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The Third Culture

Edited by John Brockman

Reviewed by Kevin Ryan

In high school, I was always one to tread between groups. I was neither a gear-head car fanatic, a jock sportsman nor a hippy. I was contented to interact with all three groups without becoming a member of any. I guess that is why I chose psychology and linguistics as areas of study, both being neither true art nor true science. And part of that has lead me to CALL, a combination of teaching and technology, of personality and science.

Almost forty years ago, C.P. Snow, wrote about "two cultures". Similar to the two worlds of Russia and the US, there was an animosity and eventual polarization. But instead of being a political battle, this was one for the minds of young thinkers. On one side were the literary intellectuals, scientists on the other. At the time Snow hoped for a "third culture," that would bridge the gap.

John Brockman has shown in his book The Third Culture that it is now scientists who are unraveling the mysteries of nature and human existence. Literary intellectuals have fallen by the wayside in our quest for truth, beauty and a "theory of everything."

Brockman brings together twenty-three visionaries and leaders in their respective fields to explain about their histories and advancements. More notably, he has gotten each to read the others’ papers and comment on them. You get a feeling that disperse characters in virtually unrelated fields have something to say about the work of scientists today and their quest tot understand the world.

Brockman divides the book into five areas; evolution, intelligence, the origin of the universe, order and chaos, and beyond human existence. One reading WIRED magazine would have a good introduction to the thinkers in the first two parts. Richard Dawkins, a strict Darwinian, makes his argument that DNA is essentially an opportunistic survival machine, and humans are just along for the ride. Something like saying "the chicken is a great way for the egg to reproduce itself." Stephen Jay Gould is at the center of many a controversy with his punctuated-equilibrium theory, where evolution happens in fits and starts, with no specific end in mind. George C. Williams, father of modern evolutionary thinking, discusses DNA as information, not an object. Brian Goodwin, on evolution as a dance, gets more criticism than the rest. Lynn Margulis, co-author of the Gaia theory that the earth is one big organism, sounds defensive and retreats to minutae.

Part two will be the most interesting to those involved in CALL . Starting with the father of AI (artificial intelligence), Marvin Minsky, we explore consciousness and learning. Roger Schank, the bad boy of AI and my favorite, talks about how learning cannot take place without mistakes, called expectation failure. Daniel C. Dennett wanders into philosophy and "intuition pumps" for the most thought-provoking part of this section. Steven Pinker is the most relevant, with a discussion of language in the role of consciousness. He is very well thought of by most of the others in this section. Roger Penrose continues his line of ideas that consciousness cannot be duplicated because of the quantum aspects of thinking.

Section three four and five deal with issues less interesting to a linguist, but essential for an extant being. Martin Rees, Alan Gluth, Lee Smolin and Paul Davies ponder on how and why the universe began, and what happened in those first few nano-seconds.

Murray Gell-Mann is the leader of the Institute at Santa Fe, a think tank for geniuses that holds a conference every year. There are a couple of other Institute members authoring papers here, too. If you read WIRED magazine, you will have seen them--Stuart Kauffman on Order, for example.

So what we see here is a synthesis of ideas, along with a reaction to those ideas within the group. It was as if they all got on line and joined a listserv for a month, exchanging ideas and opinions, sometimes flaming each other and showing loyalty to others. A must read for the citizen of today’s technological world with one foot in science, the other in humanity.

I just received my new Daedalus catlog, and they have this book on sale. Daedelus is a company that sells remainders of books left over from book club sales. Check them out, and The Third Culture at http://www.daedalus-books.com.