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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is the fourth of John Brockman's books that I have read and reviewed, and I think the best. Previously Brockman asked scientists, What do you believe but cannot prove?, What's your dangerous idea?, and What are you optimistic about? Here he asks scientist the title question, What have you changed your mind about? I think this question energized the 150 respondents and made the responses most interesting.
What Princeton Professor Lee M. Silver has changed his mind about is the effectiveness of modern education to get humans to reject supernatural beliefs or "to accept scientific implications of rational argumentation." What he has discovered over the years is that "irrationality and mysticism seem to be an integral part of normal human nature." (pp. 144-146)
Well, I've noticed the same thing and so have a lot of other people. The question is why should our minds be in such a sorry state? The broad answer is evolution made them that way because that was what worked.
Irrationality works? Strange to say, but sometimes it does--or has. Since even the most rational of our prehistoric ancestors could not know when the tsunami was coming or how to avoid drought and disease, rational thinking had a limited applicability. In some cases more value was to be found in certain rituals and mumbled words that gave our ancestors heart and allowed them to avoid despair.
The problem with this is that in the modern world, with the power of science and our knowledge of history to guide us, we would be much better off if we were able to throw off the irrationality and work together toward logical and informed solutions to our problems.
Cosmologist and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees used to believe that the fairly distant future ought to be "best left to speculative academics and cosmologists." Now, with rapid acceleration in cultural evolution that we are experiencing, he feels that "We are custodians of a 'posthuman future'--here on Earth and perhaps beyond--that cannot just be left to writers of science fiction." (pp. 29-31)
Laurence C. Smith, Professor of Geology at UCLA used to think that the effects of global warming would be gradual, but now he believes that such effects, both positive and negative" may already be upon us." He cites the rapidity with which the Arctic Ocean is becoming ice-free for changing his mind. He notes that "Over the past three years, experts have shifted from 2050 to 2035 to 2013 as plausible dates for an ice-free Arctic Ocean..." "Reality," it appears, is revising the models. (pp. 141-143)
J. Craig Venter, human genome decoder, used to believe that "solving the carbon-fuel problem was for future generations and that the big concern was the limited supply of oil, not the rate of adding carbon to the atmosphere." Now he believes greenhouse gas emissions could result in "catastrophic changes" more quickly that previously imagined, and that "we are conducting a dangerous experiment with our planet. One that we need to stop." (pp. 139-140)
Physicist Lee Smolin has changed his mind about time. Originally he believed that (quantum) reality is timeless. Then he came to believe that "time, as causality, is real." Now he writes, "Rather than being an illusion, time may be the only aspect of our present understanding of nature that is not temporary and emergent." (pp. 148-149)
I am not sure what kind of distinction Smolin is making between a reality that is timeless and one in which time is causality. I think that in both instances time does not exist and is, as Smolin reports," an illusion" that some philosophers and physicists believe "is just an 'emergent quantity' that is helpful in organizing our observations..." (p. 147)
What I think would be helpful is to realize that causality is the ordering of events with no concept of "time" needed. We say that event A occurred "before" event B as though having reference to "time," but this is just a verbalism. Notice that we also say that the numeral 2 appears "before" the numeral 3 or "after" the numeral 1 in an ordering. Again time is not involved.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss used to believe that the universe was flat. Now he thinks it will go on expanding forever. (pp. 159-161)
Richard Wrangham, author of excellent "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence," now believes it was cooking that transformed us from Homo habilis through Homo erectus to Homo sapiens and not meat-eating. He now believes that erectus used fire although clear proof is still lacking. (pp. 242-244)
Steve Connor, Science Editor of The Independent, now sees the 21st century bringing horrors worse than the Holocaust and nuclear proliferation. The culprits? "[G]lobal warming and the inexorable growth in the human population" leading to a stampede by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. He believes that the IPCC is underestimating the pace and extent of global warming. (pp. 327-330)
Richard Dawkins has changed his mind about Amotz Zahavi's "handicap principle" in evolutionary biology. (pp. 335-338) Dawkins's change of heart seems somewhat reluctant however and is, judging by the entry in this book, applicable to only the sexual selection aspect of the handicap principle. Dawkins allows that yes, superior male animals like the peacock may take on the handicap of appendages or behaviors that put them in increased danger just so they can "say" to the opposite sex: "See how fit I am. I can carry around his otherwise useless and heavy tail and still make a good living. Reproduce with me!"
But Dawkins does not mention the predator-prey aspect of Zahavi's handicap principle, such as the springbok pronking (jumping up and down conspicuously) to demonstrate to predators its fitness, "saying,": "Don't waste your energy chasing me. I am too fit for you to catch."
What I would like to see Dawkins change his mind about is group selection. He has allowed that group selection may be a (small) factor in evolution in some instances. What he needs to acknowledge is that selection occurs at various levels from the gene on up.
There is much, much more in this fascinating book. Don't miss it.
What Princeton Professor Lee M. Silver has changed his mind about is the effectiveness of modern education to get humans to reject supernatural beliefs or "to accept scientific implications of rational argumentation." What he has discovered over the years is that "irrationality and mysticism seem to be an integral part of normal human nature." (pp. 144-146)
Well, I've noticed the same thing and so have a lot of other people. The question is why should our minds be in such a sorry state? The broad answer is evolution made them that way because that was what worked.
Irrationality works? Strange to say, but sometimes it does--or has. Since even the most rational of our prehistoric ancestors could not know when the tsunami was coming or how to avoid drought and disease, rational thinking had a limited applicability. In some cases more value was to be found in certain rituals and mumbled words that gave our ancestors heart and allowed them to avoid despair.
The problem with this is that in the modern world, with the power of science and our knowledge of history to guide us, we would be much better off if we were able to throw off the irrationality and work together toward logical and informed solutions to our problems.
Cosmologist and President of the Royal Society, Martin Rees used to believe that the fairly distant future ought to be "best left to speculative academics and cosmologists." Now, with rapid acceleration in cultural evolution that we are experiencing, he feels that "We are custodians of a 'posthuman future'--here on Earth and perhaps beyond--that cannot just be left to writers of science fiction." (pp. 29-31)
Laurence C. Smith, Professor of Geology at UCLA used to think that the effects of global warming would be gradual, but now he believes that such effects, both positive and negative" may already be upon us." He cites the rapidity with which the Arctic Ocean is becoming ice-free for changing his mind. He notes that "Over the past three years, experts have shifted from 2050 to 2035 to 2013 as plausible dates for an ice-free Arctic Ocean..." "Reality," it appears, is revising the models. (pp. 141-143)
J. Craig Venter, human genome decoder, used to believe that "solving the carbon-fuel problem was for future generations and that the big concern was the limited supply of oil, not the rate of adding carbon to the atmosphere." Now he believes greenhouse gas emissions could result in "catastrophic changes" more quickly that previously imagined, and that "we are conducting a dangerous experiment with our planet. One that we need to stop." (pp. 139-140)
Physicist Lee Smolin has changed his mind about time. Originally he believed that (quantum) reality is timeless. Then he came to believe that "time, as causality, is real." Now he writes, "Rather than being an illusion, time may be the only aspect of our present understanding of nature that is not temporary and emergent." (pp. 148-149)
I am not sure what kind of distinction Smolin is making between a reality that is timeless and one in which time is causality. I think that in both instances time does not exist and is, as Smolin reports," an illusion" that some philosophers and physicists believe "is just an 'emergent quantity' that is helpful in organizing our observations..." (p. 147)
What I think would be helpful is to realize that causality is the ordering of events with no concept of "time" needed. We say that event A occurred "before" event B as though having reference to "time," but this is just a verbalism. Notice that we also say that the numeral 2 appears "before" the numeral 3 or "after" the numeral 1 in an ordering. Again time is not involved.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss used to believe that the universe was flat. Now he thinks it will go on expanding forever. (pp. 159-161)
Richard Wrangham, author of excellent "Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence," now believes it was cooking that transformed us from Homo habilis through Homo erectus to Homo sapiens and not meat-eating. He now believes that erectus used fire although clear proof is still lacking. (pp. 242-244)
Steve Connor, Science Editor of The Independent, now sees the 21st century bringing horrors worse than the Holocaust and nuclear proliferation. The culprits? "[G]lobal warming and the inexorable growth in the human population" leading to a stampede by the four horsemen of the apocalypse. He believes that the IPCC is underestimating the pace and extent of global warming. (pp. 327-330)
Richard Dawkins has changed his mind about Amotz Zahavi's "handicap principle" in evolutionary biology. (pp. 335-338) Dawkins's change of heart seems somewhat reluctant however and is, judging by the entry in this book, applicable to only the sexual selection aspect of the handicap principle. Dawkins allows that yes, superior male animals like the peacock may take on the handicap of appendages or behaviors that put them in increased danger just so they can "say" to the opposite sex: "See how fit I am. I can carry around his otherwise useless and heavy tail and still make a good living. Reproduce with me!"
But Dawkins does not mention the predator-prey aspect of Zahavi's handicap principle, such as the springbok pronking (jumping up and down conspicuously) to demonstrate to predators its fitness, "saying,": "Don't waste your energy chasing me. I am too fit for you to catch."
What I would like to see Dawkins change his mind about is group selection. He has allowed that group selection may be a (small) factor in evolution in some instances. What he needs to acknowledge is that selection occurs at various levels from the gene on up.
There is much, much more in this fascinating book. Don't miss it.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
9 reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful
A mixed bag of short essays
11 Jan 2009
Format:Paperback
The Edge Foundation is an organization of science and technology intellectuals created "to seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have themselves ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Its main activity is maintaining its free website and circulating free regular emails about the contributions of its stable of intellectuals.
Once a year Edge publishes a collection of essays devoted to a single question; the 2008 question was devoted to issues the contributors have changed their minds about. Amazon has provided an excellent table of contents which describes in some detail the answers of all of the contributors. It is almost impossible to provide a meaningful review of so many essays, but it is great fun to read through the contents, and then search out more information from authors of interest, either in the book itself or in other resources. (Google does a great job of searching out more information by entering the author's name and a few of the words from the Table of Contents.)
The model of scientific inquiry seems to embrace the idea that scientists should often change their minds, as new evidence is presented. And yet, the history of science is filled with contra examples, and it is striking that most of the examples in this book are changes of opinion or emphasis, not fundamental changes in approach.
Sharon Begley in "Newsweek" identifies only a couple, including this from Stephen Pinker:
"Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field 'may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over' 50,000 years ago, Pinker says."
Nevertheless, the essays are fascinating whatever their conclusions, showing how the scientific minds work on a pre-set problem. Next year's Question may produce more specific answers: "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
As John Brockman points out:
"Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news."
Whatever your own views, these essays give the reader plenty to think about and for this reader an enormous amount of pleasure.
Robert C. Ross 2009
Once a year Edge publishes a collection of essays devoted to a single question; the 2008 question was devoted to issues the contributors have changed their minds about. Amazon has provided an excellent table of contents which describes in some detail the answers of all of the contributors. It is almost impossible to provide a meaningful review of so many essays, but it is great fun to read through the contents, and then search out more information from authors of interest, either in the book itself or in other resources. (Google does a great job of searching out more information by entering the author's name and a few of the words from the Table of Contents.)
The model of scientific inquiry seems to embrace the idea that scientists should often change their minds, as new evidence is presented. And yet, the history of science is filled with contra examples, and it is striking that most of the examples in this book are changes of opinion or emphasis, not fundamental changes in approach.
Sharon Begley in "Newsweek" identifies only a couple, including this from Stephen Pinker:
"Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field 'may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over' 50,000 years ago, Pinker says."
Nevertheless, the essays are fascinating whatever their conclusions, showing how the scientific minds work on a pre-set problem. Next year's Question may produce more specific answers: "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
As John Brockman points out:
"Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news."
Whatever your own views, these essays give the reader plenty to think about and for this reader an enormous amount of pleasure.
Robert C. Ross 2009
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Intellectual Candy
8 Jan 2010
Format:Paperback
I love this whole series. Even though these essays range in length and quality, one gets the sense of being at a dinner party with a long table of great thinkers.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A magnificent compilation
6 Sep 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
As all books in the [...] series (I have read three of the four), this recompilation of articles is a treasure. One is forced to stop reading in between opinions in order to think about the points being brought up by the authors. A wonderful piece, one that I will read again at random, again and again.
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