Through rose-colored microscopes
EVERY YEAR SINCE 1996, the online salon Edge has e-mailed a question to scientists and thinkers about the state of the world. This year’s question was: “What are you optimistic about?” Below are excerpts of some of the responses. For full responses (and those of other contributors), go to www.edge.org.
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The big answer
By Richard Dawkins
I am optimistic that the physicists of our species will complete Albert Einstein’s dream and discover the final theory of everything before superior creatures, evolved on another world, make contact and tell us the answer.
I am optimistic that although the theory of everything will bring fundamental physics to a convincing closure, the enterprise of physics itself will continue to flourish, just as biology went on growing after Charles Darwin solved its deep problem. I am optimistic that the two theories together will furnish a totally satisfying naturalistic explanation for the existence of the universe and everything that’s in it, including ourselves. And I am optimistic that this final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions.
RICHARD DAWKINS, an evolutionary biologist, is a professor at Oxford. He is the author, most recently, of “The God Delusion.”
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Small wonders
By Max Tegmark
When gazing up on a clear night, it’s easy to feel insignificant. Since our earliest ancestors admired the stars, our human egos have suffered a series of blows.
For starters, we’re smaller than we thought. Eratosthenes showed that Earth was larger than millions of humans, and his Hellenic compatriots realized that the solar system was thousands of times larger still. Yet for all its grandeur, our sun turned out to be merely one rather ordinary star among hundreds of billions in a galaxy that, in turn, is merely one of billions in our observable universe, the spherical region from which light has had time to reach us during the 14 billion years since our Big Bang. Our lives are small temporally, as well as spatially: If this 14-billion-year cosmic history were scaled to one day, then 100,000 years of human history would be four minutes, and a 100-year life would be 0.2 seconds. Further deflating our hubris, we’ve learned that we’re not that special either. Charles Darwin taught us that we’re animals; Sigmund Freud taught us that we’re irrational; machines now outpower us, and just last month, Deep Fritz outsmarted chess champion Vladimir Kramnik. Adding insult to injury, cosmologists have found that we’re not even made out of the majority substance.
The more I learned about this, the less significant I felt. Yet, in recent years, I’ve suddenly turned more optimistic about our cosmic significance. I’ve come to believe that advanced, evolved life is very rare, yet has huge growth potential, making our place in space and time remarkably significant.
Our universe contains countless other solar systems, many of which are billions of years older than ours. Enrico Fermi pointed out that if advanced civilizations have evolved in many of them, then some have a vast head start on us -- so where are they? I don’t buy the explanation that they’re all choosing to keep a low profile: Natural selection operates on all scales, and as soon as one life form adopts expansionism (sending off rogue, self-replicating interstellar nanoprobes, say), others can’t afford to ignore it. I think that life can expand to engulf our observable universe, and that it will be determined here on this planet during this century whether it will ever happen.
MAX TEGMARK is a physicist at MIT.
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A fading boom
By Jonathan Haidt
I am optimistic about the future of social science research because the influence of the baby boom generation on the culture and agenda of the social sciences will soon decrease. Don’t get me wrong. Many of my best friends are boomers, and, technically, I’m one too. But if there is a sensitive period for acquiring a moral and political orientation, it is the late teens and early 20s, and most of those whose sensitive periods included the Vietnam War and the struggles for civil rights seem to have been permanently marked by those times. Many young people who entered doctoral programs in the social sciences during the 1970s did so with the hope of using their research to reduce oppression and inequality. This moral imprinting of a generation of researchers may have had a few detrimental effects on the (otherwise excellent) science they produced. Here are two:
Moralistic anti-nativism. The deep and politicized antipathy to 1970s sociobiology produced a generation of social scientists wary of nativism, in general, and of evolutionary thinking, in particular. Nobody admits to believing that the mind is a blank slate at birth, but in practice, I have noticed that some social scientists older than I generally begin with a social-learning explanation of everything (especially sex differences) and then act as though it is “conservative” (scientifically) or “liberal” (politically) to stick with social learning unless the evidence against it is overwhelming, which it rarely is. But shouldn’t we always let nativist and empiricist explanations both have a go at each question, and then pick the one that has the better fit, overall, with the evidence?
Moral conformity pressure. Imagine an industry in which 90% of the people are men, male values and maleness are extolled publicly and feminine values are ridiculed, and men routinely make jokes, publicly and privately, about how dumb women are, even when women are present. Sounds like a definition of a hostile climate run wild. Now replace the words “male” and “female” with “liberal” and “conservative,” and we have a pretty good description of my field: social psychology. I study morality, and I have found that conservative ideas -- about authority, respect, order, loyalty, purity and sanctity -- illuminate vast territories of moral psychology, territories that have hardly been noticed by psychologists who define morality as consisting exclusively of matters of harm, rights and justice. If social psychology were a morally diverse field, we would have done a much better job studying the full expanse of human morality, and we’d be in a much better position right now to understand the morality of radical Islam.
JONATHAN HAIDT, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is the author of “The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom.”
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Dumb never lasts
By James O’Donnell
History repeats itself. The same stupidities, the same vengeances, the same brutalities are mindlessly reinvented over and over. The study of history can help the educated and the wise avoid the mistakes of the past, but alas, it does nothing for helping the numskulls.
But the study of the past and its follies and failures reveals one surprising ground for optimism. In the long run, the idiots are overthrown, or at least they die. On the other hand, creativity and achievement are unique, exciting, liberating -- and abiding. The discoveries of scientists, the inventions of engineers, the advances in the civility of human behavior are surprisingly durable. They may be thwarted or attacked, and at any given moment it may seem that, say, the cause of women’s rights is beleaguered in too many places in the world. But the idea of women’s equality with men is not going away. Too few students may master the natural sciences, but the understanding enshrined in Newton’s laws of motion and calculus is not going away. Too many people may eat and smoke their way to early graves, but the accurate understanding of the mechanisms of the human body and how they can be healed and repaired and kept healthy aren’t going away either.
After all, we started out in the African savanna, trying to run fast enough to catch up with things we could eat and to stay away from things that could eat us. Our natural destiny was to squat in caves and shiver, then die young. We decided we didn’t like that, and we figured out how to do better.
JAMES O’DONNELL, a classicist and cultural historian at Georgetown University, is the author of “Augustine: A New Biography.”
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The decline of violence
By Steven Pinker
In 16th century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted above a stage and then was slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, “the spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted and finally carbonized.”
As horrific as present-day events are, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This is just one example of the most important and underappreciated trend in the history of our species: the decline of violence. Cruelty as popular entertainment, human sacrifice to indulge superstition, slavery as a labor-saving device, genocide for convenience, torture and mutilation as routine forms of punishment, execution for trivial crimes, assassination as a means of political succession, pogroms as an outlet for frustration and homicide as the major means of conflict resolution -- all were unexceptionable features of life for most of human history. Yet today they are rare in the West, less common elsewhere than they used to be and widely condemned when they do occur.
Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the 20th century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millenniums (and for that matter, the last 50 years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward (though of course with many zigzags).
Anyone who doubts this by pointing to residues of force in the U.S. -- capital punishment in Texas, Abu Ghraib, sex slavery in immigrant groups and so on -- misses two key points. One is that, statistically, the prevalence of these practices is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what it was in centuries past. The other is that these practices are, to varying degrees, hidden, illegal, condemned or, at the very least, as in the case of capital punishment, intensely controversial. In the past, they were no big deal.
STEVEN PINKER is a professor of psychology at Harvard University.
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Art without frames
By Jean Pigozzi
For me, the most interesting development in the art world is what Charles Saatchi is doing with the Saatchi Gallery (www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk), his online gallery that opens this summer. It is a tool that is immensely powerful, as it is open to artists and the public without interference of curators, editors, dealers, critics, etc. This is exactly the way contemporary art should be presented. The artists can show whatever they want, and the public can see whatever they choose to look at without the barrier of the museum or the gallery or the art magazine between the artists and the public.
JEAN PIGOZZI is a collector of contemporary African art and a high-tech ecological researcher and director at the Liquid Jungle Lab, Panama.
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Good choices
By Jared Diamond
I am cautiously optimistic about the state of the world because big businesses sometimes conclude that what is good for the long-term future of humanity is also good for their bottom line (Wal-Mart’s recent decision to shift its seafood purchases entirely to certified sustainable fisheries within the next three to five years), and voters in a democracy sometimes make good choices and avoid bad choices (some recent elections in a major First World country).
JARED DIAMOND, a professor of geography at UCLA, is the author of “Collapse.”
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Weigh the evidence
By J. Craig Venter
I am optimistic that one of the key tenets of scientific investigation -- evidence-based decision-making -- will be extended to all aspects of modern society. Not all questions can be simply answered by just looking at the evidence, because we are still at a very early stage in understanding the universe around us. But for most scientists, the evidence for evolution, regardless of its origins, has been overwhelming. The fossil record was sufficient evidence for most, but now with genome-sequencing information from all branches of life, including from some of our closest relatives, such as Neanderthals, chimps and rhesus monkeys, the results should be clear-cut for anyone whose thinking is not overly clouded by a “belief” system.
In contrast, we have newspapers, radio and television news stations owned by individuals or governments presenting subjective, selective subsets of information. As well, there are political campaigns and statements by those wishing to gain or retain power that can only be dismissed as partisan.
We need to push harder for an education system that teaches evidence-based decision-making, and we should hold our public leaders to a higher standard and less partisan behavior as we attempt to tackle some of the historically most difficult challenges facing the future of humanity.
J. CRAIG VENTER, a human genome decoder, is director of the J. Craig Venter Institute.
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Blue-sky science
By Roger Highfield
I am quietly optimistic that the public will become more skeptical about the practical benefits of discoveries made in the lab and more appreciative of what science is really about -- basic curiosity, rationality and the never-ending dialogue between ideas and experiments. With luck, the public will spend more time gazing up at the blue skies of science and not down at the brown torrent of parochial and humdrum expectations about what science can do for them. Science does not have to be useful, save to put forward useful models of how nature works. Science does not have to cure disease. Science does not have to make us live to 120. Science does not have to make money.
ROGER HIGHFIELD is the science editor of the Daily Telegraph and the coauthor of “After Dolly.”
