, and equally inconceivable apart from the high importance afforded to the world of and how to regulate emotions. ...

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