THE IMPRINTED BRAIN THEORY
By Christopher Badcock

According to the so-called imprinted brain theory, the paradoxes can be explained in terms of the expression of genes, and not simply their inheritance. Imprinted genes are those which are only expressed when they are inherited from one parent rather than the other. The classic example is IGF2, a growth factor gene only normally expressed when inherited from the father, but silent when inherited from the mother. According to the most widely-accepted theory, genes like IGF2 are silenced by mammalian mothers because only the mother has to pay the costs associated with gestating and giving birth to a large offspring. The father, on the other hand, gets all the benefit of larger offspring, but pays none of the costs. Therefore his copy is activated. The symbolism of a tug-of-war represents the mother's genetic self-interest in countering the growth-enhancing demands of the father's genes expressed in the foetus—the mother, after all, has to gestate and give birth to the baby at enormous cost to herself.

CHRISTOPHER BADCOCK is a Reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of PsychoDarwinism and Evolutionary Psychology: A Clinical Introduction.

Christopher Badcock's Edge Bio Page

...

OF GENITAL THIEVES
The exploration of economic irrationality
By Andrian Kreye

It was one of those watershed moments in science at which you would like to have been present. Last summer in Sonoma, three generations behavioral economists convened at a Master Class run by the Edge Foundation...If you are interested in getting your head around the current global economic meltdown, read through the transcript of this master class once more this autumn. You may not find direct answers, but you will certainly find elements of an explanation. ...

ANDRIAN KREYE is the editor of the Feuilleton of Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Munich. He is also an Edge contributor.

Andrian Kreye's Edge Bio Page

...

The problem of consciousness is understanding how this world is there for us. It shows up in our senses. It shows up in our thoughts. Our feelings and interests and concerns are directed to and embrace this world around us. We think, we feel, the world shows up for us. To me that's the problem of consciousness. That is a real problem that needs to be studied, and it's a special problem.

A useful analogy is life. What is life? We can point to all sorts of chemical processes, metabolic processes, reproductive processes that are present where there is life. But we ask, where is the life? You don't say life is a thing inside the organism. The life is this process that the organism is participating in, a process that involves an environmental niche and dynamic selectivity. If you want to find the life, look to the dynamic of the animal's engagement with its world. The life is there. The life is not inside the animal. The life is the way the animal is in the world.

THE PROBLEM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
A Talk with Alva Noë

ALVA NOË is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He works principally on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, with special interest in the theory of perception, and is also interested in the philosophy of art, the history of analytic philosophy, Phenomenology, and Wittgenstein.

Alva Noë's Edge Bio Page

THE REALITY CLUB: Arnold Trehub

...

HOW KEVIN BACON CURED CANCER

A new documentary by director Annamaria Talas from ABC Television in Australia featuring the work of Duncan Watts, Steven Strogatz and Albert-László Barabási.

We've all heard of 'six degrees of separation', the idea that everyone in the world can be connected in just a few steps. But what if those steps don't just relate to people but also to viruses, neurons, proteins and even to fashion trends? What if this 'six degrees of separation' allowed us an insight into something at the core of Nature?...

...Whether natural or man-made, vast diverse networks share a common blueprint, a structure that describes their strengths and weaknesses. In the near future network science will fundamentally change how we control epidemics; power failures; fight wars; save endangered species; prevent crime and disease.

(To watch the entire docmentary, click on the play button under the eye in the upper left corner.)

...

Further reading on Edge: Who Cares About Fireflies: A Talk with Steven Strogatz, Introduction by Alan Alda [5.12.03]; BLACKOUT!: "How the Blackout Came to Life" By Steven Strogatz; We're All On The Grid Together By Albert-László Barabási [8.22.03]

THE DOUBLE HELIX MEDAL FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH [11.6.08]

James D. Watson & J. Craig Venter

At the Cold Spring Harbor Board of Director's Dinner in New York City, James Watson and Craig Venter were co-recipients of the Double Helix Medal for Scientific Research.

PUTTING PSYCHOLOGY INTO BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman

RICHARD THALER: Behavioral economics and good psychology, there's a lot of art. There is science and there are well-crafted experiments, but thinking about what the right experiment to run, was art and, there are 80 gazillion experiments, which ones are relevant to getting people to plant the right seed. That's a problem that Sendhil and I have been talking about for, well, since he was born. You're now seeing the results of 15 years of conversations. And there wasn't a scientific way of answering that question.

SENDHIL MULLAINAITHAN: A lot of what makes behavioral economics interesting is psychology, it is about what happens inside the mind. These phenomena are taking things that are happening inside the mind and interfacing them with things happening in the world, the environment, and getting feedback or getting interesting responses from that.

We happen to call the word economics. But it's not economics. You could be talking about crime, you could be talking about many things, in the social domain, the entire spectrum of human behavior. Anyone who is interested in the broader world should be interested in something we currently call "behavioral economics".

DANIEL KAHNEMAN: What we're saying is that there is a technology emerging from behavioral economics. It's not only an abstract thing. You can do things with it. We are just at the beginning. I thought that the input of psychology into behavioral economics was done. But hearing Sendhil was very encouraging because there was a lot of new psychology there. That conversation is continuing and it looks to me as if that conversation is going to go forward. It's pretty intuitive, based on research, good theory, and important.

Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, Paul Romer, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Salar Kamangar, George Dyson, France LeClerc

Class 6
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

[...Continue to Class 6]

REAL LIFE IS NOT A CASINO
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Introduction

On New Years day I received a a prescient essay from Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, as his response to the 2008 Edge Question: "What Have You Change Your Mind About?" In "Real Life Is Not A Casino", he wrote:

I've shown that institutions that are exposed to negative black swans—such as banks and some classes of insurance ventures—have almost never been profitable over long periods. The problem of the illustrative current subprime mortgage mess is not so much that the "quants" and other pseudo-experts in bank risk-management were wrong about the probabilities (they were) but that they were severely wrong about the different layers of depth of potential negative outcomes.

Taleb had changed his mind about his belief "in the centrality of probability in life, and advocating that we should express everything in terms of degrees of credence, with unitary probabilities as a special case for total certainties and null for total implausibility".

Critical thinking, knowledge, beliefs—everything needed to be probabilized. Until I came to realize, twelve years ago, that I was wrong in this notion that the calculus of probability could be a guide to life and help society. Indeed, it is only in very rare circumstances that probability (by itself) is a guide to decision making. It is a clumsy academic construction, extremely artificial, and nonobservable. Probability is backed out of decisions; it is not a construct to be handled in a stand-alone way in real-life decision making. It has caused harm in many fields.

The essay is one of more than one hundred that have been edited for a new Edge book What Have You Changed Your Mind About? (forthcoming, Harper Collins, January 9th). See below.

—John Brockman

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB is an essayist and mathematical trader and the author of Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb Edge Bio page

Further reading on Edge: The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08]

In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects — they really don't make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)

SWATTING ATTACKS ON FRUIT FLIES AND SCIENCE
By Jerry Coyne

Sarah Palin's criticism of the critters is just bad buzz. Research on them offers insights into learning, genes, diseases.

JERRY COYNE is a professor in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, where he works on diverse areas of evolutionary genetics. He is the author (with H. Allen Orr) of Speciation, and Why Evolution Is True. Jerry Coyne's Edge Bio Page

____

Enough already. I bit my tongue when I heard that Sarah Palin believed that dinosaurs and humans once lived side by side and that she and John McCain wanted creationism taught in the public schools.

And I just shook my head when McCain derided proposed funding for a sophisticated planetarium projection machine as wasteful spending on an "overhead projector."

But the Republican ticket's war on science has finally gone too far. Last week, Sarah Palin dissed research on fruit flies.

In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: "You've heard about some of these pet projects — they really don't make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not." (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)

As a geneticist, I've worked on fruit flies in the laboratory for three decades. I know the fruit fly. The fruit fly is a friend of mine. And believe me, Sarah Palin doesn't know anything about fruit flies.

...

Further reading on Edge: "Don't Know Much Biology" By Jerry Coyne

I want to close a loop, which I'm calling "The Irony of Poverty." On the one hand, lack of slack tells us the poor must make higher quality decisions because they don't have slack to help buffer them with things. But even though they have to supply higher quality decisions, they're in a worse position to supply them because they're depleted. That is the ultimate irony of poverty. You're getting cut twice. You are in an environment where the decisions have to be better, but you're in an environment that by the very nature of that makes it harder for you apply better decisions.

THE IRONY OF POVERTY
A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan

Daniel Kahneman, Paul Romer, Richard Thaler, Danny Hillis, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker, Anne Treisman, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, George Dyson

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page

Class 5
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

[...Continue to Class 5]

TWO BIG THINGS HAPPENING IN PSYCHOLOGY TODAY
A Talk By Daniel Kahneman

DANIEL KAHNEMAN, a psychologist at Princeton University, is the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio page.

Danny Hillis, Richard Thaler, Nathan Myhrvold, Elon Musk, France LeClerc, Salar Kamangar, Anne Treisman, Sendhil Mullainathan, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker

Class 4
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

THE REALITY CLUB: W. Daniel Hillis, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Daniel Kahneman, Nathan Myhrvold, Daniel Kahneman Nathan Myhrvold

[...Continue to Class 4]

Further Reading on Edge: "A Short Course In Thinking About Thinking"—Edge Master Class 2007, Napa, California; "Tale of the Aspiration Treadmill"

Why do we live in a society that, having ruined its natural environment, is now about to knowingly ruin its social environment and the lives of an entire generation? In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond specified the causes that encourage elites to destroy their societies."They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals."

WHAT'S NEXT? [10.15.08]
By Frank Schirrmacher

FRANK SCHIRRMACHER is a German journalist, essayist, writer, and since 1994 co-publisher of the leading national German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ). He is one of Germanys leading journalists.

...

Further Reading on Edge: "Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech" By Frank Schirrmacher[7.10.00]

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SCARCITY
A Talk By Sendhil Mullainathan

Nathan Myhrvold, Richard Thaler, Daniel Kahneman, France LeClerc, Danny Hillis, Paul Romer, George Dyson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sean Parker

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page

Class 3
A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

[...Continue to Class 3]

At a minimum, what we're saying is that in every market where there is now required written disclosure, you have to give the same information electronically and we think intelligently how best to do that. In a sentence that's the nature of the proposal. —Richard Thaler

CLASS 2
RICHARD THALER & SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN

Jeff Bezos, Nathan Myhrvold, Salar Kamangar, Daniel Kahneman, Danny Hillis, Paul Romer, Elon Musk, Sean Parker

RICHARD H. THALER is the father of behavioral economics—the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Richard Thaler's Edge Bio Page

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

[...Continue to Class 2]

If you remember one thing from this session, let it be this one: There is no way of avoiding meddling. People sometimes have the confused idea that we are pro meddling. That is a ridiculous notion. It's impossible not to meddle. Given that we can't avoid meddling, let's meddle in a good way.

CLASS 1: RICHARD THALER

Danny Hillis, Nathan Myhrvold, Daniel Kahneman, Jeff Bezos,
Sendhil Mullainathan

RICHARD H. THALER is the father of behavioral economics—the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Richard Thaler's Edge Bio Page

A SHORT COURSE IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS
Edge Master Class 2008
Richard Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan, Daniel Kahneman
Sonoma, CA, July 25-27, 2008

AN EDGE SPECIAL PROJECT

[...Continue to Class 1]

Richard Thaler		Sendhil Mullainathan		Daniel Kahneman

A year ago, Edge convened its first "Master Class" in Napa, California, in which psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman taught a 9-hour course: "A Short Course On Thinking About Thinking". The attendees were a "who's who" of the new global business culture.

This year, to continue the conversation, we invited Richard Thaler, the father of behavioral economics, to organize and lead the class: "A Short Course On Behavioral Economics". Thaler asked Harvard economist and former student Sendhil Mullainathan, as well as Daniel Kahneman, to teach the class with him.

Whereas last year, the focus was on psychology, this year the emphasis shifted to behavioral economics. As Kahneman noted:

...There's new technology emerging from behavioral economics and we are just starting to make use of that. I thought the input of psychology into economics was finished but clearly it's not!

The Master Class is the most recent iteration of Edge's development, which began its activities under than name "The Reality Club" in 1981. Edge's is different from The Algonquin, The Apostles, The Bloomsbury Group, or The Club, but it offers the same quality of intellectual adventure. The closest resemblances are to The Invisible College and the Lunar Society of Birmingham.

The early seventeenth-century Invisible College was a precursor to the Royal Society. Its members consisted of scientists such as Robert Boyle, John Wallis, and Robert Hooke. The Society's common theme was to acquire knowledge through experimental investigation. Another example is the nineteenth-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal club of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age — James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgewood, Joseph Priestly, and Benjamin Franklin.

In a similar fashion, Edge's, through its Master Classes, gathers together intellectuals and technology pioneers. In this regard, George Dyson, in his summary (below) of the second day of the proceedings, writes:

Retreating to the luxury of Sonoma to discuss economic theory in mid-2008 conveys images of Fiddling while Rome Burns. Do the architects of Microsoft, Amazon, Google, PayPal, and Facebook have anything to teach the behavioral economists—and anything to learn? So what? What's new?? As it turns out, all kinds of things are new. Entirely new economic structures and pathways have come into existence in the past few years.

Indeed, as one distinguished European visitor noted, the weekend, which involved the 2-day Master Class in Sonoma followed by a San Francisco dinner, involved "a remarkable gathering of outstanding minds. These are the people that are rewriting our global culture".

Beginning October 1st, Edge will begin to publish on a weekly basis the text, selected video highlights, and photos of the six classes comprising "A Short Course In Behavioral Economics". Below, please find the Table of Contents; Introduction By Daniel Kahneman; Summary of Day 1 By Nathan Myhrvold; Summary of Day 2 By George Dyson; Link to the Photo Gallery; and Link to Class One.

—John Brockman, Editor

RICHARD H. THALER is the father of behavioral economics—the study of how thinking and emotions affect individual economic decisions and the behavior of markets. He investigates the implications of relaxing the standard economic assumption that everyone in the economy is rational and selfish, instead entertaining the possibility that some of the agents in the economy are sometimes human. Thaler is Director of the Center for Decision Research at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. He is coauthor (with Cass Sunstein) of Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Richard Thaler's Edge Bio Page

SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a Professor of Economics at Harvard, a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant", conducts research on development economics, behavioral economics, and corporate finance. His work concerns creating a psychology of people to improve poverty alleviation programs in developing countries. He is Executive Director of Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University. Sendhil Mullainathan's Edge Bio Page

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology, Princeton University, and Professor of Public Affairs, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering work integrating insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty. Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page

PARTICIPANTS: Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon.com; John Brockman, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Max Brockman, Brockman, Inc.; George Dyson, Science Historian; Author, Darwin Among the Machines; W. Daniel Hillis, Computer Scientist; Cofounder, Applied Minds; Author, The Pattern on the Stone; Daniel Kahneman, Psychologist; Nobel Laureate, Princeton University; Salar Kamangar, Google; France LeClerc, Marketing Professor; Katinka Matson, Edge Foundation, Inc.; Sendhil Mullainathan, Professor of Economics, Harvard University; Executive Director, Ideas 42, Institute of Quantitative Social Science; Elon Musk, Physicist; Founder, Tesla Motors, SpaceX; Nathan Myhrvold, Physicist; Founder, Intellectual Venture, LLC; Event Photographer; Sean Parker, The Founders Fund; Cofounder: Napster, Plaxo, Facebook; Paul Romer, Economist, Stanford; Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economist, Director of the Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; coauthor of Nudge; Anne Treisman, Psychologist, Princeton University; Evan Williams, Founder, Blogger, Twitter.

[...Continue to "A Short Class In Behavioral Economics"]

Further Reading on Edge:
"A Short Course On Thinking About Thinking"
Edge Master Class 2007
Daniel Kahneman
Auberge du Soleil, Rutherford, CA, July 20-22, 2007

"Globalization creates interlocking fragility, while reducing volatility and giving the appearance of stability. In other words it creates devastating Black Swans. We have never lived before under the threat of a global collapse. Financial Institutions have been merging into a smaller number of very large banks. Almost all banks are interrelated. So the financial ecology is swelling into gigantic, incestuous, bureaucratic banks – when one fails, they all fall. The increased concentration among banks seems to have the effect of making financial crisis less likely, but when they happen they are more global in scale and hit us very hard. We have moved from a diversified ecology of small banks, with varied lending policies, to a more homogeneous framework of firms that all resemble one another. True, we now have fewer failures, but when they occur ….I shiver at the thought."

— Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan (2006)

ECONOMIC DIS-EQUILIBRIUM [9.24.08]
Can You Have Your House And Spend It Too?
By George Dyson

George Dyson writes: "Readers of Nassim Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant may enjoy the following piece on fraud-resistant financial instruments of the 13th century—progenitors of a multitude of derivatives that are plaguing us today." ...

...The breakthrough was in money being duplicated: the King gathered real gold and silver into the treasury through the Exchequer, with the tally given in return attesting to the credit of the holder who could enter into trade, manufacturing, or other ventures, eventually producing real wealth with nothing more than a notched wooden stick. So what's the problem? Aren't we just passing around digital versions of the tallies we've been using for almost one thousand years? Aren't mortgages, whether prime or sub-prime, just a modern version of paying for houses with fraud-resistant sticks? ...

...

Further Reading on Edge: "The Fourth Quadrant: A Map of the Limits of Statistics" By Nassim Nicholas Taleb [9.15.08]

On "THE FOURTH QUADRANT: A MAP OF THE LIMITS OF STATISTICS"
By Nassim Nicholas Taleb

JARON LANIER: This is a superb piece and I hope it is widely read and taken to heart in Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington. All these centers of power and creativity are drowning in illusions brought about by thunderous misuses of statistics that have become implacably seductive only with the recent availability of vast, connected computer resources.

Edge.org has become the most dramatic point of contact between the critics and supporters of the fallacies Taleb elucidates. ...

GEORGE DYSON: ...What to do now? I'd prefer less Paulson, and more Newton. In the 17th century, English coinage had become widely debased, much as our system of financial instruments has become debased today. In 1696, Sir Isaac Newton was appointed Warden of the Mint, with authority to prosecute counterfeiters, who were not only hung, but drawn and quartered. This, accompanied by a systematic recoinage, worked.

...

An Edge Original Essay

Statistical and applied probabilistic knowledge is the core of knowledge; statistics is what tells you if something is true, false, or merely anecdotal; it is the "logic of science"; it is the instrument of risk-taking; it is the applied tools of epistemology; you can't be a modern intellectual and not think probabilistically—but... let's not be suckers. The problem is much more complicated than it seems to the casual, mechanistic user who picked it up in graduate school. Statistics can fool you. In fact it is fooling your government right now. It can even bankrupt the system (let's face it: use of probabilistic methods for the estimation of risks did just blow up the banking system).

REALITY CLUB: Jaron Lanier, George Dyson

BLOGWATCH

...

WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? [9.9.08]
By Jonathan Haidt

...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer.

THE REALITY CLUB: Daniel Everett, Howard Gardner, Michael Shermer, Scott Atran, James Fowler, Alison Gopnik, Sam Harris, James O'Donnell, Roger Schank

BLOGWATCH

...

A SLICE OF SCIFOO [9.3..07]
By Frank Wilczek

SciFoo is a conference like no other. It brings together a mad mix from the worlds of science, technology, and other branches of the ineffable Third Culture at the Google campus in Mountain View. Improvised, loose, massively parallel—it's a happening. If you're not overwhelmed by the rush of ideas then you're not paying attention.

REALITY CLUB: Lee Smolin, Betsy Devine, George Dyson

...

In a Novel Theory of Mental Disorders, Parents’ Genes Are in Competition"
By Benedict Carey

Two scientists, drawing on their own powers of observation and a creative reading of recent genetic findings, have published a sweeping theory of brain development that would change the way mental disorders like autism and schizophrenia are understood.

The theory emerged in part from thinking about events other than mutations that can change gene behavior. And it suggests entirely new avenues of research, which, even if they prove the theory to be flawed, are likely to provide new insights into the biology of mental disease.

At a time when the search for the genetic glitches behind brain disorders has become mired in uncertain and complex findings, the new idea provides psychiatry with perhaps its grandest working theory since Freud, and one that is grounded in work at the forefront of science. The two researchers — Bernard Crespi, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Christopher Badcock, a sociologist at the London School of Economics, who are both outsiders to the field of behavior genetics — have spelled out their theory in a series of recent journal articles. ...

ESSAY

Battle of the sexes may set the brain

A tug-of-war between the mother's and father's genes in the developing brain could explain a spectrum of mental disorders from autism to schizophrenia, suggest Christopher Badcock and Bernard Crespi.

It has long been recognized that mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and autism tend to run in families. But neither disorder obeys classical Mendelian laws of inheritance, making it difficult to pinpoint the genes involved.

We believe that psychiatric illness may be less to do with the genes a mother and father pass down, and more to do with which genes they program for expression. By our hypothesis, a hidden battle of the sexes — where a mother's egg and a father's sperm engage in an evolutionary struggle to turn gene expression up or down — could play a crucial part in determining the balance or imbalance of an offspring's brain. If this proves true, it would greatly clarify the diagnosis of mental disorders. It might even make it possible to reset the mind's balance with targeted drugs. ...

On the Saturnian moon Enceladus, jets of powdery snow and water vapor, laden with organic compounds, vent from the “tiger stripes,” warm gashes in the surface. How can a body just over 500 kilometers across sustain such vigorous activity?

The answer may be the presence of underground fluids, perhaps a sea, which would increase the efficiency of heating by tidal effects. Support for this idea has come from recent flybys.
If Enceladus has liquid water, it joins Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa as one of the prime places in the solar system to look for extraterrestrial life. ...

Unter Geschlechtsräubern
Die Erforschung der wirtschaftlichen Unvernunft
Andrian Kreye

Es war einer jener traumhaften Momente der Wissenschaft, bei dem man gerne dabei gewesen wäre. Im vergangenen Sommer trafen sich im kalifornischen Sonoma drei Generationen der Verhaltensökonomie zu einer Meisterklasse der Edge Foundation, jener Forschungsrichtung also, die versucht, den Mechanismen des Marktes aus dem Blickwinkel der Menschen zu begegnen. Daniel Kahnemann war der Älteste der drei prominenten Gäste, eigentlich Professor der Psychologie in Princeton, aber eben auch Wirtschaftsnobelpreisträger für seine Pionierarbeit in "Behavioral Economics", sein Schüler Richard Thaler, Ökonom in Harvard und als "Vater der Verhaltensökonomik" bekannt sowie dessen Schüler Sendhil Mullainathan, ebenfalls aus Harvard, der die Verhaltensökonomie auf die Phänomene der Armut angewandt hatte. ...

Internet cambia la forma de leer... ¿y de pensar?
La lectura en horizontal, a saltos rápidos y muy variados se ha extendido - ¿Puede la Red estar reeducando nuestro cerebro?

Abel Grau

...Uno de los más recientes en plantear el debate ha sido el ensayista estadounidense Nicholas G. Carr, experto en Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación (TIC), y asesor de la Enciclopedia británica. Asegura que ya no piensa como antes. ...

...El planteamiento de Carr ha suscitado cierto debate en foros especializados, como en la revista científica online Edge.org, y de hecho no es descabellado. Los neurólogos sostienen que todas las actividades mentales influyen a un nivel biológico en el cerebro; es decir, en el establecimiento de las conexiones neuronales, la compleja red eléctrica en la que se forman los pensamientos. " ....

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN
November 11, 2008

There are certain characters in science who stand out for their larger-than-science characteristics: Galileo and his conflicts with Papal authorities; Albert Einstein and his political dabblings and pacifist overtures; Richard Feynman and his safecracking, storytelling antics; Stephen Hawking and his ethereal brain trapped in a frozen body. Biographies, documentaries, films, and even plays have attempted to capture the essence of these giants (see QED, for example, the play starring Alan Alda as Feynman). But to my knowledge, none have had an opera produced in their likeness.

Enter Doctor Atomic, a look at the meaning behind the making of the atomic bomb from the perspective of its paterfamilias J. Robert Oppenheimer and his disparate struggles: with nature to reveal her secrets, with his conscious to ease his guilt. He also struggles with General Leslie R. Groves, the titular military head of the Manhattan Project, and with fellow physicist and future father of the H-Bomb, Edward Teller. ...

Ben Macintyre on a people with no history, no fiction and no sense of left or right

In 1980, Daniel Everett, an American missionary and linguist, set off into the heart of the Amazon to track down some of the norld's most elusive words: the language of the Pirahã, a small tribe of Amazonian Indians living on the banks of the Maici River in Brazil.

For the next 20 years Everett, the son of a California cowboy, tried to hack his way through this impenetrable language, coming across verbs that grew into the most contorted shapes, sentences without subordinate clauses and forests of nouns that seemed to change without reason or pattern. ...

THE POWER OF SPEECH

When Daniel Everett first went to live with the Amazonian Pirahã tribe in the late 70s, his intention was to convert them to Christianity. Instead, he learned to speak their unique language - and ended up rejecting his faith, losing his family and picking a fight with Noam Chomsky. Patrick Barkham meets him

Daniel Everett looks and talks very much like the middle-aged American academic he is - until he drops a strange word into the conversation. An exceptionally melodic noise tumbles from his mouth. It doesn't sound like speaking at all. Apart from his ex-wife and two ageing missionaries, Everett is the only person in the world beyond the sweeping banks of the Maici river in the Amazon basin who can speak Pirahã. ...

A NEW DAWN

ESSAY
The benefits of climate-change policies are limited and costly. Instead, the president-elect needs to coolly evaluate competing priorities, says Bjørn Lomborg. ...

ESSAY
As Barack Obama shifts from a waking dream to the real world, he faces the near-virtual reality of climate change. He has to move decisively,Ian McEwan writes.

SLATE

...Arguments about the merits of religions are often battled out with reference to history, by comparing the sins of theists and atheists. (I see your Crusades and raise you Stalin!) But a more promising approach is to look at empirical research that directly addresses the effects of religion on how people behave.

In a review published in Science last month, psychologists Ara Norenzayan and Azim Shariff discuss several experiments that lean pro-Schlessinger. In one of their own studies, they primed half the participants with a spirituality-themed word jumble (including the words divine and God) and gave the other half the same task with nonspiritual words. Then, they gave all the participants $10 each and told them that they could either keep it or share their cash reward with another (anonymous) subject. Ultimately, the spiritual-jumble group parted with more than twice as much money as the control. Norenzayan and Shariff suggest that this lopsided outcome is the result of an evolutionary imperative to care about one's reputation. ...

...It is at this point that the "We need God to be good" case falls apart. Countries worthy of consideration aren't those like North Korea and China, where religion is savagely repressed, but those in which people freely choose atheism. In his new book, Society Wit