Customer Reviews

What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science: Original Essays from a New Generation of Scientists (Vintage)

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The title of this book seriously overreaches. "Dispatches from the Future of neuroscience" would be more accurate, as 12 of the 18 essays deal with neuroscientific research. One article is about climate change, two are in the area of cosmology, two deal with evolutionary biology, and the final essay in the collection addresses the question "Why hasn't specialization resulted in the balkanization of science?"

In commenting on the neuroscience essays, I should acknowledge an upfront prejudice. I don't find it particularly surprising that more sophisticated imaging methods allow specific functions to be mapped precisely to particular regions of the brain, so I didn't find the three essays which do little more than report this kind of result particularly notable. Among the remaining essays, that by Deena Skolnick Weisberg, arguing that imagination is central to what makes us human, was little more than a statement of the obvious. Nick Bostrom's "How to Enhance Human Beings" was muddled, with no clear point, the essay by Sam Cooke on the process of memory formation was incoherent, made no mention of recent work related to the placement of "false memory", and had a Huxleyan focus on possible pharmaceutical enhancement that I found disturbing.

Essays by Joshua Greene on the organization of the brain along moral and cognitive dimensions and by David Eagleman on the way the brain perceives time were clear, but unexceptional.

The good news: Christian Keysers' lucid account of the link between mirror neurons and our ethical sensibility, Matthew Lieberman's thought-provoking discussion of the thesis that "big ideas are influential and enduring because they fit with the structure and function of the human brain" and - what was for me the best essay in the book - Lera Boroditsky's "How does our language shape the way we think", summarizing recent work related to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

So I found about half the neuroscience essays worthwhile. Unfortunately, I found both cosmology essays completely incomprehensible (as I do most writing in this field). So that overall, I can't really justify more than three stars for this book.

The editor asked prominent young scientists from a variety of fields to talk about the future of their disciplines and the result is a fascinating and diverse collection about future breakthroughs in and challenges facing scientists.

Subjects covered include neurology, climatology, paleoanthropology, biology, but what unifies them all is an interest in what impact future discoveries will have on humanity. For instance, How does recent research into the brain affect our understanding of morality?, or time?, language acquisition, or how we think about things like physical or temporal orientation? Will there be a huge human migration to the northern climes as global warming makes the earth's climate hotter? What would places like Northern Canada be like in that scenario? There's also a really interesting essay on mirror neurons, and how our minds develop ethics.

I highly recommend this book to people interested in a smart book on current, cutting-edge scientific trends.

I love reading the Science Times section of the New York Times every Tuesday...when it comes to non-fiction, I enjoy sifting through intelligent sound bytes of information and then deciding how I want to follow up as a reader. In many ways, reading this collection was an enriched version of that experience.

Mr. Brockman's collection of essays introduces the reader to 18 up-and-coming young scientists in widely varied fields. I loved being able to pick and choose which essay to read (I started with #3, Nick Bostrom's "How to Enhance Human Beings").

A few other notes:
*I like the idea of being introduced to up-and-comers in the field
*I thought the table of contents was handled very well -- there's a blurb about the topic of each essay, so it it easy to pick and choose

Within two days I had read all 18 essays -- what a treat!

For anyone who wonders what the near future holds and what exactly are all those scientists doing with the grants and tax dollar funding they receive, What's Next? is a book with some answers. Featuring eighteen original essays that have never been published from some of today's best scientists, What's Next? will insight a curiosity in the reader on advances and research that is being made in the many fields of science.

While a little patience and perhaps some scientific background is recommended, as these scientists are not authors of multiple books and tend to get very detailed and complex in their essays, readers will find news and answers in the fields if neurological research, behavior, how humans think, the nature of time, and where our idea of morality possibly arises from. Global warming is addressed in a most interesting essay that analyzes a warming world where the Northern Rim becomes further habitable, but leaves readers with the question of how many people will want to move into the undeveloped heartland of Russia?

What's Next? is a collection of some very interesting and insightful essays that give readers news and information on some areas of research and science that may not be readily available to them through magazines or newspapers, or perhaps are only available through expensive science journals. Perhaps a book to truly show "your tax dollars at work."

[...]

The main difference between this and other science anthologies that I have read is 1) the essays are original, written especially for this volume; and 2) the scientists are relatively young not yet at the pinnacle of their careers.

Max Brockman believes that "it's important to engage with the thinking of the next generation, to better understand not just what is going on in our own time but what issues society will face in the future. This exercise is especially valuable in science, where so many of the important discoveries are made by those in emerging generations." (p. xiii) Consequently he "approached some of today's leading scientists and asked them to name some of the rising stars in their respective disciplines: those who, in their research, are tackling some of science's toughest questions and raising new ones." (pp. xii-xiv) The result is this book with essays from 18 scientists in fields ranging from cosmology to microbiology.

In the first essay UCLA climatologist Laurence C. Smith asks "Will We Decamp for the Northern Rim?" His answer is that he does "not advise buying acreage in Labrador," but "maybe in Michigan." What is clear is that the north is warming up and making "land that is hardly livable [in]to land that is somewhat livable." He sees the US and Canada as the two countries "best positioned for expansion" into what has been known as the lands of the "minus-forty" degrees. Central to his piece is the prediction that north of the 45th parallel "temperatures will rise at nearly double the global average...and precipitation will increase sharply as well."

In the second essay neuroscientist Christian Keysers argues that "mirror neurons" in our brain that enable us mimic and feel what other are doing and feeling merely by watching--something we do automatically--strongly suggests that humans are ethical by nature. He believes that our brain circuits "lay the foundation for an intuitive altruism."

Philosopher Nick Bostrom looks at enhancing human beings so that we might be better acclimated to the modern world instead of the savannahs of Africa on which we evolved.

Physicist Sean Carroll explores entropy and the arrow of time in the cosmos while physicist Stephon H.S. Alexander grapples with dark energy.

There are essays on the social development of the brain in adolescence by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore; on using brain imaging to explore social thought (Jason P. Mitchell); how language shapes the way we think (Lera Broditsky); on memory enhancement (Sam Cooke); and so on to whether specialization in science is making it impossible for scientists in different field to communicate (Gavin Schmidt, who says that the last person able to keep up with all the sciences lived in the eighteenth century).

Of particular interest to me are the essays by David M. Eagleman on "Brain Time," and by Vanessa Woods and Brian Hare on how humans came "down from the trees" and why no one followed. In the former, Eagleman addresses the familiar phenomenon that "time 'slows down' during brief, dangerous events such as car accidents and robberies." (p. 159) I've had that experience myself and have tried to account for it. What Eagleman discovered is that because of the emergency situation we take in much more information about what is happening than we usually do and this "higher density of data" makes the event appear to last longer. (p. 161) This is similar to the sense that for a child the day is long and for the old person the day is short. The day seems longer for the child because so much of what the child is experiencing is new and requires close attention, whereas for a person of senior years much of what happens has been seen before and requires only the most cursory attention.

In the latter essay, Woods and Hare explore the canine-human relationship and show how dogs are better able to read humans than are our closer relatives, chimpanzees. Dogs were able to find hidden objects in an experiment when humans would gaze at or point to the hiding place or even tap on the hiding place. But chimps have not the habit of paying that much attention to humans and would just miss the clues. Woods and Hare ask why this should be and answer: "One idea is that dogs live with us, so over thousands of hours of interacting with us, they learn to read our body language. Another idea is that the pack lifestyle and cooperative hunting of wolves, the canids from which all dogs evolved, made all canids, dogs included, more in tune with social cues." (p. 177)

Woods and Hare also report on an experiment by the Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev who raised some forty generations of foxes, selecting those most friendly to humans in each generation. The foxes "became incredibly friendly toward humans. Whenever they saw people, they barked, wagged their tails, sniffed the people, and licked their faces. But even stranger were the physical changes...." Their ears "became floppy" and their "tails turned curly." "In short, they looked and behaved remarkably like their close relative the domestic dog." (pp. 178-179)

Incidentally Max Brockman is the son of John Brockman who has edited a number of first class science anthologies. "What's Next" continues that excellent tradition.

(Note: Thirteen of my books are now available at Amazon including "Hard Science and the Unknowable.")

The latest developments in science are the source of enduring fascination, by both the insiders and outsiders of the scientific community. Even more fascinating are the speculations about what may lay just around the corner, within next few years or decades of scientific research. The future always tends to be more exciting than even the most amazing advances of today. In that respect, this book is a very good overview of the status of some of the most advanced current research and the directions in which it is headed. It is written by many young but well established experts in the field, and they are the best guide to all the upcoming developments. Their presentation of their own work is well geared towards a general reader, and overall they tell some very interesting and compelling stories. If you are at all interested in science, this will be an engaging read. However, it is not always clear if some of the predictions that are offered here are based on solid scientific understanding of where that particular field is headed, or are they more of a wishful thinking at the author's part. Another thing that I don't like about this book is the lack of diversity among the chosen scientific topics. Most of the chapters are dedicated to one of the three main themes: fundamental Physics, human mind and behavior, or climate change. The reader will thus get a rather skewed and unbalanced view of the kinds of research that are done these days.

With the exeption of a single essay related to potential areas humanity might relocate in the event of drastic climate change this book mostly focused on neuroscience and almost entirely focused not on what's next but rather what's now.

With that understood I found the book to be particularly interesting.

An essay on motor neurons and the rise of ethical behavior was interesting for its suggestion that motor neurons may have played a pivotol role in the development of human ethics. While I suspect that any complete description of the basis of human ethics will be much more complicated (involving many more systems) it is interesting to consider the role of motor neurons.

Another essay which suggested language delimits human thinking was interesting. It reminded me of work by George Lakoff who suggested that language generally imports physical cognitive systems when describing intellectual endeavors. Examples would be when we speak of the EXTENT of an idea or one person's school of thought PREVAILING OVER another's. That being said I'm still agnostic to say the least that different languages would significantly alter an individual's grasp of reality. But it interesting to think that right to left readers arrange sequential images in a right to left fashion while left to right readers do the reverse.

Also relating to neuroscience I was personally interested in the work which shows the presence of a developmental period which lies at the end of adolescence. That's why the young tend to be greater risk takers and those past their youth tend to hedge their bets. It's not just a question of experience but a physical ability to respond differently to that experience. Though this essay was interesting for what it said I think many more permutations could be developed from this research.

The cosmological essays were interesting but frustrating in how modern science's failure to reconcile the standard model with relativity leaves basic questions about how the universe still unanswered.

Still the same, the book is good reading. For those looking for more provocative material relating to the future I would suggest reading Peter Ward on climate change and Ray Kurzweil on the future of technology, artificial intelligence and humanity.

If you want a good peek at what is going to be out there in the world of science and technology 10 years from now with out having a flux capacitor then this book is perhaps your best bet. Good read, engaging, thoughtful, and well organized.

***1/2

If this collection of essays is representative of where science is headed in the next decade or two, we can look forward to better understanding of human cognition, social/behavorial psychology, evolutionary biology, and climate change, not to mention more overlap between these fields. But IS it a representative collection? -- I was a little disappointed that the book didn't address obvious hot topics in more technological areas, such as particle physics, green energy, nanotechnology, or artificial intelligence.

Regardless of their focus, though, I found the issues that these piece examine generally interesting. Does the language we speak affect how we think? How are viruses necessary? Why is that wolves and chimpanzees can't follow a pointing finger, but dogs can? (Because that sort of human social awareness has been bred into dogs.) Why is it that you can see another person's eyes flick, but not your own? How does the brain organize sense data arriving at different times?

Some of the authors are better writers than others, so the level of clarity and compellingness varies, but, together, they provide a good snapshot of some of science's advancing fronts. Even fields the book doesn't cover will probably be influenced by progress in the ones it does.

For a more comprehensive review of this book I refer the reader to the review on this site written by Dennis Littrell.
My review will focus on two of the articles only. Sean Carrol's article on 'Our Place in An Unnatural Universe' was a survey of current cosmological research. The Universe is not a small warm cuddly place but one mysterious and problematic. The seemingly unhappy news that the galaxies are accelerating in their movement away from each other, seems to promise an End to all in total entropy . But Speculation never seems to be in short supply when it comes to Cosmology and he also reports about there being efforts to imagine a pre- Big Bang Universe. Apparently the rule is the less data one has the more need to send in the Armies of the Imagination, in. In any case the 'picture we have of the Universe ' today on the macro- scale is a very uneasy and uneven one.
In another area the essay by Katerina Harvati analyzes the whole process of species extinction, and focuses on the extinction of Paranthrapus one million years ago and Neanderthal thirty- thousand years ago. Mankind according to Harvati made it through for a number of reasons including our generalist diet, ability to survive in a wide range of environments, shorter birth intervals than other 'great apes' longer maturity times, longer life spans. Harvati does not discuss the wide- range of challenges to human continuity presented today, but focuses on what has been until now.