Fwd: Edge 202: Dennett: Open Letter to H. Allen Orr; Foreman: Wake Up Mr. Sleepy!; Schwartz: Davos Report

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Edge <editor@edge.org>
Date: 12 Feb 2007 16:55
Subject: Edge 202: Dennett: Open Letter to H. Allen Orr; Foreman: Wake Up Mr. Sleepy!; Schwartz: Davos Report
To: Rhys Evans <wheresrhys@gmail.com>

February 12, 2007

EDGE 202
http://www.edge.org

[14,000 words]

This EDGE edition, at 14,000 words with streaming video, graphics and links, is available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge202.html

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THE REALITY CLUB
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When I explained then in a private letter to you what I had meant, you conceded to me in your private response that you had not seen my point in the light I intended, and that my claim was not in fact the blunder you had said it was-but of course you never chose to recant your criticism in print, so your uncorrected accusation stands to this day. Such a gentleman and a scholar you are! But times have changed. We now have blogs, so this time you can readily respond in public to my open letter.

OPEN LETTER TO H. ALLEN ORR
By Daniel C. Dennett

FROM: Daniel C. Dennett
TO: H. Allen Orr

Dear Allen,

You claim Dawkins ignores the best thinking on the subject. The Selfish Gene, which you rightly admire, doesn't waste any time rebutting Teilhard de Chardin, or any of the perennial would-be defenders of Lamarckism, or even?I might add?many of the murkier claims made by Richard Lewontin over the years. Do you object that he thus "ignores the best thinking on evolution"? No, you say he "wrestled with the best thinkers." So you must have in mind some neglected gems on religion: what arguments andor thinkers on the topic of religion ought Dawkins to have tackled in detail? What in your opinion is the best thinking on the subject?

I hope that you don't mean the recent reviews. Some of them did indeed "shred" Dawkins' 747 argument, if by that you mean they scoffed and hooted and clawed at it. Did any of them, in your opinion, rebut it soundly? Tom Nagel made some dismissive remarks-not arguments-in passing. Do you count that? I'd really like to know which published critique of the 747 argument you endorse, so I can explain to you, a non-philosopher, what its shortcomings are. Maybe there are some good ones I haven't seen, but I'll lead with my chin. I myself think Dawkins has made some excellent improvements on the standard arguments, improvements any philosopher would be proud to have composed. As I said in my own review, in Free Inquiry:

"Dawkins set out to expose and discredit every source of the God delusion, and even when he is going over familiar ground, as he often must, he almost invariably finds some novel twist that refreshes our imaginations. Some of the innovations are substantial. After flattening all the serious arguments for the existence of God, he turns the tables and frames an argument against the existence of God, exploiting one of the favorite ideas of Intelligent Design demagogues: the improbability of design. The basic argument, that postulating God as creator raises the question of who created God, has been around for years, but Dawkins gives it a proper spine and uses it to show first that "Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested." (p121) Then he goes on to show how understanding this conclusion illuminates the confusing controversies surrounding the proper use of the anthropic principle. We are accustomed to physicists presuming that since their science is more "basic" than biology, they have a deeper perspective from which to sort out the remaining perplexities, but sometimes the perspective of biology can actually clarify what has been murky and ill-motivated in the physicists' discussions."

I'd be interested to see the 'shreddings" that persuaded you otherwise.

And you say that C.S. Lewis "had already dispensed with" one of Dawkins' claims. Am I to take it that you are now endorsing the quote from Lewis as an adequate rebuttal or pre-refutation of Dawkins?

You misconstrued my NYRB letter in several ways. I didn't say you held Dawkins' book to too high a standard; I said you imposed a goal on the book that was not Dawkins' goal. I didn't say or imply that Dawkins' book was "merely a popular survey" and I didn't say or imply that you were "disturbed by Dawkins' atheism." I said you adopted a double standard-like many atheists, I might add-and were attempting to protect religion from serious criticism, for reasons I am curious to know. These misconstruals do not strike me as unintended, but perhaps you read with a broad brush.

As I write this message, I am reminded of your earlier trashing, more than ten years ago, of my book Darwin's Dangerous Idea, first in Evolution, which does not permit rebuttals from authors, and then, slightly enlarged, in the Boston Review, which does. You leveled very serious charges of error and incomprehension in that review, and when I challenged them, you responded with a haughty dismissal of my objections (in an exchange in the Boston Review). Quoting an example, dealing with the speed of evolution: "Now I've been in the population genetics business for some time and, frankly, I have no idea what Dennett is talking about. And-I can find no polite way of putting this-it's hard to escape the conclusion that Dennett has no idea what he's talking about either." (1996, p37) Now that was rude-even ruder than your reply this time. When I explained then in a private letter to you what I had meant, you conceded to me in your private response that you had not seen my point in the light I intended, and that my claim was not in fact the blunder you had said it was-but of course you never chose to recant your criticism in print, so your uncorrected accusation stands to this day. Such a gentleman and a scholar you are! But times have changed. We now have blogs, so this time you can readily respond in public to my open letter.

Note that I have not yet claimed that you have no idea what you're talking about; we philosophers try not to jump to conclusions. I have however asked you, twice now, to tell us what you're talking about. Please.

I await your reply.

Dan Dennett

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NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Volume 54, Number
3 March 1, 2007

Letter

'THE GOD DELUSION' by Daniel C. Dennett, Reply by H. Allen Orr

In response to A Mission to Convert (January 11, 2007)

To the Editors:

H. Allen Orr, in "A Mission to Convert" [NYR, January 11], his review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion and other recent books on science and religion, says that Dawkins is an amateur, not professional, atheist, and has failed to come to grips with "religious thought" with its "meticulous reasoning" in any serious way. He notes that the book is "defiantly middlebrow," and I wonder just which highbrow thinkers about religion Orr believes Dawkins should have grappled with. I myself have looked over large piles of recent religious thought in the last few years in the course of researching my own book on these topics, and I have found almost all of it to be so dreadful that ignoring it entirely seemed both the most charitable and most constructive policy. (I devote a scant six pages of Beraking the Spell to the arguments for and against the existence of God, while Dawkins devotes roughly a hundred, laying out the standard arguments with admirable clarity and fairness, and skewering them efficiently.) There are indeed recherchÈ versions of these traditional arguments that perhaps have not yet been exhaustively eviscerated by scholars, but Dawkins ignores them (as do I) and says why: his book is a consciousness-raiser aimed at the general religious public, not an attempt to contribute to the academic microdiscipline of philosophical theology. The arguments Dawkins exposes and rebuts are the arguments that waft from thousands of pulpits every week and reach millions of television viewers every day, and neither the televangelists nor the authors of best-selling spiritual books pay the slightest heed to the subtleties of the theologians either.

Who does Orr favor? Polkinghorne, Peacocke, Plantinga, or some more recondite thinkers? Orr brandishes the names of two philosophers, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and cites C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity, a fairly nauseating example of middle-brow homiletic in roughly the same league on the undergraduate hit parade as Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ (1998) and transparently evasive when it comes to "meticulous reasoning." If it were a book in biology?Orr's discipline?I daresay he'd pounce on it like a pit bull, but like many others he adopts a double standard when the topic is religion. [...more]

H. Allen Orr replies:

Daniel Dennett's main complaint about my review is that I held Dawkins's book to too high a standard. The God Delusion was, he says, a popular work and, as such, one can't expect it to grapple seriously with religious thought. There are two things wrong with this objection. The first is that the mere fact that a book is intended for a broad audience doesn't mean its author can ignore the best thinking on a subject. Indeed it's precisely the task of the popularizer to take this best thinking and present it in a form that can be understood by intelligent laymen. This task is certainly feasible. Ironically, the clearest evidence comes from Dawkins himself. In his popular works on evolution, and especially in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins wrestled with the best evolutionary thinkers ?Darwin, Hamilton, and Trivers?and presented their ideas in a way that could be appreciated by a broad audience. This is what made The Selfish Gene brilliant; the absence of any analogous treatment of religion in Dawkins's new book is what makes it considerably less than brilliant.

The second thing wrong with Dennett's objection is that it's simply not true that The God Delusion was merely a popular survey and "not an attempt to contribute to ...philosophical theology." Dennett has apparently forgotten that the heart of Dawkins's book was his philosophical argument for the near impossibility of God. Dawkins presented his so-called Ultimate Boeing 747 argument in a chapter entitled "Why There Almost Certainly Is No God," branded his argument "unanswerable," and boasted that it had stumped all theologians who had met it. I can see why Dennett would like to forget about Dawkins's attempt at philosophy?the Ultimate 747 argument was shredded by reviewers?but it's absurd to pretend now that The God Delusion had no philosophical ambitions.
[...more]

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THE THIRD CULTURE
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WAKE UP MR. SLEEPY! YOUR UNCONSCIOUS MIND IS DEAD
By Richard Foreman
February 12, 2007

RICHARD FOREMAN RETURNS TO THE ONTOLOGICAL THEATRE WITH HIS LATEST MIXED MEDIA EXTRAVAGANZA

In 2005, Edge featured Richard Foreman's "The Pancake People, or, 'The Gods are Pounding My Head' which he noted that "I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self-evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the "instantly available". A new self that needs to contain less and less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance?as we all become "pancake people"?spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button". He then announced his 40+ career as New York's leading avant garde theatrical director had come to an end, and he was going to begin exploring film. Now Foreman is back as a new hybrid vision

Still young and artistically radical as he approaches 70, Richard Foreman's 45th Ontological-Hysteric production plunges into a new world in which human consciousness is turned inside out. Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead! is his second project defining a new kind of theater in which film and live action trace parallel contrapuntal dream narratives.

Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! postulates the invention of the airplane (controlled by a horde of baby-doll pilots) as the death knell of the unconscious mind. Foreman is responding to a world in which visionary sages and poets are being replaced by specialists who make platitudes out of the immediately observable and hand-feed them to the public. In Richard Foreman's universe, his muse and ally, the unconscious, fights back to life in a shape resembling "the stone that rolls up the hill backwards" (the evil one) and from such "evil", life renews itself. [See New York Times review].

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THE NEW YORK TIMES
February 5, 2007

Throw a Bucket of Ice Water on Your Brain By BEN BRANTLEY

Those among you who presume you are still alive might be interested to know that Richard Foreman is throwing a funeral for you at the Ontological Theater at St. Mark's Church.

Never mind that your pulse says your heart is still pumping. Mr. Foreman says the most essential part of you ? your independent, intuitive mind ? is a cold corpse. He has thoughtfully whipped up a memorial service, a dazzling exercise in reality-shifting called "Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind Is Dead!," that is as invigorating as it is mournful. Who knows? It might indeed be enough to wake the dead.

Two years ago Mr. Foreman, the great gray wizard of experimental theater, announced that he would no longer be creating the exquisitely unsettling dreamscapes that had been his specialty since the 1960s. It was time, he said, to bid farewell to the theater.

You have to be skeptical when brilliant artists declare they are leaving the art they love. Mr. Foreman has continued to ply his exotic trade of nonnarrative, nonlinear play making, set in fun houses crammed with mysterious cultural detritus, but with one essential difference: He has added film to the mix of what had been resolutely and religiously theatrical productions, which would seem to be a case of sleeping with the enemy.

"Wake Up" is Mr. Foreman's second film-theater hybrid. Even more than his first, "Zomboid!," presented last year, it shows how this priest of the theater has embraced his old adversary only to disarm it. Mr. Foreman creates beautiful filmic pictures for his audience's consumption. But he refuses to let us wallow in them.

The theory at work would seem to be that we have come to trust too much in the surfaces of artfully arranged pictures and information. Hooking the mind to such surfaces, Mr. Foreman says, is fatal to the unconscious. ("When the world sees itself, it doesn't," says a line from the script.) While "Wake Up" is clearly a bid to resurrect theatergoers' deeper imaginations, the elegiac undercurrent that courses through the show suggests its creator worries that he may be too late.

... An optimist could say that Mr. Foreman is portraying a rebirth of unconsciousness ? a dying that is actually, as the title promises, a reawakening.

Maybe. But as exhilarating as "Wake Up" is, it is also steeped in melancholy. Usually with Mr. Foreman, snatches of music summon the comic frenzy of silent movies. This time the aural backdrop is darker: a mixture of ringing cellphones, a wandering plaintive soprano and a hushed percussive beat that suggests an advancing army. "It can't be fixed" is the mantra that stuck in my head.

But that's probably just my unconscious mind talking. (Yours may have a different opinion.) Hey, that means it's not dead after all. Mr. Foreman appears to have done his job.

[...continue]

[Click on image for Richard Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre]

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YOU TUBE
THE DAWKINS DELUSION
Dr. Terry Tommyrot

"No, Richard Dawkins does not exist. I have never seen him. Science has given a full and satisfying explanation of the book alleged to be his handiwork. It is but a collection of fortuitously ordered a's, b's and c's, recombined from previous patterns. There is the alphabet, there is a book of nursery rhymes and there is "The God Delusion" - and one developed from the other, though some of the details of which is the most primitive remain to be sorted out. The links between them may still be missing, but Science will have that worked out at any moment. Anyone who doubts this fact is either lying, mad or stupid (or wicked, but I'd rather not think about that possibility)."

[...continue]

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CONSTELLATIONS
By Brian Eno

Luminous, a new exhibit of 77 Million Paintings by seminial sound and light artist Brian Eno is about to open in central London at Selfridges' London (400 Oxford St, London W1A 2LR), and run between 27 January to 11 March in the Ultralounge, its dedicated space for special projects.

Another Eno installation, Constellations, will be exhibited at the North London BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art from 31 January to 15 April. This is the first time these digital light paintings which are accompanied by a randomly assembled ambient music track have been exhibited in a contemporary UK art gallery.

Eno, primarily known for shattering musical conventions as a founding member of Roxy Music and pioneer of ambient music has created a computer programme that continually fuses his virtual paintings to create 77 million permutations.

'We are used to artists producing defined and finished things, what's interesting about this kind of generative work is that I can't possibly predict the outcome of 77 Million Paintings,' says Eno. More than 300 Eno paintings, most of them scratched or inked onto slides, were digitized to create Constellations (77 Million Paintings). The constantly evolving paintings will be shown on a group of screens installed throughout the Level 4 gallery space.

'The 77 million permutations of the work creates unique moments for each viewer and provides a different experience every time,' adds Eno. It's been estimated that it would take over 9,000 years to watch the entire show at the fastest speed available on the software and it would take several million years to witness all the possible combinations it can create.

Click here for Brian Eno's Edge Bio Page.

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THE COLBERT REPORT
February 8, 2007

Steven Pinker Explains How The Brain Works in Five Words

[click on image]

... [STEPHEN COLBERT:] Your specialty is the brain and how it works. Right?

[STEVEN PINKER:] Right.

It's a complicated subject. How does the brain work? Five words or less.

Brain cells fire in patterns.

Brain cells fire in patterns. Not bad.  And these patterns establish our behavior and stuff like that,

A pattern corresponds to a thought. One patterns causes another pattern, that's what happen when we think.

OK. Let me ask you something. You're also, you're also, uh, language is very important to you. Umm, uhh, wha wha, what, why is language important?

It's the way we get our thoughts across. It's the way we cooperate, the way we share our knowledge?

How important is volume? I find if I'm trying to get an idea across if I shout it at the person I'm saying it to, it makes it seem more important. Is that common?

I think that's common, unfortunately, yes.

Now, uh, your book here, you've got a book called  The Blank Slate, The Human Denial of Nature. What are we denying about human nature, Sir?

A lot of people are upset about the very idea that there is such a thing as human nature. Some people fear that ?

Well, that God gave us our nature.

Some people fear that human nature is a product of evolution, rather than a  ?

I don?t fear it I deny it. I'm not afraid of evolution because I know it's not really there. I'm not afraid of ghosts either.

Some people are afraid of the idea that if were born with any kind of talent or temperaments,  then different people can be born with different talents and temperaments, and that seems to open the door to discrimination and oppression. Some people are upset that if we have any kind of instincts we may have selfish and nasty instincts and that would seem to get in the way of hopes for social reform. Why try to make the world a better place if people are rotten to the core and we'll just foul it up no matter what you  do.

Well I say some people get it some people just don?t.

Well, that would imply that there are differences among people.

There are.

And there are people that would want to deny that there could be differences among people and if we all start off with nothing then by definition we're all the same.

No, we don't all start off with nothing in my opinion, if I may, and I may because it's my show, I don't think we start off with nothing. I think we can achieve nothing. I think we can become a blank slate. I've worked very hard over the years to stop thinking and now I'm empty inside. What do you think people have, uh, what do you think people have instinctually other than original sin. What do they have when they're born? ...

[...continued]

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THE HARVARD CRIMSON
February 8, 2007

Pinker's Brain Picked On 'Colbert Report' By Claire M. Guehenno, Crimson Staff Writer

Last night, Colbert?who plays a right-wing pundit on his show "The Colbert Report" - welcomed Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology Steven Pinker as a guest on his program. The appearance came just two months after Colbert journeyed to Cambridge himself to record segments for his show at the Institute of Politics.

In last night's segment, entitled "Pinker and the Brain," Colbert and Pinker discussed basic brain function and human nature. Colbert introduced Pinker by saying that because Pinker is a Harvard professor, he "probably thinks I think he's a pompous know-it-all."

Colbert asked Pinker to summarize the brain in five words or less, to which he responded "Brain cells fire in patterns."

Pinker said he was surprised by his own ability to describe the brain in so few words under pressure.

"I never thought I could sum up how the brain works in exactly five words!" he wrote in an e-mail after he taped the show, adding that he was "pretty nervous beforehand."

Most of the discussion focused on Pinker's 2002 book "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature"?a book on evolutionary psychology?as Pinker struggled to explain his beliefs about brain function while Colbert joked and interrupted him.

Colbert also poked fun at Pinker's 2003 move from MIT to Harvard.

"You were at MIT first then went to Harvard? That's like going from the nerds' table to the rich nerds' table," Colbert said.

At the "rich nerds' table," Pinker continues to be a professor of some of the College's most popular classes.

Pinker, who has in the past led the popular core Science B-62, "The Human Mind," is co-teaching Psychology 1002, "Morality and Taboo," with Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz this spring.

There was no specific occasion for Pinker's appearance on the show, as he has not published any major works in the past year. A Comedy Central representative said she could not comment on why Pinker was chosen as a guest.

[...continue]

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What is Davos and how does it work? Officially the meeting is called the World Economic Forum. This is their annual meeting, but there are many other meetings during the year held around the world, but this is their big event they are known for. It was founded and run by Klaus Schwab in the early eighties as mostly a European event, but has grown huge and global with about 2000 participants from all over the world.

DAVOS REPORT
By Peter Schwartz

Introduction

Every year dozens of Edgies are invited to the World Economic Forum event and the dancing bears to perform for the corporate and govermental elite. Attending this years conference were Peter Schwartz, Larry Brilliant, John Markoff, Paul Saffo, Lord Martin Rees, Adam Bly, Dan Dubno, and Yossi Vardi. Peter Schwartz, founder of Global Business Network (GBN), is equally at home and astute in the worlds of science, technology and the corporate boardroom. This year, he wrote a blog which is is distilled into this report.

[...continue]


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EDGE BOOKS
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"Danger - brilliant minds at work...A brilliant book: exhilarating, hilarious, and chilling." - The Evening Standard (London)

[US EDITION NOW AVAILABLE FROM HARPERCOLLINS!]

WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA?
Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable
With an Introduction by STEVEN PINKER and an Afterword by RICHARD DAWKINS
Edited By JOHN BROCKMAN

"A selection of the most explosive ideas of our age."
Sunday Herald

"Provocative"
The Independent

"Challenging notions put forward by some of the world's sharpest minds"
Sunday Times

"A titillating compilation"
The Guardian

Hardcover - UK £12.99, 352 pp Free Press, UK

Paperback - US $13.95, 336 pp Harper Perennial

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"...This collection, mostly written by working scientists, does not represent the antithesis of science. These are not simply the unbuttoned musings of professionals on their day off. The contributions, ranging across many disparate fields, express the spirit of a scientific consciousness at its best - informed guesswork "
- Ian McEwan, from the Introduction, in The Telegraph

WHAT WE BELIEVE BUT CANNOT PROVE
Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty
With an Introduction by IAN MCEWAN
Edited By JOHN BROCKMAN

"An unprecedented roster of brilliant minds, the sum of which is nothing short of an oracle ? a book ro be dog-eared and debated."
Seed

"Scientific pipedreams at their very best."
The Guardian

"Makes for some astounding reading."
Boston Globe

Fantastically stimulating...It's like the crack cocaine of the thinking world.... Once you start, you can't stop thinking about that question."
BBC Radio 4

Paperback - US $13.95, 272 pp Harper Perennial

Paperback - UK £7.99 288 pp Pocket Books

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IN THE NEWS
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Canberra Times, Seed, New York Times, Boston Globe, Toronto Star, Les Affaires, Tonight, Genome Technology Online, Le Monde

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CANBERRA TIMES
February 10, 2007

Peering dangerously into a future of ageless codgers

AN IDEA may be dangerous either to its conceiver or to others, including its proponents. Four hundred years ago, heliocentricity was acutely dangerous to Galileo, whom it led before the Holy Inquisition. Two and a half centuries later, Darwin's notions on natural selection and the evolution of species jeopardised the certainties and imperilled the livelihoods of many professional Christians. To this day, the idea that God does not exist is dangerous enough to get atheists murdered in America.

The editor of this anthology of dangerous ideas, John Brockman, is, among other things, the publisher of Edge, the "Third Culture" website (www.edge.org). He has already published What We Believe but Cannot Prove, to which this volume is a companion. Each year, Brockman asks a question of his contributors. Last year's was: "What is your dangerous idea?" He meant not necessarily a new idea, or even one which they had originated, but one which is dangerous "not because it is assumed to be false but because it might be true". This volume, with an introduction by Steven Pinker and an afterword by Richard Dawkins, publishes the responses given in 2006 by 108 of "Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable".

...There is much in many of these brief essays to astonish, to be appalled at, to mull over or to wish for. Some of them suffer from galloping emailographism, that mannerism of the hasty respondent whose elliptical prose can make even the most pregnant idea indigestible. But most of them, from the three-sentence reminder by Nicholas Humphrey of Bertrand Russell's dangerous idea ("That it is undesirable to believe in a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true") to the five pages of V.S. Ramachandran on Francis Crick's "Astonishing Hypothesis" (that what we think of as our self is merely the activity of 100 billion bits of jelly, the neurons which constitute the brain), are vitally engaging to anyone with an ounce of interest in matters such as being or whatever meaning we might deem being to have.

...Mind you, there is one glimpse of the future which rings grotesque enough to be plausible, Gerald Holton's "Projection of the Longevity Curve", in which we see a future matriarch, 200 years old, on her death bed, surrounded by her children aged about 180, her grandchildren of about 150, her great-grandchildren of about 120, their offspring aged in their 90s, and so on for several more generations. A touching picture, as the author says, "But what are the costs involved?"

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Seed
February 8, 2007

More from the Vanguard of Science

See what Marc Hauser, Drew Endy, Joshua Greene, and others have to say about where their fields are going in 2007 By Edit Staff

Cosmology and Particle Physics

On the theoretical side, particle phenomenologists will continue to develop physics beyond the Standard Model; string theorists are  connecting more strongly to cosmology and astrophysics; and cosmologists are investigating models of dark matter, dark energy, and modified gravity. ...

- Sean Carroll, Caltech

Synthetic Genomics

The goal of synthetic biology is to make possible the engineering of living organisms that behave as expected. Progress in the field is based on three new foundational technologies that go beyond classical genetic engineering: automated DNA synthesis, standardization, and abstraction. Synthesis enables direct construction of genetic material from raw chemicals and information. Standards and abstraction together provide the languages and grammars needed to define the information used by DNA synthesizers. 2007 should witness two important milestones for automated DNA synthesis (which enables direct construction of genetic material from raw chemicals and information). ...

-Drew Endy, MIT

Neuroscience

In the last five years the scientific study of morality has exploded. We're now probing the moral brain like never before, using functional neuroimaging, studies of neurological patients, and sophisticated cognitive testing techniques. As a result of this work, it's now clear (to some of us, at any rate) that moral decision-making is neither a pristine rational enterprise, nor simply a matter of emotional expression. ...

-Joshua Greene, Harvard University

High Energy Physics

The coming year will see a number of interesting developments as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) goes online. The enormous amount of data generated by the LHC will force us to refine our methods?and explore new ones?for extracting and interpreting information from high energy collisions. This work should lead to new insights into the masses of elementary particles and the consequences of various models for particle physics and cosmology. ...

Lisa Randall, Harvard University

[...]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 30, 2007
SCIENCE TIMES

How Do We See Red? Count the Ways
By Natalie Angier

Valentine?s Day is nearly upon us, that sweet Hallmark holiday when you can have anything your heart desires, so long as it's red. Red roses, red nighties, red shoes and red socks. Red Oreo filling, red bagels, red lox.As it happens, red is an exquisite ambassador for love, and in more ways than people may realize. Not only is red the color of the blood that flushes the face and swells the pelvis and that one swears one would spill to save the beloved?s prized hide. It is also a fine metaphoric mate for the complexity and contrariness of love. In red we see shades of life, death, fury, shame, courage, anguish, pride and the occasional overuse of exfoliants designed to combat signs of aging. Red is bright and bold and has a big lipsticked mouth, through which it happily speaks out of all sides at once. Yoo-hoo! yodels red, come close, have a look. Stop right there, red amends, one false move and you?re dead.

Such visual semiotics are not limited to the human race. Red is the premier signaling color in the natural world, variously showcasing a fruitful bounty, warning of a fatal poison or boasting of a sturdy constitution and the genes to match. Red, in other words, is the poster child for the poster, for colors that have something important to say. "Our visual system was shaped by colors already in use among many plants and animals, and red in particular stands out against the green backdrop of nature," said Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of "Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness." "If you want to make a point, you make it in red.

[...]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

BOSTON GLOBE
February 5, 2007

Morality play

A Harvard researcher believes that humans have an innate sense of right and wrong, but others say morality is mostly learned

By Carey Goldberg, Globe Staff

Last week, Harvard professor Marc Hauser dropped in to his daughter Sofia's kindergarten class and presented the children with a moral dilemma. You must all keep your eyes closed for 30 seconds, he told them. If none of you raises your hand during that time, you will each get a sheet of stickers when it's over. But if one of you raises your hand, only that child will get all the stickers.

The task brought immediate cries of protest, Hauser recalled. "But that's not fair!" some children exclaimed, shocked at the idea that one child could hog all the stickers.

Some might say that the kindergartners, in their short lives, had already learned much about the nature of justice. But Hauser goes a step further: Morality, he argues, is influenced by cultural teachings but is also so deep and universal an aspect of human existence that it is effectively "hard-wired" into the brain, much like the instinct for language.

At work, he says, are principles as unconscious and yet powerful as the grammar rules we use when we speak -- and the challenge to scientists is to figure out what those built-in moral rules are and how they work.

To that end, Hauser and other researchers are experimenting with children, monkeys, on-line survey takers, brain-damaged patients, and even psychopaths and remote hunter-gatherers.

His theory that morality is based in biology has plunged Hauser into an intellectual fray that spans from the pages of The New York Times to the rows of students who take his evolution classes at Harvard.

A psychologist, evolutionary biologist, and anthropologist, Hauser has felt students grow restless as he talks about the underpinnings of morality. In one class, he said, a student complained, "I know where you're going: Because it's universal, it's biological, and therefore there's no role for religion."

Hauser recalls responding: "I'm not saying you shouldn't derive meaning from religion. I'm just telling you that at some level, the nature of the moral judgments that you make and I make are the same, even though I don't go to church and you do."

[...]

------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE TORONTO STAR W
ho believes in God?

Michael Shermer was once a fundamentalist Christian, but is now an agnostic and an advocate for humanist philosophy.

...When Sulloway and I noticed the difference between why people believe in God and why they think other people believe in God, we decided to undertake an extensive analysis of all the written answers people provided in our survey. In addition, we inquired about family demographics, religious background, personality characteristics, and other factors that contribute to religious belief and skepticism. We discovered that the seven strongest predictors of belief in God are:

1. being raised in a religious manner

2. parents' religiosity

3. lower levels of education

4. being female

5. a large family

6. lack of conflict with parents

7. being younger ...

[... ]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

JOURNAL LES AFFAIRES
2 fÈvrier 2007

L'optimisme boursier actuel est inquiÈtant

Bernard Mooney , Journal Les Affaires

Le marchÈ boursier se distingue ‡ bien des Ègards. Ainsi, dans la vie de tous les jours, l'enthousiasme, l'optimisme et la confiance sont des valeurs importantes. Mais ‡ la Bourse, ces belles qualitÈs peuvent devenir des piËges co?teux.

Le paradoxe, c'est que notre monde en gÈnÈral est en manque d'optimisme, alors mÍme qu'il y en a probablement trop dans les marchÈs financiers.

Le site Web Edge.org offre un lieu d'Èchange ‡ un grand nombre de scientifiques, philosophes, penseurs et intellectuels de tous genres. Le consulter est fascinant. La quantitÈ et la qualitÈ des interventions qu'on y trouve sont vraiment exceptionnelles.

Au dÈbut de chaque annÈe, John Brockman, Èditeur d'Edge.org, pose une question fondamentale ‡ ses participants. En 2006, la question Ètait "Quelle est votre idÈe dangereuse?"

Cette annÈe, sa question est "- propos de quoi Ítes-vous optimiste?" Et des personnalitÈs comme le psychologue Steven Pinker, le philosophe Daniel Dennett, le biologiste Richard Dawkins, le psychologue Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, le biologiste et gÈographe Jared Diamond, le physicien Freeman Dyson, le psychologue Daniel Goleman et des dizaines d'autres y ont rÈpondu.

[...]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TONIGHT (South Africa)
February 1, 2007

What Is Your Dangerous Idea?

Question everything, ban nothing, think dangerously By James Mitchell

Dare to question. Most don't. Indeed, many people get alarmed, agitated, when difficult questions are posed.

Questioning settled assumptions forces people to think, which can be a frightening, radical exercise.

Consider the "dangerous ideas" listed here: "Do women, on average, have a different profile of aptitudes and emotions than men?

Were the events in the Bible fictitious ? not just the miracles, but those involving kings and empires? Do most victims of sexual abuse suffer lifelong damage? Did Native Americans engage in genocide and despoil the landscape? Do men have an innate tendency to rape?

Are suicide terrorists well-educated, mentally healthy, and morally driven? Are Ashkenazi Jews, on average, smarter than Gentiles because their ancestors were selected for the shrewdness needed in money lending? ...

Steven Pinker, in his introduction, calls these "dangerous ideas - ideas that are denounced not because they are self-evidently false, not because they advocate harmful action, but because they are thought to corrode the prevailing moral order"....

...psychologist Daniel Gilbert employs just 131 words to shoot down the thought "that ideas can be dangerous".

Paradoxically, he states "the most dangerous idea is the only dangerous idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous."

Whew! I was worried for a moment. Like the meaning of life, there's no simple answer. Which is why so many, desperate for certainty, shy away books like this.

Personally, I relish such questions, and if you have any sort of an open, enquiring mind, then so will you.

[...]
------------------------------------------------------------------------

GENOME TECNOLOGY ONLINE
January 31, 2007

Keeping the Glass Half Full

The Edge Foundation, an intellectual group of leaders from various fields, has issued its question of the year: What are you optimistic about? While we might rephrase the question to eliminate that irksome preposition, the point today is that genomic heavyweight George Church has sent in his response, and it's worth a read.

Church predicts that 2007 will be the year of the personal genome, with the mainstream public finally getting involved (and interested) in the field and its consequences. "I am optimistic that while society is not now ready, it will be this year," Church writes. Check out his full response here.

And for the record - it's people like George Church who keep us optimistic. Thanks, George!

[...]

------------------------------------------------------------------------

LE MONDE 08
janvier 2007

"Dans quel domaine Ítes-vous optimiste? Et pourquoi?"

C'est la double question posÈe par John Brockman, Èditeur de Edge ‡ plus de 160 "penseurs de la troisiËme culture, ces savants et autres penseurs du monde empirique qui, par leur travail ou leurs Ècrits prennent la place des intellectuels traditionnels en rendant visibles les sens profonds de nos vies, en redÈfinissant autant qui nous sommes que ce que nous sommes".

«a change des unes constamment catastrophiques de nos mÈdias habituels.

Quelques exemples:

Brian Eno estime que la rÈalitÈ du rÈchauffement global est de plus en plus acceptÈe et que cela pourrait donner lieu ‡ un premier cas de gouvernance globale. D'o? sa principale source d'optimisme: "le pouvoir croissant des gens. Le monde bouge, communique, se connecte et fusionne en des blocs d'influence qui transfËreront une partie du pouvoir des gouvernements nationaux prisonniers de leurs horizons ‡ court terme dans des groupes plus vaques, plus globaux et plus consensuels. Quelque chose comme une vraie dÈmocratie (et une bonne dose de chaos dans l'intÈrim) pourrait Ítre ‡ l'horizon".

Xeni Jardin de BoingBoing, est optimiste aprËs avoir suivi les travaux de la Forensic Anthropology Foundation du Guatemala, un groupe qui se consacre ‡ identifier les morts assassinÈs par la dictature en s'appuyant sur des logiciels open source, des ordinateurs recyclÈs et l'aide de laboratoires amÈricains pour l'analyse de l'ADN. "Quant au moins une personne croit que la vÈritÈ Áa compte, il y a de l'espoir," conclue-t-elle.

[...]

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This EDGE edition, at 14,000 words with streaming video, graphics and links, is available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge202.html
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EDGE

John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant

Copyright (c) 2007 by EDGE Foundation, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.

Published by EDGE Foundation, Inc.,
5 East 59th Street, New York, NY 10022

EDGE Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit private  operating foundation under Section 501(c)(3) of  the Internal Revenue Code.

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