18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A mixed bag of short essays, January 11, 2009
This review is from: What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything (Paperback)
The Edge Foundation is an organization of science and technology intellectuals created "to seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together and have themselves ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." Its main activity is maintaining its free website and circulating free regular emails about the contributions of its stable of intellectuals.
Once a year Edge publishes a collection of essays devoted to a single question; the 2008 question was devoted to issues the contributors have changed their minds about. Amazon has provided an excellent table of contents which describes in some detail the answers of all of the contributors. It is almost impossible to provide a meaningful review of so many essays, but it is great fun to read through the contents, and then search out more information from authors of interest, either in the book itself or in other resources. (Google does a great job of searching out more information by entering the author's name and a few of the words from the Table of Contents.)
The model of scientific inquiry seems to embrace the idea that scientists should often change their minds, as new evidence is presented. And yet, the history of science is filled with contra examples, and it is striking that most of the examples in this book are changes of opinion or emphasis, not fundamental changes in approach.
Sharon Begley in "Newsweek" identifies only a couple, including this from Stephen Pinker:
"Steven Pinker, one of evo-psych's most prominent popularizers, now admits that many human genes are changing more quickly than anyone imagined. If genes that affect brain function and therefore behavior are also evolving quickly, then we do not have the Stone Age brains that evo-psych supposes, and the field 'may have to reconsider the simplifying assumption that biological evolution was pretty much over' 50,000 years ago, Pinker says."
Nevertheless, the essays are fascinating whatever their conclusions, showing how the scientific minds work on a pre-set problem. Next year's Question may produce more specific answers: "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?"
As John Brockman points out:
"Through science we create technology and in using our new tools we recreate ourselves. But until very recently in our history, no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever indicated by choice, by vote, how this process should play out.
Nobody ever voted for printing. Nobody ever voted for electricity. Nobody ever voted for radio, the telephone, the automobile, the airplane, television. Nobody ever voted for penicillin, antibiotics, the pill. Nobody ever voted for space travel, massively parallel computing, nuclear power, the personal computer, the Internet, email, cell phones, the Web, Google, cloning, sequencing the entire human genome. We are moving towards the redefinition of life, to the edge of creating life itself. While science may or may not be the only news, it is the news that stays news."
Whatever your own views, these essays give the reader plenty to think about and for this reader an enormous amount of pleasure.
Robert C. Ross 2009
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A magnificent compilation, September 6, 2010
This review is from: What Have You Changed Your Mind About?: Today's Leading Minds Rethink Everything (Paperback)
As all books in the [...] series (I have read three of the four), this recompilation of articles is a treasure. One is forced to stop reading in between opinions in order to think about the points being brought up by the authors. A wonderful piece, one that I will read again at random, again and again.
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