Guest book review: What are you optimistic about?

sciencewoman — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:13:43 +0000

ScienceWoman notes: Last week I gave away a couple of books to readers who enthusiastically promised to review the books. The books were mailed on Friday and I've already gotten the first review back. Talk about enthusiasm! Here's a review from Courtney of Courtney's Blog.

What Are You Optimistic About is one of Edge.org's "celebration of the ideas of the third culture" (for further information, read C.P. Snow's classic, The Two Cultures). There is an introduction by the famed scientist/philosopher Dennett, who says, "It can't all be true, but we need to test them."

Fig. 1. Courtney's awesome visual depiction of What are you optimistic about?

More below the fold.

Spoiler Alert:
Despite the optimistic introduction, there is a fairly clear divide between science and humanities, with the bulk of the authors settling quite comfortably on the science bench. Specifically, technology seems to be the egg counted in almost everyone's basket. If not technology specifically, then scientific evidence, science itself, and hence truth and or/knowledge come up as the other clutch of eggs.

Hope for the Theory of Everything in physics makes a good showing, as well as some anti-universal theory of everything proponents. There is a fairly large component of atheism as hope, and some "down with religion" spiels. Happy medicine, epigenetics, age, sleep, hearing, and mental health visions blend into transhumanists, would-be space farers, and then AI optimists, SETI and the human creation of an omni god that could span universes.

Back at biology, Rushkoff uses a good phrase: he is optimistic that we will be "liberated from our biology." Others chime in with optimism about altruism, inner decency, mental health, overpopulation, urbanization, children, family, human bonds, marriage, and the sheer perversity and stubbornness of the human spirit.

Along those lines, there is a great deal of respect for globalization, and the diffusion of power it could be/is bringing to the people with technology, specifically the Internet and cell phones. Education is theoretically, now less about power and cost, and more about metacognition, cognitive flexibility, and recognition of both the individual human intellect and perhaps more importantly, the collective/situational society.

Some say social progress may depend on the recognition of the limits of democracy, a rise in prominence of the female mind, and the continuing global decline in violence and poverty, despite what the news media has to say about it. There is even hope from Jared Diamond that big business can make choices good for both business and humanity.

There is even a fervent believer in Art, and some believers in the spirituality of science, as well as hope for a reconciliation between religion and science.

In Short:
This is an interesting book, but I liked What We Believe But Cannot Prove (also by the Edge.org people) better. These are everybody's hopes and dreams, wishes and beliefs. In a paraphrase from one of my favorite television shows, Bones, intelligence doesn't cause you to make different choices; it just affects how well you're going to carry them out.

sciencewoman Fri, 04/10/2009 - 02:13

What We Believe But Cannot Prove

grrlscientist — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 07:49:18 +0000

What We Believe But Cannot Prove

The Seed Media Offices recently sent a book to me to review. This book, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today's Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty (2006, Harper Perennial) is edited by John Brockman, publisher of Edge. The book is a collection of essays written by more than 100 scientists and other leading scholars in response to the question, "What do you believe even though you cannot prove it?" Each essay is blog-length, ranging between five and approximately 800-1000 words, so it makes for interesting thought experiments that you can easily read and contemplate while waiting for the bus, for example.

I enjoyed this pleasant little book and its bite-sized essay format. Even though the writing can be rather dry in places, and it is sometimes repetitive, the topics discussed are very interesting. The contributors discuss everything from mathematics, computer software and the Big Bang to evolution, consciousness and whether there is a God.

I was particularly intrigued by linguist John McWhorter's essay. He says that human languages evolve towards complexity rather than simplicity, unless they are a blend of two or more languages. He also observes that subjugated peoples tend to modify the dominant people's language, creating a sort of "pidgin" form that is a simplified form of the dominant language combined with strong influences from the subordinant language(s). One example is the Afrikaans language, which is Dutch modified by several local African languages spoken by the Khoikhoi, Xhosa and later, by the Zulu peoples.

So, based on these data, McWhorter believes that three strangely streamlined languages spoken on the Indonesian island of Flores resulted from blending the language(s) spoken by humans with the language(s) spoken by the so-called "hobbits", an extinct species of Homo that were recently described. He writes;

So isn't it interesting that the island those [unusual] languages are spoken on is none other than Flores, which had its fifteen minutes of fame last year as the site where skeletons of "little people" were found. Anthropologists have hypothesized that this was a different species of Homo. While the skeletons date back 18,000 years ago or more, local legend recalls "little people" living alongside modern humans -- little people who had some kind of language of their own and could "repeat back" in the modern humans' language.

But wait, there's more. If interspecies communication doesn't interest you, there is a smorgasbord of topics to read about. For example, Professor of Cognitive Science, Alison Gopnik, believes that babies and young children are actually more conscious than adults. George Dyson, an Historian of Technology, believes that bird dialects correspond to indigenous human language groups. Philosophy Professor Daniel Dennett believes that acquiring a human language is a necessary precondition for consciousness. Terrence Sejnowski, a Computational Neuroscientist, believes that memories are stored in the connective tissue located in the extracellular space within the brain. Independent Scholar and Theoretician, Judith Rich Harris, believes there are three processes (not two) involved in human evolution; natural selection, sexual selection and parental selection. Robert Sapolsky, a Neuroscientist at Stanford University, believes that there is no god(s) nor such a thing as a soul (whatever the religiously inclined of the right persuasion mean by that word). Psychologist David Buss believes that true love exists.

Each belief is well-argued using both existing data and as well as speculation, or "flights of fancy", if you will. One thing that I wish could have been part of this book was a discussion between contributors who wrote about the same topics, particularly when their beliefs conflicted. But maybe that's something best left to blogs, instead.

tags: books, science, book review

grrlscientist Mon, 03/20/2006 - 02:49

what we believe but cannot prove

Guest book review: What are you optimistic about?

What We Believe But Cannot Prove