April 1, 2009
(12,300 words)
This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge279.html
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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THE END OF UNIVERSAL RATIONALITY A Talk With Yochai Benkler
EDGE VIDEO
"We have a lot of sophisticated analyses that try, with great precision, to predict and describe existing systems in terms of an assumption of universal rationality and a sub-assumption that what that rationality tries to do is maximize returns to the self. Yet we live in a world where that's not actually what we experience. The big question now is how we cover that distance between what we know very intuitively in our social relations, and what we can actually build with."
YOCHAI BENKLER is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His research focuses on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange on the distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture in the digital environment. He is the author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.
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SERPENTINE~EDGE EXPERIMENT MARATHON
Timothy Taylor: THE TRADESCANT'S ARK EXPERIMENT
EDGE VIDEO
In this Edge Video, archeologist Tim Taylor conducts an experiment about making sense of things.
"There are 43 stones passing amongst you. It's called the Tradescant's Ark Experiment and I've named it in honor of John Tradescant and John Tradescant, Sr. and Jr., father and son, who were collectors of things in the 17th century. They were the exhibitors of the world's first pay-to-view museum and they had a cabinet of curiosities set up in Lambeth, on the Thames, which much later was sold to Elias Ashmole and became the germ of the Ashmolean Museum. Not much of it survives, there are little parts of it in the Ashmolen Museum. What is more important is the intellectual move they made in the catalog, which John Tradescant the younger created and in which he distinguished between 2 types of things, naturalls and artificialls. He divided all the things he collected into those he thought were natural and those that were modified by human hand—what archaelogists today call artifacts."
TIMOTHY TAYLOR teaches in the Department of Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK, and conducts research on the later prehistoric societies of southeastern Europe. He has presented BBC archaeology programs and he is the author of The Prehistory of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture, and The Buried Soul.
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THE REALITY CLUB
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MUST WE ALWAYS CATER TO THE FAITHFUL WHEN TEACHING SCIENCE?
By Jerry Coyne
"It seems to me that we can defend evolution without having to cater to the faithful at the same time. Why not just show that evolution is TRUE and its alternatives are not? Why kowtow to those whose beliefs many of us find unpalatable, just to sell our discipline? There are, in fact, two disadvantages to the 'cater-to-religion' stance."
JERRY A. COYNE is a professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago. His new book is Why Evolution Is True.
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ON "NEWSPAPERS AND THINKING THE UNTHINKABLE" By Clay Shirky
MARC FRONS: Clay Shirky's shock treatment for newspapers executives — "Nothing will work" — is a refreshing rejoinder to the proponents of the latest batch of so-called solutions to the industry's crisis. His words are all the more important given the fundamentalist certainty with which many of these failed or unrealistic strategies are being advanced. But it is by no means inevitable, as he asserts, that all old media institutions will disintegrate as the printed newspaper itself diminishes in importance and eventually ceases to exist. A few newspapers will make the transition to an all-digital future with their newsrooms largely intact. It's just not obvious yet how they will get there.
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IN THE NEWS
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NEWSWEEK
April 6, 2009
RAGE AGAINST THE ART GENE
By Jeremy McCarter
"Darwin revolutionized our understanding of mankind's origins. Now scientists think they can apply his theories to the source of our creativity without it sounding like a lot of monkey business."
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THE ECONOMIST
March 27, 2009
ECONOMIST DEBATES: THE ETHICS OF DNA DATABASING
This house believes that people's DNA sequences are their business, and nobody else's.
Professor J. Craig Venter: "As I suspected he would, Art Caplan raised the fear argument. 'The police, government, medical system, researchers and prosecutors … the military, your out-of-wedlock children, your parents, your boss, doctor, hospital, universities, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and the immigration service etc., 'are all out to get your DNA and control you'. They know that they can track you, control you and even profit from you."
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NEW HUMANIST
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Book Review: Questions of Truth: God, Science and Belief by John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale
AC Grayling rips into the latest attempt to bridge the God-science gap
By AC Grayling
...This is the strategy adopted by the Templeton Foundation too, of sidling up to proper scientists and scientific establishments and getting their sticky religious fingers on to respectable coat-sleeves in the hope of furthering their agenda - which, to repeat what must endlessly be repeated in these circumstances, is to have the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research.
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FINANCIAL ANALYSTS JOURNAL
January/February 2009
MODELS
By Emanuel Derman
...Financial models [are] best regarded as a collection of parallel, inanimate "thought universes" available for exploration. Each universe should be internally consistent, but the financial/human world, unlike the world of matter, is vastly more complex and vivacious than any model we could ever make of it. The right way to engage with a model is to be like a reader of fiction — to suspend disbelief and then push ahead with the model as far as possible.". ...
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THE TIMES
March 28, 2009
NATURE V NURTURE? PLEASE DON'T ASK
The question has fuelled some of history's fiercest scientific and political feuds. Now we have an answer
By Mark Henderson
...Though well-intentioned, and in some respects an important antidote to pseudoscientific genetic determinism, this view was dangerously inflexible. Any evidence that genetics might be seriously influential after all would threaten the very foundations of liberty and equality - so it would have to be resisted, as would research that might provide it.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, March 29, 2009
FRONT PAGE
VAST SPY SYSTEM LOOTS COMPUTERS IN 103 COUNTRIES
By John Markoff
TORONTO — A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
Sunday, March 29, 2009
SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW
GET SMART
By Jim Holt
Richard E. Nisbett, a prominent cognitive psychologist who teaches at the University of Michigan, doesn't shirk the hard work. In "Intelligence and How to Get It," he offers a meticulous and eye-opening critique of hereditarianism. True to its self-helplike title, the book does contain a few tips on how to boost your child's I.Q. — like exercising during pregnancy (mothers who work out tend to have bigger babies who grow up smarter, possibly because of greater brain size). But its real value lies in Nisbett's forceful marshaling of the evidence, much of it recent, favoring what he calls "the new environmentalism," which stresses the importance of nonhereditary factors in determining I.Q.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE
Sunday, March 29, 2009
COVER STORY
THE CIVIL HERETIC
By Nicholas Dawidoff
FOR MORE THAN HALF A CENTURY the eminent physicist Freeman Dyson has quietly resided in Prince ton, N.J., on the wooded former farmland that is home to his employer, the Institute for Advanced Study, this country's most rarefied community of scholars. Lately, however, since coming "out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned," as Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors' letter boxes and Dyson's own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective in which Dyson has discovered himself variously described as "a pompous twit," "a blowhard," "a cesspool of misinformation," "an old coot riding into the sunset" and, perhaps inevitably, "a mad scientist." Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. Then he added the caveat that if CO2 levels soared too high, they could be soothed by the mass cultivation of specially bred "carbon-eating trees," whereupon the University of Chicago law professor Eric Posner looked through the thick grove of honorary degrees Dyson has been awarded — there are 21 from universities like Georgetown, Princeton and Oxford — and suggested that "perhaps trees can also be designed so that they can give directions to lost hikers." Dyson's son, George, a technology historian, says his father's views have cooled friendships, while many others have concluded that time has cost Dyson something else. There is the suspicion that, at age 85, a great scientist of the 20th century is no longer just far out, he is far gone — out of his beautiful mind.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
March 29, 2009
WIKIPEDIA EXPLORING FACT CITY
By Noam Cohen
Contributors to Wikipedia have wondered aloud lately if — perish the thought — they are running out of topics. The obvious articles, low-hanging fruit like "China," "Moses" and "Homer Simpson," have been written and rewritten hundreds of times. There are more than 2.8 million articles on the English version of Wikipedia alone. Already looking back, Wikipedia this month got its first serious memoir, "The Wikipedia Revolution," by Andrew Lih, an early Wikipedian (yes, that is what they call themselves), who writes about how "a bunch of nobodies created the world's greatest encyclopedia."
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TED TALKS
March, 2009
TALKS NATHAN WOLFE: HUNTING THE NEXT KILLER VIRUS
Virus hunter Nathan Wolfe is outwitting the next pandemic by staying two steps ahead: discovering new, deadly viruses where they first emerge -- passing from animals to humans among poor subsistence hunters in Africa -- before they claim millions of lives.
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SALON
March 23, 2009
YOU ARE NOT YOUR BRAIN
We have become too reductive in understanding ourselves, argues philosopher Alva Noe. Our thoughts and desires are shaped by more than neurons firing inside our heads.
By Gordy Slack
There's a kind of temporal lobe epilepsy that causes people to experience deeply religious feelings. Couldn't the relevance of that association tell us something about, say, the roots or essence of religious experience?
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REASON ONLINE
February 2009
'CHIEFS, THIEVES, AND PRIESTS'
Science writer Matt Ridley on the causes of poverty and prosperity
By Ronald Bailey
...It's very clear from history that markets bring forth innovation. If you've got free and fair exchange with decent property rights and a sufficiently dense population, then you get innovation. That's what happens in west Asia around 50,000 years ago: the Upper Paleolithic Revolution.
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BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW
March 23, 2009
THE THINKING READ
WHY EVOLUTION IS TRUE
By A. C. Grayling
...A paradigm case is Jerry Coyne's lucidly brilliant account of evolutionary theory, Why Evolution Is True. For many reasons, among them the rapid advances we are witnessing in contemporary biological science, an understanding of evolution as the central principle of biology is crucial. If we are to be informed participants in the debate about what we want from the applied biological sciences, across the range from medicine to cloning to genetic modification of crops to the saving of endangered species, we need a proper understanding of evolution as the living world's organising principle.
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BOOKS FROM EDGE
Now Available in Bookstores and Online...
WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT (Harper Perennial)
Edited by John Brockman
With An Introduction By BRIAN ENO
http://www.amazon.com/What-Have-Changed-Your-About/dp/0061686549
"An intellectual treasure trove"
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
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This online EDGE edition with streaming video is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge279.html
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Edge Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code.
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EDGE
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant
Copyright (c) 2009 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022
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