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9.23.10 |
EDGE MASTER CLASS 2010
CANCERING
Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation
W. Daniel Hillis
We make a mistake when we think of cancer as a noun. It is not something you have, it is something you do. Your body is probably cancering all the time. What keeps it under control is a conversation that is happening between your cells, and the language of that conversation is proteins. Proteomics will allow us to listen in on that conversation, and that will lead to much better way to treat cancer.
August 8-9. 2010
Spring Mountain Vineyard
St. Helena, CA (Napa)
[See: The Edge Master Classes & Seminars]
Introduction
By John Brockman
In August, Edge convened the fourth in it's series of annual Master Classes at Spring Mountain Vineyard in Napa. Danny Hillis came for three days to talk about his new work in cancer research. The leaders of the National Cancer Institute," he said, "are very keenly aware of how little progress has actually been made in the treatment of cancer. This is something they pay a lot of attention to. They're thinking very laterally in giving funding to people like me to work on cancer."
"What they've said is 'Let's bring some new kinds of thinking to this, and create a program where we have physical scientists be the principle investigators, partnered with the co-investigators who are clinicians and biological scientists.' I'm partnering with David Agus, for example. But giving money to the physical scientist is a pretty radical idea, you can imagine it is very controversial within the biological community."
"NCI has started a few of these centers," Hillis continued, "and given them five years to work. They need to be interdisciplinary and geographically distributed. Our center at USC has people all over the United States involved in it, like Cold Spring Harbor, Stanford, Arizona, UT, NYU and CalTech."
As a result, Hillis is the newly appointed professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC). And he is the principal investigator of a five-year government program on cancer.
This is a very imaginative initiative. In the 1980s and 90s, Danny Hillis, an inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary, pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He broke the von Neumann bottleneck and changed the way we think about, and use, computation. Hillis's contributions affect nearly every scientific discipline, not to speak of the daily lives of most people on the planet. When he speaks, I listen.
It's interesting to note that "scale", "scalability", are among the favorite mantras of today's digital age. But what is embodied in the mind of Danny Hillis, is a quaint analog notion: ideas scale.
University of Southern California Physical Sciences-Oncology Center
The University of Southern California Physical Sciences-Oncology Center's (USC PS-OC) overall goal is to thoroughly understand therapeutic response.
Investigators will establish a predictive model of cancer that they can utilize to determine tumor steady state growth and drug response, particularly those involved in the hematological malignancies of acute myeloid leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Furthermore, multi-scale physical measurements will be unified with sophisticated modeling approaches to facilitate the development of a model that can derive the tumor's traits during its growth and after any distress, such as chemotherapeutic treatment. These investigators will apply pioneering measurement platforms to resolve real-time protein interactions and protein abundance and to characterize protein modifications. Appropriately, these studies will also address tumor and host response to therapy using a systems approach. Overall, the predictive tumor response model should enable clinicians to determine the most efficacious therapies a priori and reduce deleterious side effects. |
"We misunderstand cancer by making it a noun", Hillis says. "Instead of saying, 'My house has water', w' say, 'My plumbing is leaking.' Instead of saying, 'I have cance'", we should say, "I am cancering.' The truth of the matter is we're probably cancering all the time, and our body is checking it in various ways, so we're not cancering out of control. Probably every house has a few leaky faucets, but it doesn't matter much because there are processes that are mitigating that by draining the leaks. Cancer is probably something like that.
"In order to understand what's actually going on, we have to look at the level of the things that are actually happening, and that level is proteomics. Now that we can actually measure that conversation between the parts, we're going to start building up a model that's a cause-and-effect model: This signal causes this to happen, that causes that to happen. Maybe we will not understand to the level of the molecular mechanism but we can have a kind of cause-and-effect picture of the process. More like we do in sociology or economics."
Stewart Brand, John Brockman, W. Daniel (Danny) Hillis
Below is part I of the 2-part Edge Master Class which is available in three formats: streaming viideo (one hour), audio download, and text. Part II is coming soon.
— JB
W. DANIEL ("DANNY") HILLIS is Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, Judge Widney Professor of Engineering and Medicine of the University of Southern California (USC), professor of research medicine at the Keck School of Medicine, and research professor of engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering. An inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary, Hillis pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 150 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices.
In 2005, Hillis and others from Applied Minds initiated Metaweb Technologies to develop a semantic data storage infrastructure for the Internet, and Freebase, an "open, shared database of the world's knowledge". That company was recently acquired by Google. He is the author of The Pattern on the Stone. and Co-Chair of Long Now Foundation and the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.
Further reading
on Edge:
• "The Hillis Knowledge Web: An Idea Whose Time Has Come"
• Part V: "Danny Hillis: Something Beyond Ourselves" in The
Third Culture
• "Danny Hillis: The
Genius" in Digerati: Encounters With The Cyber Elite
Danny Hillis's Edge Bio Page
[...Continue to the Edge Master Class 2010]
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CANCERING
Listening In On The Body's Proteomic Conversation (Part I)
Right now, I am asking a lot of questions about cancer, but I probably should explain how I got to that point, why somebody who's mostly interested in complexity, and computers, and designing machines, and engineering, should be interested in cancer. I'll tell you a little bit about cancer, but before I tell you about that, I'm going to tell you about proteomics, and before I tell you about proteomics, I want to get you to think about genomics differently because people have heard a lot about genes, and genomics in the last few years, and it's probably given them a misleading idea about what's important, how diseases work, and so on. ...
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FORSKNINGSRADET
20, September 2010
IAN McSCIENCE
Gunnar Colbjørnsen
 Last week was Ian McEwan in the country to promote his latest novel, "Solar". McEwan is fiction writer known for her turn from the macabre plots in the earliest novels, to a culture of cool rational protagonists if the world cracked in later releases, a bit like all that terrible that gave McEwan nicknamed Ian McAbre in the 80's has been sublimed and now appears as an underlying discomfort in his recent novels, most evident in releases like "Saturday" and now "Solar".
There is an ever more socially engaged, optimistic about technology and science writer geeky we are dealing with in the case of Ian McEwan. In particular, science is his heart, or should we say brain, near. For several years, McEwan cultivated a close relationship, both personal and professional, with well-known scientists, fagformidlere and scientific spin doctors, of whom the most influential people such as Richard Dawkins and John Brockman *. When McEwan also has been noticeably shaped by events such as the Rushdie affair, 11 September, the Iraq invasion and 7 July will be a total metamorphosis, his last novels can be read as a criticism of both the political left as "soft" humanities universities, projected through a sarcastic view of the world. ...
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* Brockman is probably an unknown name to most people, in short, he is the most important literary agent in research dissemination in the United States, and considering that several of his authors, eg.physicist Brian Greene has topped the New York Times' bestseller list, He enjoys a very special position in the field, also because of his efforts to bring together the best thinkers from different disciplines through interdisciplinary seminars and online projects as The Reality Club and edge.org . [Foto: Wikimedia Commons)
Google Translation | Norwegian Original
THE FRONT PAGE
21 set 2010
THE SCIENCE OF MORALS (LA SCIENZA DELLA MORALE)
(Fabrizio Rondolino and Claudio Velardi)
Edge.org is a site worth visiting regularly. Guiltily, sometimes reduces me to surf when I get the news. Edge In discussing interesting ideas, often "heretical" because they challenge openly, to use Kuhn, the current paradigm.Its creator, John Brockman, is, in my opinion, a seductive, but concerned, business oriented man.
The discussions, however, has the ability to inspire are always of great value. The last one I received the mail (Edge 327) entitled "The new science of morality". Warning: the science, the philosophy of morality. A debate among eight scientists, mostly psychologists, which ended with the signing of a statement, that a declaration entitled "Consensus statement." More than anything, an intellectual provocation, aimed at defining what are the points on which there is agreement among scientists concerned with the "scientific study of human nature."
To understand what we are talking about must take a step back, and back in the early 70s. E 'in this period that a "graduate student" at Harvard, an evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, wrote five articles to define a new field of scientific inquiry: the study, scientific, not philosophical or religious or political, of human nature . Thousands of books and experiments have been conducted and written in the last 35 years on the subject. Morality, ethics and more generally, will eventually be a chapter a day for no more philosophical, but scientists, what Wilson, author of Sociobiology (1975) ...
Summary of what? Of many different disciplines. I will mention a few. Evolutionary Biology, Physics, Information Technology, Genetics, Neurobiology, Psychology, Engineering, Chemistry of Materials (yes, even the chemistry of materials. We are made of matter, and therefore any effect on what we are or we will also become the chemistry of the elements that we are made or not?). All these matters, pertaining to domains that are essential for understanding what "means" to be "human." ...
Google Translation | Italian Original
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THE NEW SCIENCE OF MORALITY
An Edge Conference
CONSENSUS STATEMENT
A statement of consensus reached among participants at
the Edge The New Science of Morality Conference
Washington, CT, June 20-22, 2010
In the last ten years, morality has become a major convergence zone for scholars in the sciences and humanities. The volume of research has increased rapidly, as has the diversity of methods employed. In an effort to take stock of this rapidly changing field, Edge convened a conference in Washington, CT, on June 20-22, 2010. The participants in the conference described their own work, and then attempted to draft a list of points on which all could agree. They reached consensus on the eight points listed below.
This Consensus Statement is not intended to speak for all who study morality, nor is it intended to be a definitive pronouncement about morality. Rather, the statement is intended to be a starting point for an Edge Reality Club conversation. It is proposed as a first draft of a partial description of the state of the art, submitted to the research community for commentary and editing.
In addition, a forthcoming set of individual statements will highlight areas of disagreement among this statements signatories.
Signed by:
Roy Baumeister, Florida State University
Paul Bloom, Yale University
Joshua Greene, Harvard University
Jonathan Haidt, University of Virginia
Sam Harris, Project Reason
Joshua Knobe, Yale University
David Pizarro, Cornell University
CONSENSUS STATEMENT
1) Morality is a natural phenomenon and a cultural phenomenon
Like language, sexuality, or music, morality emerges from the interaction of multiple psychological building blocks within each person, and from the interactions of many people within a society. These building blocks are the products of evolution, with natural selection playing a critical role. They are assembled into coherent moralities as individuals mature within a cultural context. The scientific study of morality therefore requires the combined efforts of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities.
2) Many of the psychological building blocks of morality are innate
The word "innate," as we use it in the context of moral cognition, does not mean immutable, operational at birth, or visible in every known culture. It means "organized in advance of experience," although experience can revise that organization to produce variation within and across cultures.
Many of the building blocks of morality can be found, in some form, in other primates, including sympathy, friendship, hierarchical relationships, and coalition-building. Many of the building blocks of morality are visible in all human culture, including sympathy, friendship, reciprocity, and the ability to represent others' beliefs and intentions.
Some of the building blocks of morality become operational quite early in childhood, such as the capacity to respond with empathy to human suffering, to act altruistically, and to punish those who harm others. ...
[...Continue to Consensus Statement]
THE REALITY CLUB: Liane Young, Robert Kurzban, Jonathan Baron, Linda J. Skitka, Kees van den Bos, Daniel R. Kelly, Peter Ditto, Alison Gopnik, Randolph Nesse, M.D., , Scott Atran, Daniel L. Everett, Christina Bicchieri
[...Continue to Reality Club discussion] |
| EDITOR NOTE: A strong case can be made that in the past 50 years, the two most influential evolutionary theorists are George C. Williams and Robert Trivers. Here, Trivers remembers Williams ...
ROBERT TRIVERS
In memory of George C. Williams
The last time I spoke with George Williams was in 2002 when I called about something and he told me he had pre-Alzheimer's. There were simple memory tests now that were diagnostic, he said. In the background I could hear his wife Doris saying something and George said, "Doris always tells me not to tell people" and continued by saying that what he first noticed is that all words starting with capital letters were disappearing from his mind — arbitrary words for cities, buildings, people and so on.
A few months later, I sent my Selected Papers book but I never heard from him. He was gone. The person I felt for was Doris, a beautiful woman about half his size, and a very welcome compliment to him. It is those closest to someone with Alzheimer's who often suffer the most but George had a sweet disposition that, I hear, greatly reduced the cost to those closest to him.
We last saw each other at the William Hamilton memorial session at Amherst in 2000 during the meetings of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, at which both of us spoke. He was sitting behind me while others preceded us and I could hear Doris saying, "Now, George, don't do what you are thinking of. Just tell the stories you have about Bill, don't do it." So I was full of anticipation when George got up because I knew he was surely going to do exactly what his wife thought was a bad idea. George gets up and says "I wish Bill were here today, because I have a bone to pick with him".
And then he went and picked that bone for the entire talk. It had to do with the evolution of sex and patterns of evidence that George had pointed out years ago that contradicted (so George said) aspects of Bill's parasite approach. I thought it was wonderful. There were those that said it was inappropriate and why didn't he tell stories, but I thought it was perfect for the occasion, both vintage George Williams — no wasted motion with that organism! — and a tribute to the enduring importance of Bill's ideas.
My first contact with George was when as a graduate student. I sent him my chapter then in press on "Parental investment and sexual selection". When I wrote the paper I had completely forgotten that a key portion of the argumentation came right out of George's 1966 book, Adaptation and Natural Selection. I had only relearned this when I reread his book in preparation for teaching my first course on social evolution. There was "sex role reversed" species (as well as female choice for genes and investment) and the relevant pages were full of underlining and marginal comments by me. None of this was acknowledged in the chapter I was sending him, so I pointed this out and said I would try to put some in before the book was printed. I was therefore feeling a little nervous when a letter came from George Williams. I braced myself for an unpleasant experience.
Instead, I found one of the warmest and most generous letters I have ever received. Among other things, he said my paper had rendered obsolete a chapter in his own forthcoming book on "Sex and Evolution", namely the one on differential mortality by sex, which chapter he enclosed. He said nothing about not being properly cited but dealt only with scientific content. His chapter had my essential insight regarding male mortality — that higher variance in male reproductive success would often select for traits more costly in survival. The larger book was the first to systematically explore the consequences of seeing that sex usually had an immediate 50% cost in every generation (compared to asexuality) which cost had to be overcome in any successful model.
I invited him to Harvard in 1974 and he lectured on his ideas on sex. I do not say he was shy so much as reserved, but with a warm smile and sense of humor. A classic I use often occurred while telling me about the joys of grand-fatherhood. "If I could have figured out how to have grandchildren without having children first, I would have done so." I knew just what he meant — high relatedness, no work! Or as Melvin Newton (Huey's brother) puts it, "You can serve them ice cream for breakfast, what do you care?"
Having started with the evolution of senescence in 1957 in later life he tackled Darwinian Medicine, memorably saying that he did not think there was any compound — arsenic included — that was not beneficial if given in sufficiently small doses. This was almost surely an overstatement but a bracing and useful one. His knowledge of biology was so deep that he is the only person I know of to have predicted in advance the existence of an entire category of selfish genetic elements — androgenesis in which paternal genes eject maternal ones and take over the genome of an organism, a system now known from three very different groups of organisms.
He was a beautiful man, with a very simple and clear style of thinking, in a warm and humble personality. |
He was a beautiful man. —Robert Trivers
GEORGE C. WILLIAMS
(1926-2010)
Niles Eldredge: I remember the English evolutionary geneticist
John Maynard Smith remarking to me that he was astonished to find out
that George Williams wasn't in our National Academy. Williams finally
got elected in 1993. When I visited him in Stony Brook in the mid 1980s,
he told me he was having a hard time getting grant support for his research,
and I couldn't believe that. The two thoughts converged, because George
really is the most important thinker in evolutionary biology in the United
States since the 1959 Darwin centennial. It's astonishing that he hasn't
gotten more credit and acclaim. He's a shy guy, but a very nice guy, and
a very deep and a very careful thinker. I admire him tremendously, even
though we've been arguing back and forth for years now.
GEORGE C. WILLIAMS was an evolutionary biologist; professor emeritus
of ecology and evolution at the State University of New York at Stony
Brook; author of Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of
Some Current Evolutionary Thought (1966), Sex and Evolution (1975), Natural Selection: Domains, Levels, and Challenges (1992),
(with Randolph Nesse, M.D.) Why We Get Sick (1995), and The
Ponyfish's Glow: and Other Clues to Plan and Purpose in Nature (1997).
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Images are bouncing around my head since I learned that George Williams had passed away...
• Meeting him for the first time when with Randy Nesse, who did all the talking (i.e. never stopped talking) obout their planned book on Darwinian Medicine. Finally, I interrupted Nesse and asked the taciturn Dr. Williams, "Professor, what can I tell publishers about you?" "Well", he replied, "I once wrote a little book for a university press, but it was thirty years ago. It probably won't be of interest to them."
• The memorable mid-nineties lunch in my office. Williams and Richard Dawkins on one side of the table, Niles Eldredge sitting across. The long silences.
• Margulis v. Williams. George Williams, looking like Abraham Lincoln, and ever the gentleman, backed up against a wall being harangued by Lynn Margulis at midnight after my dinner in the 90s in Boston at AAAS.
• On the phone on separate calls: Stephen Jay Gould on line 1, George on line 2, jumping back and forth as they "talked" to each other through me.
A number of Edgies knew George Williams and many more have been influenced by his work. I am asking for your stories and recollections. It's time for an Edge conversation.
— JB]
In the meantime, in George's memory, I am pleased to reprise the Introduction ("The Evolutionary Idea"), Chapter One ("George C. Williams: A Package of Information"), and comments Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Lynn Margulis, Steven Pinker, Niles Eldredge, Daniel C. Dennett, excerpted from The
Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1996).
(From The Introduction:)
In Darwin's day, the exact manner of the inheritance of characteristics
was not known; Darwin himself believed that certain characteristics were
acquired by an organism as a result of environmental change and could
be passed to the organism's offspring, an idea popularized by the French
naturalist Jean- Baptiste Lamarck. In 1900, the work done by Mendel some
fifty years earlier was brought to light, and the gene, though its exact
nature was unknown at the time, became a player in "the modern synthesis"
of Mendel and Darwin. This synthesis, which reconciled genetics per se
with Darwin's vision of natural selection, was carried out in the early
1930s by R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, and Sewall Wright, and augmented
a few years later by the work of the paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson,
the biologist Ernst Mayr, and the geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky, who
expanded on this neo-Darwinian paradigm. Nevertheless, there is still
discord in the ranks of evolutionary biologists. The principal debates
are concerned with the mechanism of speciation; whether natural selection
operates at the level of the gene, the organism, or the species, or all
three; and also with the relative importance of other factors, such as
natural catastrophes.
Among the evolutionary biologists, George C. Williams is the senior
figure in the book. People outside the field who take an interest in evolution
are much more likely to think of Stephen Jay Gould or the British evolutionary
biologist Richard Dawkins; few laypeople have heard of Williams. Yet nearly
all evolutionary biologists, even those who do not agree with him, admire
him. Williams was the first to emphasize that it was the gene on which
natural selection acted. In this regard, he precedes Richard Dawkins,
with whom he shares a great many ideas, and he is in a different camp
from Stephen Jay Gould, who has a hierarchical theory of selection processes,
of which the gene is only one level. Williams' book Adaptation and
Natural Selection, published in 1966, was a treatise on what has become
known as ultra-Darwinism. In recent work, Williams describes the gene
as having a "codical" as well as a physical character — that is, he
views the gene as a package of information, not an object. ...MORE
(...Continue to George C. Williams 1926-2010) |
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SAVAGE MINDS
August 30, 2010
There is nothing wrong with Deutscher's article, which seems to be an excerpt from a longer book he is writing, it is just that it was all too familiar. That's because I'd read it all before in Lera Boroditsky's Edge.org article "How does Language Shape the Way We Think?"
MY PROBLEM WITH JOURNALISM
I'm a big advocate of anthropologists finding ways to connect with a larger audience, beyond those who read academic journals. (Sometimes I'm not even sure anthropologists read what other anthropologists write.) But then I see something like Guy Deutscher's NY Times Magazine article "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" and I find myself wondering if the standards of journalism are just too different from those of academics? There is nothing wrong with Deutscher's article, which seems to be an excerpt from a longer book he is writing, it is just that it was all too familiar. That's because I'd read it all before in Lera Boroditsky's Edge.org article "How does Language Shape the Way We Think?" as well as her more recent WSJ piece, "Lost in Translation."
I'm not saying Guy Deutscher plagiarized Lera Boroditsky's work. What I'm saying is that if this was an academic publication he would have been expected to cite her, but because it is journalism there is no such expectation, and that bugs the hell out of me. Even blog posts are expected to link to sources. Perhaps he does cite her in his book, but again, my point is about the standards of the NY Times. Now it is possible that these are simply common stories told by people in the field, but I find it strange that Boroditsky's isn't even mentioned in this article. After all, Newsweek's article on the topic focused on her research.
THE ECONOMIST
September 1, 2010
IT'S WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO
GUY DEUTSCHER chimed in with a new piece last weekend in the New York Times on the recently hot-again topic of language and thought. Language, he says, really may play a big role in how we think. Like Lera Boroditsky, whom we discussed earlier, Mr Deutscher cites some of the recent evidence that while language may not constrict your thought—Ludwig Wittgenstein was quite wrong in saying "the limits of my language are the limits of my world"—it may just nudge or steer it. Often the results are quite subtle, but in at least one case they are quite striking.
The examples Mr Deutscher gives in the piece (which is adapted from his new book, "Through the Language Glass") were all mentioned by Ms Boroditsky in her Wall Street Journal piece and in this Edge article. ...
BOOKS.BLOG.IT
01 settembre 2010
JOHN BROCKMAN: EINSTEIN SECONDO ME
Bollati Boringhieri pubblica il volumetto Einstein secondo me, che mi ha colpito per curatore, John Brockman. Se il nome vi è sconosciuto, fate un salto su Edge.org, il forum dove da anni Brockman stimola la discussione tra le menti più acute del mondo scientifico. E' famosa la domanda che ogni anno pone a questa élite, che risponde con una straordinaria visione collettiva dalla prospettiva di chi vede da vicino il nostro futuro.
Tornando a noi, dal volume in uscita rubiamo per voi in anteprima un passaggio dell'introduzione di Brockman, gentilmente concessa dall'editore. Leggete nel seguito questo bello scorcio di vita americana. ...
THE MAUI NEWS
August 27, 2010
Haku Mo'olelo
Edwin Tanji, Former City Editor
In a technological world saturated with information, the issue is less access to information than validity.
Writer Howard Rheingold ("Smart Mobs") says the overload of online information will require a new kind of literacy - an ability to judge the accuracy of information found on the Web.
"Crap detection - Hemingway's name for what digital librarians call credibility assessment - is another essential literacy. If all schoolchildren could learn one skill before they go online for the first time, I think it should be the ability to find the answer to any questions and the skills necessary to determine whether the answer is accurate or not" ("Attention is the fundamental literacy," Edge World Question 2010, www.edge.org). |
DAVID PIZARRO TALK
What I want to talk about is piggybacking off of the end of Paul's talk, where he started to speak a little bit about the debate that we've had in moral psychology and in philosophy, on the role of reason and emotion in moral judgment. I'm going to keep my claim simple, but I want to argue against a view that probably nobody here has, (because we're all very sophisticated), but it's often spoken of emotion and reason as being at odds with each other — in a sense that to the extent that emotion is active, reason is not active, and to the extent that reason is active, emotion is not active. (By emotion here, I mean, broadly speaking, affective influences).
I think that this view is mistaken (although it is certainly the case sometimes). The interaction between these two is much more interesting. So I'm going to talk a bit about some studies that we've done. Some of them have been published, and a couple of them haven't (because they're probably too inappropriate to publish anywhere, but not too inappropriate to speak to this audience). They are on the role of emotive forces in shaping our moral judgment. I use the term "emotive," because they are about motivation and how motivation affects the reasoning process when it comes to moral judgment.
ELIZABETH PHELPS TALK
In spite of these beliefs I do think about decisions as reasoned or instinctual when I'm thinking about them for myself. And this has obviously been a very powerful way of thinking about how we do things because it goes back to earliest written thoughts. We have reason, we have emotion, and these two things can compete. And some are unique to humans and others are shared with other species.
And economists, when thinking about decisions, have also adopted what we call a dual system approach. This is obviously a different dual system approach and here I'm focusing mostly on Kahneman's System 1 and System 2. As probably everybody in this room knows Kahneman and Tversky showed that there were a number of ways in which we make decisions that didn't seem to be completely consistent with classical economic theory and easy to explain. And they proposed Prospect Theory and suggested that we actually have two systems we use when making decisions, one of which we call reason, one of which we call intuition.
Kahneman didn't say emotion. He didn't equate emotion with intuition.
JOSHUA KNOBE TALK
...what's really exciting about this new work is not so much just the very idea of philosophers doing experiments but rather the particular things that these people ended up showing. When these people went out and started doing these experimental studies, they didn't end up finding results that conformed to the traditional picture. They didn't find that there was a kind of initial stage in which people just figured out, on a factual level, what was going on in a situation, followed by a subsequent stage in which they used that information in order to make a moral judgment. Rather they really seemed to be finding exactly the opposite.
What they seemed to be finding is that people's moral judgments were influencing the process from the very beginning, so that people's whole way of making sense of their world seemed to be suffused through and through with moral considerations. In this sense, our ordinary way of making sense of the world really seems to look very, very deeply different from a kind of scientific perspective on the world. It seems to be value-laden in this really fundamental sense.
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STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER
1945 — 2010
[8.31.10]
Warming is unequivocal, that's true. But that's not a sophisticated question. A much more sophisticated question is how much of the climate Ma Earth, a perverse lady, gives us is from her, and how much is caused by us. That's a much more sophisticated, and much more difficult question.
Stanford climate researcher Stephen H. Schneider, a long-time friend, colleague and Edge contributor, died last month at the age of 65 of a heart attack while on a flight to London.
To remember him, Edge asked Andrew Revkin and Stewart Brand to have an email conversation about his influence on their thinking. From 1995 through 2009, he covered the environment for The New York Times as a staff reporter and he continues to write his "Dot Earth" blog for The Times Op-Ed section. With his 1968 National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog, Brand was one of the founders of the ecology movement. He is the author of recently-published Whole Earth Discipline.
Below, is a 20-minute EdgeVideo interview with Stephen Schneider from our April 2008 feature on his work, "Modeling the Future".
— JB
STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER, a climatologist, was Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, a Co-Director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. He was the author of Laboratory Earth: The Planetary Gamble We Can't Afford to Lose.
Stephen Schneider's Edge Bio
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REMEMBERING STEPHEN SCHNEIDER: Andrew Revkin & Stewart Brand
STEWART BRAND: What I appreciated most about Steve — along with all the significant work he did on climate science and climate policy — was his readiness to declare in public when his mind had been changed by new and better data.
He warned about global cooling when it looked like particulate aerosols were dominating climate change, and then as soon as more thorough models indicated that the effects from increasing greenhouse gases would swamp the cooling effects of aerosols, he reversed his position right away and explained why.
Likewise, several months after he first participated in warnings about "nuclear winter," he publicized new studies indicating that the initial fears were exaggerated.
That's intellectual honesty.
ANDREW REVKIN: I first got to know Steve while reporting a long cover story for Science Digest on nuclear winter (published March, 1985), followed soon after by our interactions while I was trying to determine the fate of Vladimir Alexandrov, a Soviet climate modeler and spokesman on nuclear winter (and probable spy for someone; it was never clear whether for the USSR, USA, or both) who had spent months working on supercomputers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research with Steve and others and vanished in Spain in the mid 1980s while attending a conference on nuclear-free cities.
I, too, was impressed with Steve's eagerness to follow the data, including his work with Starley Thompson of NCAR that concluded the cooling effect of smoke lofted from immolated cities after a nuclear war would be more "nuclear autumn" than nuclear winter. Some scientists, particularly Alan Robock at Rutgers, say Steve was wrong about that conclusion, although my sense is there's enough uncertainty in the science of post-war cooling that it'll never be a significant influence should someone be pondering pushing the button. ...
[...Continue]
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...I think we should differentiate three projects that seem to me to be easily conflated, but which are distinct and independently worthy endeavors. The first project is to understand what people do in the name of "morality." We can look at the world, witnessing all of the diverse behaviors, rules, cultural artifacts, and morally salient emotions like empathy and disgust, and we can study how these things play out in human communities, both in our time and throughout history. We can examine all these phenomena in as nonjudgmental a way as possible and seek to understand them. We can understand them in evolutionary terms, and we can understand them in psychological and neurobiological terms, as they arise in the present. And we can call the resulting data and the entire effort a "science of morality". This would be a purely descriptive science of the sort that I hear Jonathan Haidt advocating.
And so that said, in terms of trying to understand human nature, well, and morality too, nature and culture certainly combine in some ways to do this, and I'd put these together in a slightly different way, it's not nature's over here and culture's over there and they're both pulling us in different directions. Rather, nature made us for culture. I'm convinced that the distinctively human aspects of psychology, the human aspects of evolution were adaptations to enable us to have this new and better kind of social life, namely culture.
Culture is our biological strategy. It's a new and better way of relating to each other, based on shared information and division of labor, interlocking roles and things like that. And it's worked. It's how we solve the problems of survival and reproduction, and it's worked pretty well for us in that regard. And so the distinctively human traits are ones often there to make this new kind of social life work.
Now, where does this leave us with morality?
What I want to do today is talk about some ideas I've been exploring concerning the origin of human kindness. And I'll begin with a story that Sarah Hrdy tells at the beginning of her excellent new book, "Mothers And Others." She describes herself flying on an airplane. It’s a crowded airplane, and she's flying coach. She's waits in line to get to her seat; later in the flight, food is going around, but she's not the first person to be served; other people are getting their meals ahead of her. And there's a crying baby. The mother's soothing the baby, the person next to them is trying to hide his annoyance, other people are coo-cooing the baby, and so on.
As Hrdy points out, this is entirely unexceptional. Billions of people fly each year, and this is how most flights are. But she then imagines what would happen if every individual on the plane was transformed into a chimp. Chaos would reign. By the time the plane landed, there'd be body parts all over the aisles, and the baby would be lucky to make it out alive.
The point here is that people are nicer than chimps.
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NEW YORK TIMES - DOT EARTH
August 28, 2010
ON HARVARD MISCONDUCT, CLIMATE RESEARCH AND TRUST
By Andrew C. Revkin
Earlier this week I was invited to join an e-mail discussion involving a variegated array of scientists and science communicators exploring a provocative question posed by one of them (I'll leave the identities out, but will invite them to weigh in here).
The conversation encompassed the case of Marc Hauser, the Harvard specialist in cognition found guilty of academic misconduct, and assertions that climate research suffered far too much from group think, protective tribalism and willingness to spin findings to suit an environmental agenda.
The question? "Maybe science—in some fields, not necessarily all of them—is much more corrupt than anyone wants to acknowledge." ...
WIENER ZEITUNG (VIienna)
THE CAPRICIOUS WAY IN THE FUTURE (Der launische Weg in die Zukunft)Leading researchers on discoveries that fundamentally changelife on earth
By Eva Stanzl
...But what if leading scientists provide philosophical reflections on discoveries that could change our future? Would they also exude anxiety and pessimism - particularly because the state of knowledge always deepens? John Brockmann, a former performance artist, editor of the Internet magazine "Edge" and head of a literary agency in New York, has obtained such considerations. Where he edited Volume "What idea will change everything?" (Fischer), the science looks sober in the future. Instead of painting colorful outlook on the wall, the authors explore the possibilities of existing innovations. Is no trace of fear, but not of utopia. ...
Google Translation | German Language Original
EL MUNDO
August 26, 2010
WHAT IS A MEMORY
Arcadi Espada
A correspondence with Sam Cooke:
Dear Researcher:
I am a Spanish journalist, who works in the newspaper El Mundo and is interested in issues of neuroscience. I read with great interest "Improving the memory, erase the memory: the future of our past," the Spanish translation of his article included in What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science, edited by Max Brockman. In this article makes you some references to the future possibility could erase certain memories and the possibility of adding new ones. I do not care now the plausibility of these hypotheses, if not somewhat earlier. What does it mean to isolate a memory?
Google Translation | Spanish Original
BOSTON GLOBE
August 15, 2010
IDEAS
EWWWWWWWW!
The surprising moral force of disgust
By Drake Bennett
A few of the leading researchers in the new field met late last month at a small conference in western Connecticut, hosted by the Edge Foundation, to present their work and discuss the implications. Among the points they debated was whether their work should be seen as merely descriptive, or whether it should also be a tool for evaluating religions and moral systems and deciding which were more and less legitimate — an idea that would be deeply offensive to religious believers around the world.
USA TODAY
August 8, 2010
NEUROSCIENCE OR 'NEUROSEXISM'? BOOK CLAIMS BRAIN SCANS SELL SEXES SHORTBy Dan Vergano
"There are real, and in some cases sizable, sex differences with respect to some cognitive (thinking) abilities," psychologist Diane Halpern of Claremont (Calif.) McKenna College argued in a 2008 Edge Foundation essay. "But we have no reason to expect that complex phenomena like cognitive development have simple answers," she added, arguing that neither brain wiring nor discrimination alone can explain the differences between men and women.
AFTENPOSTEN (Norway)
August 6, 2010
ANOTHER TYPE OF THINKING: TO BE AN "INTELLECTUAL" TODAY REQUIRES KNOWLEDGE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Bjørn Vassnes
John Brockman was a literary agent for Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker, among other leading figures of what he called "the third culture," and he created a digital meeting place, edge.org, where many of the world's sharpest minds regularly participate in interesting, but understandable discussions on everything from the Internet's effect on the human brain to the root causes behind terrorism.
Google Translation | Norwegian Original
STRAITS TIMES (Singapore)
July 31, 2010
HAS THE NET STALLED OUR THINKING?
By Andy Ho
EVERY year, a United States-based non-profit group called The Edge Foundation poses a big question to renowned thought leaders.
This year, 172 individuals were asked to talk about the Internet. Here is a sample of the most interesting responses just posted on its read-only website. ...
ATLANTIC
July 29, 2010
THE FIVE MORAL SENSES
Alexis Madrigal
University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt delivered an absolutely dynamite talk on new advances in his field last week. The video and a transcript have been posted by Edge.org, a loose consortium of very smart people run by John Brockman. Haidt whips us through centuries of moral thought, recent evolutionary psychology, and discloses which two papers every single psychology student should have to read. Through it all, he's funny, erudite, and understandable. Here, we excerpt a few paragraphs from his conclusion, in which Haidt tells us how to think about our moral minds: ...
FRANKFURTER ALLGEMEINE ZEITUNG
July 28, 2010
FEUILLETON
Moral reasoning
SOLEMN HIGH MASS IN THE TEMPLE OF REASON
How do you train a moral muscle? American researchers take their first steps on the path to a science of morality without God hypothesis. The last word should have the reason.
By Jordan Mejias
[Google translation:]
28th July 2010 One was missing and had he turned up, the illustrious company would have had nothing more to discuss and think. Even John Brockman, literary agent, and guru of the third culture, it could not move, stop by in his salon, which he every summer from the virtuality of the Internet, click on edge.org moved, in a New England idyl. There, in the green countryside of Washington, Connecticut, it was time to morality as a new science. When new it was announced, because their devoted not philosophers and theologians, but psychologists, biologists, neurologists, and at most such philosophers, based on experiments and the insights of brain research. They all had to admit, even to be on the search, but they missed not one who lacked the authority in matters of morality: God.
The secular science dominated the conference. As it should come to an end, however, a consensus first, were the conclusions apart properly.
German language original | Google translation
ANDREW SULLIVAN — THE DAILY DISH
25 JUL 2010
FACTS INFUSED WITH MORALITY
Edge held a seminar on morality. Here's Joshua Knobe:
Over the past few years, a series of recent experimental studies have reexamined the ways in which people answer seemingly ordinary questions about human behavior. Did this person act intentionally? What did her actions cause? Did she make people happy or unhappy? It had long been assumed that people's answers to these questions somehow preceded all moral thinking, but the latest research has been moving in a radically different direction. It is beginning to appear that people's whole way of making sense of the world might be suffused with moral judgment, so that people's moral beliefs can actually transform their most basic understanding of what is happening in a situation.
David Brooks' illuminating column on this topic covered the same ground:
...
...Advantage Locke over Hobbes.[...Continue]
THE NEW YORK TIMES
July 23, 2010
OP-ED COLUMNIST
THE MORAL NATURALISTS
Scientific research is showing that we are born with an innate moral sense.
By DAVID BROOKS
This week a group of moral naturalists gathered in Connecticut at a conference organized by the Edge Foundation. ...
Jonathan Haidt of the University of Virginia argues that this moral sense is like our sense of taste. We have natural receptors that help us pick up sweetness and saltiness. In the same way, we have natural receptors that help us recognize fairness and cruelty. Just as a few universal tastes can grow into many different cuisines, a few moral senses can grow into many different moral cultures.
Paul Bloom of Yale noted that this moral sense can be observed early in life. Bloom and his colleagues conducted an experiment in which they showed babies a scene featuring one figure struggling to climb a hill, another figure trying to help it, and a third trying to hinder it.
MEMBRANA (Russia)
July 22, 2010
QUANTUM TIME MACHINE RESOLVES THE PARADOX OF KILLING GRANDFATHER
Whatever happened to the positive protagonist of the standard action movie, we know beforehand - he survived. Law of the genre. Now scientists have substantiated a similar law of nature for the displacements in time. If the hypothesis is correct, the traveler will never be able to kill his grandfather in the past: something must reject the bullet, knife or a brick in the last minute.
Google Translation | Russian Language Original
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Now, it's true that, as scientists, our basic job is to describe the world as it is. But I don't think that that's the only thing that matters. In fact, I think the reason why we're here, the reason why we think this is such an exciting topic, is not that we think that the new moral psychology is going to cure cancer. Rather, we think that understanding this aspect of human nature is going to perhaps change the way we think and change the way we respond to important problems and issues in the real world. If all we were going to do is just describe how people think and never do anything with it, never use our knowledge to change the way we relate to our problems, then I don't think there would be much of a payoff. I think that applying our scientific knowledge to real problems is the payoff.
JONATHAN HAIDT'S TALK
I just briefly want to say, I think it's also crucial, as long as you're going to be a nativist and say, "oh, you know, evolution, it's innate," you also have to be a constructivist. I'm all in favor of reductionism, as long as it's paired with emergentism. You've got to be able to go down to the low level, but then also up to the level of institutions and cultural traditions and, you know, all kinds of local factors. A dictum of cultural psychology is that "culture and psyche make each other up." You know, we psychologists are specialists in the psyche. What are the gears turning in the mind? But those gears turn, and they evolved to turn, in various ecological and economic contexts. We've got to look at the two-way relations between psychology and the level above us, as well as the reductionist or neural level below us.
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THE HILLIS KNOWLEDGE WEB
An Idea Whose Time Has Come [7.19.10]
In retrospect
the key idea in the "Aristotle" essay
was this: if humans could contribute their knowledge to a database
that could be read by computers, then the computers could present
that knowledge to humans in the time, place and format that would
be most useful to them. The missing link to make the idea work
was a universal database containing all human knowledge, represented
in a form that could be accessed, filtered and interpreted by computers.
One
might reasonably ask: Why isn't that database the Wikipedia
or even the World Wide Web? The answer is that these depositories
of knowledge are designed to be read directly by humans, not interpreted
by computers. They confound the presentation of information with
the information itself. The crucial difference of the knowledge web
is that the information is represented in the database, while the
presentation is generated dynamically. Like Neal Stephenson's
storybook, the information is filtered, selected and presented according
to the specific needs of the viewer.
W. Daniel ("Danny") Hillis
On July 17th, buried in the news on a summer Friday afternoon, was the announcement that Google had acquired Metaweb.
It all began with the technological breakthroughs in the realm of massively parallel computers and their associated algorithms. Credit for this goes to Hillis who is primarily responsible for having broken through the von Neumann bottleneck of the serial computer.
At MIT in the late seventies, Hillis built his "connection machine," a computer that makes use of integrated circuits and, in its parallel operations, closely reflects the workings of the human mind. In 1983, he spun off a computer company called Thinking Machines, which built the world's fastest supercomputer by utilizing parallel architecture.
Hillis's computers, which were fast enough to simulate the process of evolution itself, showed that programs of random instructions can, by competing, produce new generations of programs — an approach that led to the creation of his Knowledge Web. Hillis's work demonstrates that when systems are not engineered but instead allowed to evolve — to build themselves — then the resultant whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Simple entities working together produce some complex thing that transcends them; the implications for biology, engineering, and physics have been, and will increasingly be, enormous. ...
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THE EDGE ANNUAL QUESTION BOOK SERIES
Edited by John Brockman
"An intellectual treasure trove"
San
Francisco Chronicle
THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING: IDEAS THAT WILL SHAPE THE FUTURE(*)
Edited by John Brockman
Harper Perennial
[2010]
NOW IN BOOKSTORES AND ONLINE!
[click to enlarge]
"Fascinating"
"Bold"
"Overwhelming"
Contributors include: RICHARD DAWKINS on cross-species breeding; IAN McEWAN on the remote frontiers of solar energy; FREEMAN DYSON on radiotelepathy; STEVEN PINKER on the perils and potential of direct-to-consumer genomics; SAM HARRIS on mind-reading technology; NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB on the end of precise knowledge; CHRIS ANDERSON on how the Internet will revolutionize education; IRENE PEPPERBERG on unlocking the secrets of the brain; LISA RANDALL on the power of instantaneous information; BRIAN ENO on the battle between hope and fear; J. CRAIG VENTER on rewriting DNA; FRANK WILCZEK on mastering matter through quantum physics.
"a provocative, demanding clutch of essays covering everything from gene splicing to global warming to intelligence, both artificial and human, to immortality... the way Brockman interlaces essays about research on the frontiers of science with ones on artistic vision, education, psychology and economics is sure to buzz any brain." (Chicago Sun-Times)
"11 books you must read —
Curl up with these reads on days when you just don't want to do anything else: 5. John Brockman's This Will Change Everything: Ideas That Will Shape the Future" (Forbes India)
"Full of ideas wild (neurocosmetics, "resizing ourselves," "intuit[ing] in six dimensions") and more close-to-home ("Basketball and Science Camps," solar technology"), this volume offers dozens of ingenious ways to think about progress" (Publishers Weekly — Starred Review)
"A stellar cast of intellectuals ... a stunning array of responses...Perfect for: anyone who wants to know what the big thinkers will be chewing on in 2010. " (New Scientist)
"Pouring over these pages is like attending a dinner party where every guest is brilliant and captivating and only wants to speak with you—overwhelming, but an experience to savor." (Seed)
* based On The Edge Annual Question — 2009: "What Will Change Everything?) |
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[2009]
"Compelling"
"Stellar"
"Important"
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[2008]
"Wonderful"
"Persuasively upbeat"
"Uplifting"
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[2007]
"Exhilarating"
"Explosive"
"Provocative" |
[2006]
"Fantastically
stimulating"
"Astounding reading"
"Creative magnificence" |
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[1969 — 40th Anniversary Edition]
"There are certain writers whose thought is so important that it doesn't matter whether you agree with them or not.
— San Francisco Review of Books, cover story
"The most important book since Wittgenstein's Tractatus."
— Alan Watts
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[2009]
"Engaging"... "Engrosing" ... "Brilliant"
"A who's who of science's next generation. ... A captivating collection of essays ... a medley of big ideas ... a fascinating foray into the future."
— New Scientist
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[2008]
"Compelling"
"Stellar"
"Important"
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[2006]
"Irresistible"
"Excellent"
"Fascinating"
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[2006]
"Incisive"
"Deeply passionate"
"Engaging" |
[2004]
"Intriguing"
"Engrossing"
"Invigorating"
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[2000]
"Dazzling"
"Wondrous"
"Outstanding"
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[2002]
"Provocative"
"Captivating"
"Mind-stretching" |
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"For those seeking substance over sheen, the occasional videos released at Edge.org hit the mark. The Edge Foundation community is a circle, mainly scientists but also other academics, entrepreneurs, and cultural figures. ... Edge's long-form interview videos are a deep-dive into the daily lives and passions of its subjects, and their passions are presented without primers or apologies. The decidedly noncommercial nature of Edge's offerings, and the egghead imprimatur of the Edge community, lend its videos a refreshing air, making one wonder if broadcast television will ever offer half the off-kilter sparkle of their salon chatter. — Boston Globe
[Continue to Edge Video]
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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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