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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.Read more ›
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37 of 38 people found the following review helpful
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.Read more ›
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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.Read more ›
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This item: What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science: Original Essays from a New Generation of Scientists (Vintage)
