John Brockman is a literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an organization that brings together leading edge thinkers across a broad range of scientific and technical fields.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The Emerging Third Culture

The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are.

PART ONE: THE EVOLUTIONARY IDEA

Chapter 1.

GEORGE C. WILLIAMS

"A Package of Information"

The gene is a package of information, not an object. The pattern of base pairs in a DNA molecule specifies the gene. But the DNA molecule is the medium, it's not the message. Maintaining this distinction between the medium and the message is absolutely indispensable to clarity of thought about evolution.

Chapter 2.

STEPHEN JAY GOULD

"The Pattern of Life's History"

There is no progress in evolution. The fact of evolutionary change through time doesn't represent progress as we know it. Progress isn't inevitable. Much of evolution is downward in terms of morphological complexity, rather than upward. We're not marching toward some greater thing.

Chapter 3.

RICHARD DAWKINS

"A Survival Machine"

It rapidly became clear to me that the most imaginative way of looking at evolution, and the most inspiring way of teaching it, was to say that it's all about the genes. It's the genes that, for their own good, are manipulating the bodies they ride about in. The individual organism is a survival machine for its genes.

Chapter 4.

BRIAN GOODWIN

"Biology Is Just a Dance"

The "new" biology is biology in the form of an exact science of complex systems concerned with dynamics and emergent order. Then everything in biology changes. Instead of the metaphors of conflict, competition, selfish genes, climbing peaks in fitness landscapes, what you get is evolution as a dance. It has no goal. As Stephen Jay Gould says, it has no purpose, no progress, no sense of direction. It's a dance through morphospace, the space of the forms of organisms.

Chapter 5.

STEVEN JONES

"Why Is There So Much Genetic Diversity?"

We have the beginnings of an answer as to why, in some places, one snail species is so variable, but we have no real idea why in any species anywhere at any time no two individuals are identical. That's an essential question of evolution. All others flow from that.

Chapter 6.

NILES ELDREDGE

"A Battle of Words"

Species are real entities, spatiotemporally bounded, and they're information entities. Other kinds of entities do things. Ecological populations, for example, have niches; they function. Species don't function that way. They don't do things; they are, instead, information repositories. A species is not like an organism at all, but it's nonetheless a kind of entity that plays an important role in the evolutionary process.

Chapter 7.

LYNN MARGULIS

"Gaia Is a Tough Bitch"

How did the eukaryotic cell appear? Probably it was an invasion of predators, at the outset. It may have started when one sort of squirming bacterium invaded another -- seeking food, of course. But certain invasions evolved into truces; associations once ferocious became benign. When swimming bacterial would-be invaders took up residence inside their sluggish hosts, this joining of forces created a new whole that was, in effect, far greater than the sum of its parts: faster swimmers capable of moving huge quantities of genes evolved. Some of these newcomers were uniquely competent in the evolutionary struggle. Further bacterial associations were added on, as the modern cell evolved.

PART TWO: A COLLECTION OF KLUDGES

Chapter 8.

MARVIN MINSKY

"Smart Machines"

The brain is...a great jury-rigged combination of many gadgets to do different things, with additional gadgets to correct their deficiencies, and yet more accessories to intercept their various bugs and undesirable interactions -- in short, a great mess of assorted mechanisms that barely manage to get the job done.

Chapter 9.

ROGER SCHANK

"Information Is Surprises"

Information is surprises. We all expect the world to work out in certain ways, but when it does, we're bored. What makes something worth knowing is organized around the concept of expectation failure. Scripts are interesting not when they work but when they fail.

Chapter 10.

DANIEL C. DENNETT

"Intuition Pumps"

The idea of consciousness as a virtual machine is a nice intuition pump. It takes a while to set up, because a lot of the jargon of artificial intelligence and computer science is unfamiliar to philosophers or other people. But if you have the patience to set some of these ideas up, then you can say, "Hey! Try thinking about the idea that what we have in our heads is software. It's a virtual machine, in the same way that a word processor is a virtual machine." Suddenly, bells start ringing, and people start seeing things from a slightly different perspective.

Chapter 11.

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY

"The Thick Moment"

What is it like to be ourselves? How can a piece of matter which is a human being be the basis for the experience each one of us recognizes as what it's like to be us? How can a human body and a human brain also be a human mind?

Chapter 12.

FRANCISCO VARELA

"The Emergent Self"

Why do emergent selves, virtual identities, pop up all over the place, creating worlds, whether at the mind/body level, the cellular level, or the transorganism level? This phenomenon is something so productive that it doesn't cease creating entirely new realms: life, mind, and societies. Yet these emergent selves are based on processes so shifty, so ungrounded, that we have an apparent paradox between the solidity of what appears to show up and its groundlessness. That, to me, is the key and eternal question.

Chapter 13.

STEVEN PINKER

"Language Is a Human Instinct"

I call language an "instinct," an admittedly quaint term for what other cognitive scientists have called a mental organ, a faculty, or a module. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently.

Chapter 14.

ROGER PENROSE

"Consciousness Involves Noncomputable Ingredients"

My present view is that the brain isn't exactly a quantum computer. Quantum actions are important in the way the brain works, but the noncomputational actions occur at the bridge from the quantum to the classical level, and that bridge is beyond our present understanding of quantum mechanics.

PART THREE: QUESTIONS OF ORIGINS

Chapter 15.

MARTIN REES

"An Ensemble of Universes"

Cosmology is exciting to the public because it's clearly fundamental, and this is a rather special time in the subject. For the first time, it's become a part of mainstream science, and we can address questions about the origin of the universe.

Chapter 16.

ALAN GUTH

"A Universe in Your Backyard"

One of the most amazing features of the inflationary-universe model is that it allows the universe to evolve from something that's initially incredibly small. Something on the order of twenty pounds of matter is all it seems to take to start off a universe....It becomes very tempting to ask whether, in principle, it's possible to create a universe in the laboratory -- or a universe in your backyard -- by man-made processes.

Chapter 17.

LEE SMOLIN

"A Theory of the Whole Universe"

What is space and what is time? This is what the problem of quantum gravity is about. In general relativity, Einstein gave us not only a theory of gravity but a theory of what space and time are -- a theory that overthrew the previous Newtonian conception of space and time. The problem of quantum gravity is how to combine the understanding of space and time we have from relativity theory with the quantum theory, which also tells us something essential and deep about nature.

Chapter 18.

PAUL DAVIES

"The Synthetic Path"

My personal belief is that biologists tend to be uncompromising and reductionistic because they're still feeling somewhat insecure with their basic dogma, whereas physicists have three hundred years of secure foundation for their subject, so they can afford to be a bit more freewheeling in their speculation about these complex systems.

PART FOUR: WHAT WAS DARWIN'S ALGORITHM?

Chapter 19.

MURRAY GELL-MANN

"Plectics"

To refer to the subject on which some of us now work as "complexity" seems to me to distort the nature of what we do, because the simplicity of the underlying rules is a critical feature of the whole enterprise. Therefore what I like to say is that the subject consists of the study of simplicity, complexity of various kinds, and complex adaptive systems, with some consideration of complex nonadaptive systems as well.

Chapter 20.

STUART KAUFFMAN

"Order for Free"

What kinds of complex systems can evolve by accumulation of successive useful variations? Does selection by...