As you march through or dance around in this book, you’ll see that some of the entries describe the patterns of the world. Nicholas Christakis is one of several scholars to emphasize that many things in the world have properties not present in their parts. They cannot be understood simply by taking them apart; you have to observe the interactions of the whole. Stephon Alexander is one of two writers (appropriately) to emphasize the dualities found in the world. Just as an electron has both wave-like and particle-like properties, so many things can have two sets of characteristics simultaneously. Clay Shirky emphasizes that while we often imagine bell curves everywhere, in fact the phenomena of the world are often best described by the Pareto Principle. Things are often skewed radically toward the top of any distribution. Twenty percent of the employees in any company do most of the work, and the top 20 percent within that 20 percent do most of that group’s work.
As you read through the entries that seek to understand patterns in the world, you’ll run across a few amazing facts. For example, I didn’t know that twice as many people in India have access to cell phones as to latrines.
But most of the essays in the book are about metacognition. They consist of thinking about how we think. I was struck by Daniel Kahneman’s essay on the Focusing Illusion, by Paul Saffo’s essay on the Time Span Illusion, by John McWhorter’s essay on Path Dependence, and Evgeny Morozov’s essay on the Einstellung Effect, among many others. If you lead an organization, or have the sort of job that demands that you think about the world, these tools are like magic hammers. They will help you, now and through life, to see the world better, and to see your own biases more accurately.
But I do want to emphasize one final thing. These researchers are giving us tools for thinking. It sounds utilitarian and it is. But tucked in the nooks and crannies of this book there are insights about the intimate world, about the realms of emotion and spirit. There are insights about what sort of creatures we are. Some of these are not all that uplifting. Gloria Origgi writes about Kakonomics, our preference for low-quality outcomes. But Roger Highfield, Jonathan Haidt, and others write about the “snuggle for existence”: the fact that evolution is not only about competition, but profoundly about cooperation and even altruism. Haidt says wittily that we are the giraffes of altruism. There is something for the poetic side of your nature, as well as the prosaic.
The people in this book lead some of the hottest fields; in these pages they are just giving you little wisps of what they are working on. But I hope you’ll be struck not only by how freewheeling they are willing to be, but also by the undertone of modesty. Several of the essays in this book emphasize that we see the world in deeply imperfect ways, and that our knowledge is partial. They have respect for the scientific method and the group enterprise precisely because the stock of our own individual reason is small. Amid all the charms to follow, that mixture of humility and daring is the most unusual and important.
Preface: The Edge Question
JOHN BROCKMAN
Publisher and editor, Edge
In 1981 I founded the Reality Club. Through 1996, the club held its meetings in Chinese restaurants, artists’ lofts, the boardrooms of investment-banking firms, ballrooms, museums, and living rooms, among other venues. The Reality Club differed from the Algonquin Round Table, the Apostles, or the Bloomsbury Group, but it offered the same quality of intellectual adventure. Perhaps the closest resemblance was to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal gathering of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age—James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin. In a similar fashion, the Reality Club was an attempt to gather together those people exploring the themes of the postindustrial age.
In 1997, the Reality Club went online, rebranded as Edge. The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, and physics. Emerging out of these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions.
For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I have asked contributors for their responses to a question that comes to me, or to one of my correspondents, in the middle of the night. It’s not easy coming up with a question. As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?” I’m looking for questions that inspire answers we can’t possibly predict. My goal is to provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have.
This year’s question, suggested by Steven Pinker and seconded by Daniel Kahneman, takes off from a notion of James Flynn, intelligence researcher and emeritus professor of political studies at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, who defined shorthand abstractions (SHAs) as concepts drawn from science that have become part of the language and make people smarter by providing widely applicable templates. “Market,” “placebo,” “random sample,” and “naturalistic fallacy” are a few of his examples. His idea is that the abstraction is available as a single cognitive chunk, which can be used as an element in thinking and in debate.
The Edge Question 2011
What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody’s Cognitive Toolkit?
Here, the term “scientific” is to be understood in a broad sense—as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, whether it be human behavior, corporate behavior, the fate of the planet, or the future of the universe. A “scientific concept” may come from philosophy, logic, economics, jurisprudence, or any other analytic enterprises, as long as it is a rigorous tool that can be summed up succinctly but has broad application to understanding the world.
“Deep Time” and the Far Future
Martin Rees
President emeritus, the Royal Society; professor of cosmology & astrophysics; master, Trinity College, University of Cambridge; author, Our Final Century: The 50/50 Threat to Humanity’s Survival
We need to extend our time horizons. Especially, we need deeper and wider awareness that far more time lies ahead than has elapsed up until now.
Our present biosphere is the outcome of about 4 billion years of evolution, and we can trace cosmic history right back to a Big Bang that happened about 13.7 billion years ago. The stupendous time spans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture and understanding—even though the concept may not yet have percolated to all parts of Kansas and Alaska. But the immense time horizons that stretch ahead—though familiar to every astronomer—haven’t permeated our culture to the same extent.
Our sun is less than halfway through its life. It formed 4.5 billion years ago, but it’s got 6 billion more years before the fuel runs out. It will then flare up, engulfing the inner planets and vaporizing any life that might then remain on Earth. But even after the sun’s demise, the expanding universe will continue, perhaps forever—destined to become ever colder, ever emptier. That, at least, is the best long-range forecast that cosmologists can offer, though few would lay firm odds on what may happen beyond a few tens of billions of years.
Awareness of the “deep time” lying ahead is still not pervasive. Indeed, most people—and not only those for whom this view is enshrined in religious beliefs—envisage humans as in some sense the culmination of evolution. But no astronomer could believe this; on the contrary, it would be equally plausible to surmise that we are not even at the halfway stage. There is abundant time for posthuman evolution, here on Earth or far beyond, organic or inorganic, to give rise to far more diversity and even greater qualitative changes than those that have led from single-celled organisms to humans. Indeed, this conclusion is strengthened when we realize that future evolution will proceed not on the million-year time scale characteristic of Darwinian selection but at the much accelerated rate allowed by geneti
c modification and the advance of machine intelligence (and forced by the drastic environmental pressures that would confront any humans who were to construct habitats beyond the Earth).
Darwin himself realized that “not one living species will preserve its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity.” We now know that “futurity” extends far further—and alterations can occur far faster—than Darwin envisioned. And we know that the cosmos, through which life could spread, is far more extensive and varied than he envisioned. So humans are surely not the terminal branch of an evolutionary tree but a species that emerged early in cosmic history, with special promise for diverse evolution. But this is not to diminish their status. We humans are entitled to feel uniquely important, as the first known species with the power to mold its evolutionary legacy.
We Are Unique
MARCELO GLEISER
Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and professor of physics and astronomy, Dartmouth College; author, A Tear at the Edge of Creation: A Radical New Vision for Life in an Imperfect Universe
To improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit, the required scientific concept has to be applicable to all humans. It needs to make a difference to us as a species, or, more to the point I am going to make, as a key factor in defining our collective role. This concept must affect the way we perceive who we are and why we are here. It should redefine the way we live our lives and plan for our collective future. This concept must make it clear that we matter.
A concept that might grow into this life-redefining powerhouse is the notion that we, humans on a rare planet, are unique and uniquely important. But what of Copernicanism, the notion that the more we learn about the universe the less important we become? I will argue that modern science, traditionally considered guilty of reducing our existence to a pointless accident in an indifferent universe, is actually saying the opposite. Whereas it does say that we are an accident in an indifferent universe, it also says that we are a rare accident and thus not pointless.
But wait! Isn’t it the opposite? Shouldn’t we expect life to be common in the cosmos and us to be just one of many creatures out there? After all, as we discover more and more worlds circling other suns, the so-called exoplanets, we find an amazing array of possibilities. Also, given that the laws of physics and chemistry are the same across the universe, we should expect life to be ubiquitous: If it happened here, it must have happened in many other places. So why am I claiming that we are unique?
There is an enormous difference between life and intelligent life. By intelligent life, I don’t mean clever crows or dolphins but minds capable of self-awareness and of developing advanced technologies—that is, not just using what’s at hand but transforming materials into devices that can perform a multitude of tasks. I agree that single-celled life, although dependent on a multitude of physical and biochemical factors, shouldn’t be an exclusive property of our planet—first, because life on Earth appeared almost as quickly as it could, no more than a few hundred million years after things quieted down enough; and second, because the existence of extremophiles, life-forms capable of surviving in extreme conditions (very hot or cold, very acidic or/and radioactive, no oxygen, etc.), show that life is resilient and spreads into every niche it can.
However, the existence of single-celled organisms doesn’t necessarily lead to that of multicellular ones, much less to that of intelligent multicellular ones. Life is in the business of surviving the best way it can in a given environment. If the environment changes, those creatures that can survive under the new conditions will. Nothing in this dynamic supports the notion that once there’s life all you have to do is wait long enough and poof! up pops a clever creature. This smells of biological teleology, the concept that life’s purpose is to create intelligent life, a notion that seduces many people for obvious reasons: It makes us the special outcome of some grand plan. The history of life on Earth doesn’t support this evolution toward intelligence. There have been many transitions toward greater complexity, none of them obvious: prokaryotic to eukaryotic unicellular creatures (and nothing more for 3 billion years!), unicellular to multicellular, sexual reproduction, mammals, intelligent mammals, Edge.org . . . Play the movie differently and we wouldn’t be here.
As we look at planet Earth and the factors that enabled us to be here, we quickly realize that our planet is very special. Here’s a short list: the long-term existence of a protective and oxygen-rich atmosphere; Earth’s axial tilt, stabilized by a single large moon; the ozone layer and the magnetic field, which jointly protect surface creatures from lethal cosmic radiation; plate tectonics, which regulates the levels of carbon dioxide and keeps the global temperature stable; the fact that our sun is a smallish, fairly stable star not too prone to releasing huge plasma burps. Consequently, it’s rather naïve to expect life—at the complexity level that exists here—to be ubiquitous across the universe.
A further point: Even if there is intelligent life elsewhere—and, of course, we can’t rule that out (science is much better at finding things that exist than at ruling out things that don’t)—it will be so remote that for all practical purposes we are alone. Even if SETI finds evidence of other cosmic intelligences, we are not going to initiate an intense collaboration. And if we are alone, and alone are aware of what it means to be alive and of the importance of remaining alive, we gain a new kind of cosmic centrality, very different and much more meaningful than the religion-inspired one of pre-Copernican days, when Earth was the center of Creation. We matter because we are rare and we know it.
The joint realization that we live in a remarkable cosmic cocoon and can create languages and rocket ships in an otherwise apparently dumb universe ought to be transformative. Until we find other self-aware intelligences, we are how the universe thinks. We might as well start enjoying one another’s company.
The Mediocrity Principle
P. Z. Myers
Biologist, University of Minnesota; blogger, Pharyngula
As someone who just spent a term teaching freshman introductory biology and will be doing it again in the coming months, I have to say that the first thing that leaped to my mind as an essential skill everyone should have was algebra. And elementary probability and statistics. That sure would make my life easier, anyway; there’s something terribly depressing about seeing bright students tripped up by a basic math skill they should have mastered in grade school.
But that isn’t enough. Elementary math skills are an essential tool we ought to be able to take for granted in a scientific and technological society. What idea should people grasp to better understand their place in the universe?
I’m going to recommend the mediocrity principle. It’s fundamental to science and it’s also one of the most contentious, difficult concepts for many people to grasp. And opposition to the mediocrity principle is one of the major linchpins of religion and creationism and jingoism and failed social policies. There are a lot of cognitive ills that would be neatly wrapped up and easily disposed of if only everyone understood this one simple idea.
The mediocrity principle simply states that you aren’t special. The universe does not revolve around you; this planet isn’t privileged in any unique way; your country is not the perfect product of divine destiny; your existence isn’t the product of directed, intentional fate; and that tuna sandwich you had for lunch was not plotting to give you indigestion. Most of what happens in the world is just a consequence of natural, universal laws—laws that apply everywhere and to everything, with no special exemptions or amplifications for your benefit—given variety by the input of chance. Everything that you as a human being consider cosmically important is an accident. The rules of inheritance and the nature of biology meant that when your parents had a baby, it was anatomically human and mostly fully functional physiologically, but the unique combination of traits that make you male or female, tall or short, brown-eyed or blue-eyed, were the result of a chance shuffle of genetic attributes duri
ng meiosis, a few random mutations, and the luck of the draw in the grand sperm race at fertilization.
Don’t feel bad about that, though; it’s not just you. The stars themselves form as a result of the properties of atoms, the specific features of each star set by the chance distribution of ripples of condensation through clouds of dust and gas. Our sun wasn’t required to be where it is, with the luminosity it has; it just happens to be there, and our existence follows from this opportunity. Our species itself is partly shaped by the force of our environment through selection and partly by fluctuations of chance. If humans had gone extinct a hundred thousand years ago, the world would go on turning, life would go on thriving, and some other species would be prospering in our place—and most likely not by following the same intelligence-driven, technological path we did.
And that’s OK—if you understand the mediocrity principle.
The reason this principle is so essential to science is that it’s the beginning of understanding how we came to be here and how everything works. We look for general principles that apply to the universe as a whole first, and those explain much of the story; and then we look for the quirks and exceptions that led to the details. It’s a strategy that succeeds and is useful in gaining a deeper knowledge. Starting with a presumption that a subject of interest represents a violation of the properties of the universe, that it was poofed uniquely into existence with a specific purpose, and that the conditions of its existence can no longer apply, means that you have leaped to an unfounded and unusual explanation with no legitimate reason. What the mediocrity principle tells us is that our state is not the product of intent, that the universe lacks both malice and benevolence, but that everything does follow rules—and that grasping those rules should be the goal of science.
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