Fwd: Edge 206: Pinker: "A History of Violence"

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Edge <editor@edge.org>
Date: 28 Mar 2007 18:53
Subject: Edge 206: Pinker: "A History of Violence"
To: Rhys Evans <wheresrhys@gmail.com>

March 28, 2007

EDGE 206
http://www.edge.org

[10,675 words]

This EDGE edition, at 10,675 words with graphics and links, is available online at http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge206.html

----------------------------------------------------
THE THIRD CULTURE
----------------------------------------------------
A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
By Steven Pinker

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

[ED. NOTE: Based on Pinker's talk at this year's interesting and eclectic TED Conference in Monterey, California, organized by TED "curator" Chris Anderson.]

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER
By Denis Dutton

This makes instrumental criticism a tricky business. I'm personally convinced that there is an authentic, objective maturity that I can hear in the later recordings of Rubinstein. This special quality of his is actually in the music, and is not just subjectively derived from seeing the wrinkles in the old man's face. But the Joyce Hatto episode shows that our expectations, our knowledge of a back story, can subtly, or perhaps even crudely, affect our aesthetic response.

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
UNIVERSE
REVEALING OUR MODERN MYTHOLOGY
By Jonathan Harris

As humans, we have a long history of projecting our great stories into the night sky. This leads us to wonder: if we were to make new constellations today, what would they be? If we were to paint new pictures in the sky, what would they depict? These questions form the inspiration for Universe, which explores the notions of modern mythology and contemporary constellations.

[ED. NOTE: One of the highlights of the TED Conference was the premiere a new work by Jonathan Harris, a New York artist and storyteller working primarily on the Internet. His work involves the exploration and understanding of humans, on a global scale, through the artifacts they leave behind on the Web.]

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
RED ANEMONE
By Katinka Matson

New images by EDGE's co-founder and resident artist.

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
THE REALITY CLUB
P.Z. MYERS On "Open Letter To H. Allen Orr"
----------------------------------------------------

Orr would be better served by putting up a clear statement of what god he is defending, rather than shuttling back and forth between the supernatural being Dawkins is addressing and the innocuously ideational metaphysical force that no one is crucifying.

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
THIRD CULTURE NEWS
----------------------------------------------------

SCIENCE
>From Whole Earth to the Whole Web
Henry Lieberman

Fred Turner's fascinating From Counterculture to Cyberculture gives us a detailed look at one slice through this marvelous story. Unlike many other histories that focus on the technical innovators--the Vin Cerfs, the Tim Berners-Lees, the Alan Kays, the Marvin Minskys--this account focuses on a key player whose role was making the counterculture-cyberculture connection: Stewart Brand

Brand's contribution was reporting on this phenomenon; theorizing about it; popularizing it; cheerleading for it; and organizing, networking, and providing resources for it. Brand articulated the unspoken consensus values of the communities. It's hard to say exactly what he did, but everybody knew him, and that sure helped.

[...more]

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

WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN
What Is Your Dangerous Idea
By Tony Maniaty

What is Your Dangerous Idea? Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable

BRAIN stretch is an exciting concept, the more so as John Brockman's anthology pushes everything to the extreme. Can our brains exist without bodies? If, as Ray Kurzweil says, ''we need only 1 per cent of 1 per cent of the sunlight to meet all our energy needs'', why are we pouring billions into Middle East wars over oil and not into research on nano-engineered solar panels and fuel cells? Read these 100 or so mini-essays and realise how lacking in vision most politicians are.

[...more]

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

MSNBC
Elegant physicist makes string theory sexy
By Alan Boyle

Elegant physicist makes string theory sexy

Brian Greene does theoretical physics ... and Hollywood as well
By Alan Boyle, Science editor

If you're trying to impress the geeks, being a professional string theorist would have to put you pretty high up on the coolness scale. And if you're a string theorist with books, movies and TV shows to your credit, so much the better.

By those measures, Columbia University physicist Brian Greene has already achieved superstring stardom: His book about string theory, "The Elegant Universe," broke onto bestseller lists and spawned a "Nova" documentary series by the same name (which you can watch online). He has consulted with - and taken cameo roles in - movies ranging from "Frequency" to "Deja Vu" to "The Last Mimzy" (which opens Friday). He's made the talk-show circuit, from "Nightline" and Letterman to "The Colbert Report." And as if all that wasn't enough, he's also organizing a World Science Festival in New York City.

[...more]

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

THE NEW REPUBLIC
Histories of Violence
By Steven Pinker

Here are some of the most important books about violence, its evolution, and its uses during the twentieth century.

* Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). "And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." This pithy description of life in a state of nature is just one example of the lively prose in this seventeenth-century masterpiece. Hobbes's analysis of the roots and varieties of violence is uncannily modern, and anticipated many insights from game theory and evolutionary psychology. He also was the first cognitive scientist, outlining a computational theory of memory, imagination, and reasoning.

* Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, Homicide (1988). This is the book that sold me on evolutionary psychology. Daly and Wilson use homicide statistics as an assay for human conflict, together with vivid accounts from history, journalism, and anthropology. They select each of the pairings of killer and victim-fratricide, filicide, parricide, infanticide, uxoricide, stepparent-stepchild, acquaintances, feuds & duels, amok killers, and so on-and test predictions from evolutionary theory on their rates and patterns. The book is endlessly insightful and beautifully written. ...

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
THE NEW YORK TIMES - SCIENCE TIMES
Scientist Finds the Beginnings of Morality in Primate Behavior
By Nicholas Wade

...Moral philosophers do not take very seriously the biologists' bid to annex their subject, but they find much of interest in what the biologists say and have started an academic conversation with them.

The original call to battle was sounded by the biologist Edward O. Wilson more than 30 years ago, when he suggested in his 1975 book "Sociobiology" that "the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized." He may have jumped the gun about the time having come, but in the intervening decades biologists have made considerable progress.

Last year Marc Hauser, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard, proposed in his book "Moral Minds" that the brain has a genetically shaped mechanism for acquiring moral rules, a universal moral grammar similar to the neural machinery for learning language. In another recent book, "Primates and Philosophers," the primatologist Frans de Waal defends against philosopher critics his view that the roots of morality can be seen in the social behavior of monkeys and apes.

[...more]


----------------------------------------------------
SCIENCE
METAGENOMICS:
Ocean Study Yields a Tidal Wave of Microbial DNA
John Bohannon

Data glut or unprecedented science? A global hunt for marine microbial diversity turns up a vast, underexplored world of genes, proteins, and "species"

After relishing the role of David to the Human Genome Project's Goliath, J. Craig Venter is now positioning himself as a Charles Darwin of the 21st century. Darwin's voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle 170 years ago to the Galápagos Islands netted a plethora of observations-the bedrock for his theory of evolution. Four years ago, Venter set sail for the same islands and returned 9 months later with his own cache of data-billions of bases of DNA sequence from the ocean's microbial communities. But whether that trip will prove anything more than a fishing expedition remains to be seen.

On 13 March, Venter, head of the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, and a bevy of co-authors rolled out 7.7 million snippets of sequence, dubbed the Global Ocean Sampling, in a trio of online papers in PLoS Biology. As a first stab at mining these data, which have just become publicly available to other scientists, Venter's team has found evidence of so many new microbial species that the researchers want to redraw the tree of microbial life. They have also translated the sequences into hypothetical proteins and made some educated guesses about their possible functions.

Some scientists are wowed by the effort. Others worry that researchers will not be able to make sense of all this information. The diversity of microbes uncovered is "overwhelming, … tantamount to trying to understand the plot of a full-length motion picture after looking at a single frame of the movie," says Mitch Sogin, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. And Venter doesn't necessarily disagree. In 2004, as the data were first rolling in, Venter confidently predicted that his salty DNA survey would "provide a different view of evolution." To make that happen, however, he now says, "we need even more data." ...

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
TIME
60-SECOND SYNOPSIS READING JUDAS
By Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King

60-SECOND SYNOPSIS READING JUDAS By Elaine Pagels and Karen L. King; 198 pages

All About The Gospel of Judas

A year ago, scholars got access to a bizarre document from about A.D. 150 called The Gospel of Judas. In it, Jesus promises Judas heaven for turning him in and maligns the rest of the Apostles for sacrificing their followers.

Princeton's Pagels and Harvard's King try to decipher the document. Why reward Judas? Because Jesus' death helps prove what the Gospel writer thought was Christ's real message: that his-and our-true essence is not flesh but immortal spirit. And the text bad-mouths other disciples as an indirect way of attacking 2nd century Christian bishops who encouraged believers to be martyrs.

The authors suggest the text was a polemic-and a losing one, since martyrdom became a pillar of the church. But its angry tone supports a favorite theme of Pagels': that not all early believers embraced doctrines now accepted as handed down directly from Jesus.

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
THE IRISH TIMES
Reading room: a surfers' guide

"www.edge.org has established itself as a major force on the intellectual scene in the US"

Reading room: a surfers' guide
The Dublin Review of Books will boast a regular blog where readers can carry on live discussion of particular articles or topics between issues.

But it isn't the only online magazine vying for the attention of literary audiences - there are dozens of sassy outfits out there, each with its own distinctive perks and quirks. ...

www.edge.org has established itself as a major force on the intellectual scene in the US and as required reading for humanities heads who want to keep up to speed with the latest in science and technology. Current debates on the site feature stellar contributors Noam Chomsky, Scott Atran and Daniel C Dennett.

----------------------------------------------------
FRESH AIR
With Terry Gross
Interviews
The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity

Religion scholars Elaine Pagels and Karen King's new book, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity, interprets and translates the recently discovered gnostic gospel of Judas.

Ms. ELAINE PAGELS: What we're showing in this gospel is how stories about Jesus were told by people who began to tell them and write them down. This is in the New Testament and outside the New Testament, and what they knew is that Judas had handed Jesus over to the people who arrested him. That's what they knew. That's what the earliest account said. And then later, people speculated, `Why did he do it? Why did he commit this crime,' as they saw it? And some said, `Well, he did it for greed. He did it for money.' The gospel of Judas says he did it because Jesus asked him to.

......Ms. KING: You know, Terry, many of your readers I think when they hear this are going to think of it as revisionist, are going to call it revisionist. But I would say what they need to understand first of all is that the story that we have now is from the side of those who won. You know, the winners get to tell history, and what we're doing is not revising history. What we're doing is filling it out. What these new texts are giving us are voices from early Christians that allow us now to hear many sides of the debates and struggles, the experiences that Christians were undergoing in this period. So it is a fuller and richer picture of what was going on in this early Christian movement, and the gospel of Judas gives us one kind of voice. We had not really had voices before that allowed us to hear Christians objecting to the heroization of martyrs.

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
SKEPTICAL INQUIRER
Intellectual and creative magnificence
Kenneth W. Krause

What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers in the Age of Uncertainty

...What We Believe But Cannot Prove offers an impressive array of insights and challenges that will surely delight curious readers, generalists and specialists alike. Science is intimidating for the vast majority of us. But John Brockman has grown deservedly famous in recent years for his ability to lure these disciplines and theirleading practitioners back to Earth where terrestrials are afforded all-too-rare opportunities to marvel at the intellectual and creative magnificence of science in particular, and at our species' immeasurable potential in all pursuits more generally.

----------------------------------------------------
PHYSICS WORLD
Intellectual innovator

Former physicist Nathan Myhrvold has been many things - from Bill Gates' right-hand man to the world champion of barbecue. He tells Martin Griffiths how he is now hoping to change the way the world invents. ...

...Myhrvold also funds research into dinosaur paleontology, and even does some research on the topic on the side. In 2000 he had a paper published in Nature on his co-discovery of a bird-like tail bone from and dynamics of molecules within a non-avian dinosaur in Mongolia.  Most people's hobbies do not end up being published in leading scientific journals, but then Myhrvold makes a habit of excelling.

A case in point is his passion for cookery, which led to him training as French chef, working part-time in a top Seattle restaurant and winning the barbecue world championship in Memphis in 1991. Myhrvold is even working on a cookbook that will include a section on "physics for chefs", which will cover using the heat-diffusion equation to explain how quickly a steak cooks.

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
NEWSWEEK
Our Books, Ourselves
By Malcolm Jones

Our Books, Ourselves

Baby boomers and their books-it's a love story where nobody ever said he was sorry. Except, perhaps, for 'Love Story' itself.
By Malcolm Jones

...The best memoirists are cranks at heart. They don't want anyone else telling them how it all happened. They want to do the telling. They're like some old coot down in the basement building a car from scratch. And what is that if not a boomer trait, maybe the best of all?

... Self-reliance, self-invention-these ideas are as old as the republic. But in their art-from rock to graphic novels-the boomers took these concepts about as far as any generation has. There are few, if any, schools of writing, just lots of individualist writers going their own way.

In that light, if I had to nominate one book to stand for my generation, it wouldn't be a novel, or a memoir, or a graphic novel. It would be The Whole Earth Catalog. First published in 1968, the brainchild of Stewart Brand went through many subsequent editions. In it you could find information on raising goats, building a geodesic dome-just about anything. It was the first place I heard of the architectural writing of Christopher Alexander, solar power, paleontologist Gregory Bateson, the tools of Smith & Hawken and the excellent novelist Gurney Norman, whose "Divine Right's Trip" was first published on every other page of the first edition of the catalog. The catalog's subtitle was "Access to Tools," and the first lesson it taught me was that a book is a kind of tool, a thing you use to learn with.

It is, at last, out of print, but that fact belies this ultimate baby-boomer bible's profound influence on the culture-not the counterculture but the whole culture. In a way, you could say that the catalog put itself out of business, because it so successfully anticipated the way we currently gain access to information-to almost everything, really. Not coincidentally, Brand was an early fan of the computer and the Internet. The way I searched for information in the pages of that counterculture wishbook, one reference leading to another, in an endless chain of influence, is almost exactly the way I use a computer. The Whole Earth Catalog was just the first, and very successful, prototype of a search engine.

"We are as gods, and might as well get good at it," Brand wrote in the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog. When it comes to books, I think we took his advice. ...

[...more]

----------------------------------------------------
This EDGE edition, at 10,675 words with graphics and links, is available online at
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge206.html
----------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------
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.

---
You are currently subscribed to edge_editions as: wheresrhys@gmail.com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-2582575-13069806A@sand.lyris.net


--
http://londonskyline.blogspot.com