Customer Reviews

Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution

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The underlying premise of this book is that a new kind of scientist-popularizer now serves as the intellectual elite of our culture. Each chapter focuses on one such scientist-popularizer; first he or she explains his/her work and then peers comment on it. Broadly, the science focuses on about four themes: evolution, cognitive science/AI, cosmology, and complexity. The people interviewed include Steven Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Marvin Minsky, Roger Penrose, Murray Gellman, Steve Pinker, and others. My criticisms of the book are

1. It's exceedingly arrogant in its dismissal of literary and politcal intellectuals in the book's preface.

2. At least half of the peer discussion at the end of chapters is inane remarks like "So-and-so's work is very important. She's the smartest person I know." This, along with the tone of the preface, makes it seem as if the participants are insecure somehow. It also makes me suspect the book is merely a promotional vehicle for the participants books. (The editior of this book is a literary agent.)

3. In very few instances are the participants ideas adequately developed or critiqued. The spatial limitations are exacerbated by the inane praise and filler.

4. Much of the thinking covered is glitzy with little substance and this gives a false notion of how science is done. There's very little mention of experiment.

3 and 4 combine to create a book that includes both crackpot and mainstream scientific ideas and then doesn't not present the reader with enough information to distinguish between them.

The book does attempt to do some worthwhile things:

1. Lead one to some great authors. For instance, readers pick up the book because they like Pinker's "The Language Instinct" might then be led to Dawkins' "Selfish Gene"

2. Present both sides of a scientific debate. Dawkins vs. Gould is the prime example. I wish this had been developed more.

3. Show what prominent scientists think of each other's work.

4. Show some modern scientific paradigms--only this is done somewhat disingenously because real scientific breakthroughs and the paradigms they beget are eschewed for pop-sci that has done very little. For instance, fields like genomics and quantum computation are passed over but complexity is included.

My advice is to peruse the contents and use that to find interesting authors to read directly.

This book is a sad collage of weak efforts from a self-promoting literary agent. Brockman co-opts a pithy title with a specific meaning and then misapplies it intentionally, seeking to acquire the virtues of the label without providing the substance to back it up. If you want to read a group of highly respected scientists (and an occasional philosopher) speculating about their work's broader context -- socially, historically, aesthetically, morally, spiritually -- without the rigorous requirements of a peer reviewed journal or the space required to make a nuanced argument, this may be worth your time. However, be prepared to wade through piles of mutual admiration smugness and now-you're-an-insider prose.

Brockman positions the work as an "oral history of a dynamical emergent system," which is just a jargon-laden smokescreen for a half-assed effort. If only Brockman had the spine to take the transcripts of his interviews and synthesize them for the reader into a coherent, readable whole! Instead, we have edited transcripts, a power point version of a thoughtful book, the crucial synthetic element replaced with copyediting and cleverly labeled section titles. Good idea, lousy execution. This is a book edited by Brockman, not written by him; he apparently lacked the self-confidence or talent to write in his own voice, and he does a disservice to the thinkers whose verbal speculations he edits into pabulum, digestible by the massest of the mass public (e.g., "Chris Langton is the central guru of this artificial life stuff." Ack.).

Do yourself a favor and buy the original works of the thinkers included in this volume, or read their original academic publications. Yes, it may be putting money in Brockman's pocket as their agents, but at least he will be rewarded for the work that reflects his talent - leeching off others. The cover swims with the names of Nobel Prize winners and scientific luminaries - in a halo around his own.

Knowledge is power. But as Brockman successfully argues, the significance of the new knowledge born by scientific revolution will never be fully realized without communication. Enter the Third Culture. These individuals have successfully bridged the gap between ignorance and enlightenment by revealing the magic and power of science to the world.

In his book, Brockman has brought together the ideas of those who, in his opinion, are best representative of the Third Culture. Lynn Margulis' ideas on symbiosis and evolutionary change give a new twist to Darwinism; the idea of exaptation as explained by Stephen Jay Gould reveals the inherent randomness of natural selection; Alan Guth's comments on the Big Bang and the fate of the universe will force anyone to become a kid again and wonder. The reader will be exposed to a vast range of scientific thought in a way which is easily understood and enjoyable. In addition to getting exposed to ideas which are dominating science today, the reader also gets a flavor for the lives of those who are truly passionate and dedicated to their work.

Scholar or layman, the reader will enjoy this anthology of thought and walk away knowing that science is really as amazing as it's cracked up to be.

Love the premise. It falls apart at some points though.
I Love having the opposing viewpoints at the end of the chapter. Finally you can hear both sides of a debate without having to buy many seperate books. Also I love the short encapsulated synopsis of great thinkers like Dawkins. You get a great overview of all his work, from himself, in just a few pages.
I Love the concept of the intellectual elite being hijacked by the science illiterate.
However, not many of the chapters make sense and some of the comments at the ends of the chapters are inane.

What John Brockman does here makes a lot of sense. He brings together a whole group of first- rank scientists and enables them to explain major aspects of their thought. These 'popularizations' of scientific work taken together, and dialogued about are however proposed by Brockman to be the basis of a 'Third Culture' a scientifically based higher or true culture.
Here we meet the recurrence of the well- known reality in which the person goes and asks various people in the town why X or Y happens to be the way they are. The barber says it is because they do not have a proper haircut, and the tailor says it is because their trousers have not been properly sewn, the mailman says its because their letters were not delivered. Etc Etc.
Brockman should understand that there are realms , respectable realms of cultural and human activity which Science has no significant place in. The drama of Shakespeare does not need an Isaac Asimov analysis of the number of its characters or pages to be what it is. The world of Music does not need a scientific explanation of what Music is in order to give pleasure and meaning to many.
A truly comprehensive Culture would have Science as a central part of it. But it would not be exclusively scientific.
I am personally a great fan of Brockman and the colloqiums he puts together in 'Edge'. But he should too understand that there are worlds outside the world of science, and that those worlds are real and meaningful in ways scientific work does not comprehend.

Yes, and it's called 'The Third Culture'. I am a final year high school student studying evolution and I read 'The Third Culture' expecting a dry and uninteresting outline of science. I was so happy to be proved wrong! I found that 'The Third Culture' was a logical and plausible explanation of integral facets of existence and that it explored science in such a way that it LIVED. Instead of just regurgitating the tried and true aspects of science which are so often printed in school books (or untried and untrue aspects of religion which is so often the resort of people attempting to explain the supposedly unexplainable) it does not shrink from showing that there is conflict in the scientific community and that it is by no means infallible but at least it's trying to resolve some old questions. Not least, it is readable and informative and doesn't resort incomprehensible jargon which was important to me. I'm very glad I read 'The Third Culture' and I think I'm better informed for doing that.

This book starts out with the oft-expressed complaint of C.P. Snow and others regarding the two cultures in academics and thought, positing the humanities against the sciences. It echoes the usual complaints against philosophers: their exclusivity, their hijacking of the label "intellectual", and their ivory tower attitude. This complaint can be justifiably levelled against some academic philosophers, but more so against the scientists themselves, whose torch the author carries.

The third culture that the author points to is a motley crew of scientists and philosophers, who are paraded as evidence of the new intellectual who reaches to the common man, through accessible texts. The author fails in his attempt to define such a new third culture due to a long list of reasons.

1. His initial thesis is flawed. Philosophers, literary critics and other non-scientists have consistently made sincere effort to translate their thought to the man on the street. They have upheld the importance of science and the knowledge that its practitioners uncovered. On the other hand, scientists, from the days of the logical positivists have exhibited a collective front of intellectual snobbery and disguising their claims to wisdom behind esoteric language and exclusive organizations. Few scientists have exhibited the moral courage of someone such as Jean Paul Sartre, who refused a Nobel Prize and used every form available to him, to reach his audience, the man on the street.

2. The list of "new intellectuals" that the author lists have really nothing in common. He presents humanists such as Penrose and Gould as if they belong to the same tradition and thought as reductionists and apologists such as Minsky and Dennett.

3. The attempt by humanist scientists to explain their work to the common man and to address his concerns, and further to ground their work in his world, is not a new trend. In fact, it may well be a dying trend. Einstein, Eddington, Bohr, Russell and many others are fine examples of such scientists. They did not reject the philosophers of their time (Russell, for instance, acknowledges his debt to Wittgenstein, his student). They worried about the real world implications of their work and the consequences of its application.

4. The suggestion that a new breed of such thinkers have emerged is false. There have always been critical thinkers, men who have resisted the fad of the day and worked sometimes from the inside and at other times from outside viewpoints, such as Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend.

5. The list is incomplete, not by chance as the author implies, but seemingly due to premeditation on his part. Its laughable in its exclusion of men such as Noam Chomsky and even more so in its failure to present the alternate viewpoint of the philosophers.

I could continue forever with my critique of this ill-conceived text, which serves the purpose of a sounding-board for men such as Dennett and Minsky to address each other, and themselves, in a congratulatory tone, but instead, I will point the author to his own text, where the criticism is levelled against philosophers of identifying thought with individuals.

In this fine volume, editor and literary agent John Brockman has managed to assemble a majority of the key scientists who are developing the 'Third Culture' - a new scientific paradigm that provides public feedback loops.

The interviews are first-rate, particularly those with Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Paul Davies, Murray Gell-Mann, Roger Penrose, Lynn Margulis, and Stuart Kauffman. Unlike some of Brockman's other interview collections, Brockman is not really intrusive, enabling the scientists to speak for themselves, directly to the interested reader. Just as intriguing are the commentaries within each interview by other scientists featured within the volume, giving an insight into the lively debate that features prominently within the contemporary scientific community. Despite featuring many of the major names and minds, they don't always agree, and the interplay is exhilirating. Brockman's opening chapter on the 'Third Culture' concept steps beyond C.P. Snow's oft-quoted warnings to embrace sovereignty, freedom, and conscience.

'The Third Culture' is an excellent introductory volume to give to a non-scientist that conveys the power and longterm social impact of evolutionary flows, systemic design, spiral thinking, and holistic structures. The interviews accurately convey how the new paradigms unleashed by Memetics, Complexity, Chaos Theory, Metaphysics, Neuro-biology, Cosmology, Biological Systems, Darwinian Evolution, Artificial Intelligence et. al will affect the layperson. Knowledge of this will be crucial for survival in the postmodern environment: why live in an absolutist moralistic Newtonian universe when the 'Third Culture' is far more liberating and inviting?

The book does fail to consider certain concepts beyond those propagated by the Santa Fe Institute, such as the Pribram/Bohm/Talbot 'Holographic Mind' model, Terence McKenna's Timewave and 2012 Singularity Point, or Rupert Sheldrake's controversial 'Morphic Resonance' models. But if this is kept in mind, the book is invaluable, and for the beginner, makes science accessible.

This is a great book, yet because it so clearly shows the views of the best in science, it inadvertently demonstrates the limitations of scientific thought.

The best in science is not good enough! As I trained scientist myself and after reading this book, I conclude that the best in science are trying too hard to work within the limitations of their adopted methodology--the scientific mode of inquiry. Implicit within that mode is an imprisonment of thought patterns that will allow only for very slow incremental knowledge about the real important things of life. Science is bent on being absolutely sure about unimportant things (especially inorganic things) because scientists cannot bear to be just probable about anything, including important things such as human affairs.

This book clearly shows that we need to read the views of the best scientific minds, but we also need to read books by others, such as Michael Talbot's "Holographic Universe." There are other thinkers, (unfortunately not considered brilliant because we are so enamored with things scientific), who are not entrapped into being so clever within a methodology such as scientific inquiry, that was once dominant, but is now losing its relevance in providing answers to our deeper questions.

In reading "Complexity" by M. Mitchell Waldrop and this book, I was struck how hard even the more enlightened scientists from the Sante Fe Institute were trying to derive insights into self-organizing systems and other "obvious" issues. (Imagine using a Newtonian derived device--the computer, like its linear "if ..and..then" approach-- to model quantum phenomena such as awareness and consciousness which need approaches such as self-annealing knowledge!) With a simple switch in their approach, the scientists do not have to try so hard and be so clever. The problem is the METHOD of inquiry. We need paradigm shifts in our APPROACH to knowledge discovery, not just in knowledge. Complexity is actually an apology by scientists for having lead the world astray in their previous promulgations about a simple-minded, linear universe. The world had to be seen as simple because the method of inquiry was simple-minded.

Within the above perspective, I highly recommend purchase of the book. It may cause the lay people to understand that they may have to contribute to the development of the new knowledge. The best scientific minds are running out of steam, as this book shows, by making their views so accessible to the wider audience.

C. Sherman Severin, Ph.D.,
President & Editor, Consultants Report International Magazine

Why pour over stacks of technical journals when Brockman has collected summary essays from leaders in their fields?