Edge 235 - February 6, 2008
[15,900 words]
This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge235.html
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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LIFE: A GENE-CENTRIC VIEW
Craig Venter & Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich
(Moderator: John Brockman)
NOW AVAILABLE: COMPLETE ONE-HOUR VIDEO & TRANSCRIPT
BETTER THAN FREE
By Kevin Kelly
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EDGE IN THE NEWS
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PUBLICO (Lisbon)
Cover Story, Sunday Magazine
When the world's great scientific thinkers change their minds
By Ana Gerschenfeld
WALL STREET JOURNAL
A Sense of the Future
Scientists, writers, athletes and others try to see what lies ahead
By Paul Boutin
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould
By Richard C. Lewontin
TIMES COLONIST (Victoria, British Columbia)
Boffins wax poetic about their passions; Mainstream media, readers seem
scared despite fine writing, fascinating facts
By Barbara Julien
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THE THIRD CULTURE
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CRAIG VENTER: One of the exciting elements that people who are interested in the digital world here may find is we can use the genetic code to watermark chromosomes. You can use it in a secret code, or you can?basically what we're using is the three-letter triplet code that codes for amino acids. There's 20 amino acids, and they use single letters to denote those. Using the triplet code, we can write words, sentences, we can say, "This genome was made by Richard Dawkins on this date in 2008." A key hallmark of man-made species, manmade chromosomes, is that they will be very much denoted that way.
RICHARD DAWKINS: What has happened is that genetics has become a branch of information technology. It is pure information. It's digital information. It's precisely the kind of information that can be translated digit for digit, byte for byte, into any other kind of information and then translated back again. This is a major revolution. I suppose it's probably "the" major revolution in the whole history of our understanding of ourselves. It's something would have boggled the mind of Darwin, and Darwin would have loved it, I'm absolutely sure.
LIFE: A GENE-CENTRIC VIEW
Craig Venter & Richard Dawkins: A Conversation in Munich
(Moderator: John Brockman)
It's not everyday you have Richard Dawkins and Craig Venter on a stage talking for an hour about "Life: A Gene-Centric View". That it occurred in Germany, where the culture has been resistant to open discussion of genetics, and at DLD, the Digital, Life, Design conference organized by Hubert Burda Media in Munich, a high-level event for the digital elite - the movers and shakers of the Internet - was particularly interesting. This event was a continuation of the EDGE "Life: What a Concept!" meeting in August, 2008.
EDGE is pleased to report on the event:
- the complete one hour video;
- the verbatim transcript;
- a sampling of the press from event articles in Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Spiegel Online, and Stern.
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SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG
22. Januar 2008 FEUILLETON
The future of Selection: Scientists Craig Venter and Richard Dawkins in Munich (Die Zukunft der Selektion)
Digital or biological? There was a moment during Munich's conference about the future at DLD ( Digital Life Design) this past Monday, that felt like the exchage of a baton. After a rather dull discussion about social platforms on the internet a burly man entered the stage,introduced himself as John Brockman and proclaimed that the topic of the hour would now be biology.
John Brockman was not just another moderator. In the late summer of 2007 he hosted the now legendary symposium 'Life: What a Concept!' at his farm in Connceticut. This was where six pioneers of science had jointly proclaimed a new era: After the decyphering of the human genome soon whole genomes sequences could be written. That would be the beginning of the age of biology.
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SPIEGEL ONLINE
January 22, 2008
GENETICS REVOLUTION
Craig Venter wants to email life (Craig Venter will Lebewesen e-mailen
By Christian Stocker
Amidst all the enthusiasm for technology, one conversation had more explosive potential than the talking points of all the old and new digital entrepreneurs put together.
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STERN
January 23, 2008
When Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and dispeller of the God delusion, and Craig Venter, who first decoded the human genome, come together for their conversation, the audience feels privileged to listen in, and strains to follow their not-entirely-easy-to-follow lines of reasoning. The two thinkers are in agreement that, as Dawkins put it, "genetics has entered the realm of information technology." The growing understanding of our genetic makeup and the complex interplay of our genes has been "the biggest revolution in the history of human self-knowledge."
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BETTER THAN FREE
By Kevin Kelly
This super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy, particularly those involved with exports - that is, those industries where the US has a competitive advantage. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.
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EDGE IN THE NEWS
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"Edge: brilliant, essential and addictive"
PUBLICO
14 Jan 2008 Lisbon
Front Page
Science
History Shows That Famous Thinkers Also Get It Wrong. And they admit it
Cover Story, Sunday Magazine
When the world's great scientific thinkers change their minds
One hundred and sixty-five eminent thinkers, researchers, and communicators, at the annual request of the edge.org website, answered the following question: "What Have You Changed Your Mind About? Why?"
Ana Gerschenfeld
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http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge235.html#publico
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THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ? WEEKEND JOURNAL, Page W8
January 26, 2008
BOOKS
A Sense of the Future
Scientists, writers, athletes and others try to see what lies ahead
By Paul Boutin
...Not surprisingly, the most detailed predictions in both books come from information technologists. Second-guessing current trends is, after all, an integral part of their work. Taken together, the optimistic visions of several of Mr. Brockman's Net-savvy essayists seem not just wonderful but plausible: The Internet, for all it has brought so far, is only the first step before a much bigger leap in information and interconnectivity between people. ...
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NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
Volume 55, Number 2 February 14, 2008
The Triumph of Stephen Jay Gould
By Richard C. Lewontin
Some depart entirely from their expertise and build a public career with only the slimmest connection to their professional knowledge. It will not be obvious to the readers of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel that he is, in fact, a physiologist and an expert in tropical biogeography. Still others are public figures concerned with political questions quite separate from the content of their intellectual accomplishment. Noam Chomsky's politics have nothing to do with his theory of universal grammar, although he might gain attention for his political arguments because we already know that he is very smart. It is even possible to become a public intellectual in science with no institutional home in a technical discipline. Richard Dawkins, who was trained as a biologist and who obviously knows a great deal about genetics and evolution, is Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. ...
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TIMES COLONIST (Victoria, British Columbia)
January 27, 2008 Sunday
Boffins wax poetic about their passions; Mainstream media, readers seem scared despite fine writing, fascinating facts
By Barbara Julian, Special to the Times Colonist
In its roundup of best books of 2007, The Economist claimed that "there is something for everyone" - but there wasn't.
There was not a single science title, which is curious, even for a business and political affairs periodical, given not only the technology-invention-business connection but also the fact that we are currently in a golden age of literary science writing.
That we are is affirmed by British science journalist Matt Ridley in his introduction to a recent collection of essays on evolution. Scientists, says Ridley, "(are) writers and their currency (is) words: poetic flights of fancy, ample use of metaphor, and personal appeals to the reader."
Many editors, reviewers and other publicists don't seem to have heard the news, however. Not only The Economist but also the Globe & Mail and the New York Times snubbed 2007's science titles. ...
...In his Christmas Day sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury praised his compatriot Richard Dawkins for expressing humanity's "amazement and awe" at nature, and urged people to treat nature with "reverence." It seems that for some, the famous long cultural war between science and the humanities can now be over, and that "science literature" can now be literature.
That is certainly the opinion of editor John Brockman whose exhilarating science site "edge.org" profiles dozens of groundbreaking scienists by asking them an annual New Year's Big Question. This year's is "What Have You Changed Your Mind About?"
Their answers add up to, roughly, "everything." That is what science frees thinkers to do: change their theories as new evidence comes in. Most responders one way or another emphasized the ethical demands of good science, and described scientific work as subjective, dynamic and creative - rather like the humanities, in fact.
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This online EDGE edition is available at:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge235.html
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EDGE
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher
Russell Weinberger, Associate Publisher
Karla Taylor, Editorial Assistant
Copyright (c) 2008 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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