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As you might expect from a group of academics with popular books writing on a site by a literary agent, when asked “What is your dangerous idea?”, most took the opportunity to talk about their most beloved idea. They tried to phrase their essays in such a way that their research sounded like it might have dangerous implications, but I think they largely failed. Daniel Hillis figures that people with truly dangerous ideas shouldn’t discuss them in public anyway.
The quality of the posts varies greatly and there are a lot of them (75 000 words) so to help you optimize your precious Internet reading time I’ve selected the most insightful and thought provoking* essays into three BioCurious-centric categories:
Biology
Gerald Holton: The medicination of the ancient yearning for immortality
George Dyson: Understanding molecular biology without discovering the origins of life
Robert Shapiro: We shall understand the origin of life within the next 5 years
Eric R. Kandel: Free will is exercised unconsciously, without awareness
Arnold Trehub: Modern science is a product of biology
Karl Sabbagh: The human brain and its products are incapable of understanding the truths about the universe
J. Craig Venter: Revealing the genetic basis of personality and behavior will create societal conflicts
Richard Dawkins: Let’s all stop beating Basil’s car
Freeman Dyson: Biotechnology will be thoroughly domesticated in the next fifty years
Physics
Neil Gerschenfeld: Democratizing access to the means of invention
Lee Smolin: Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein; seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin
Jeremy Bernstein: The idea that we understand plutonium
Other
Geoffrey Miller: Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi Paradox
Paul Davies: The fight against global warming is lost
Oliver Morton: Our planet is not in peril
Carolyn Porco: The Greatest Story Ever Told
Alison Gopnik: A cacophony of “controversy”
Sam Harris: Science Must Destroy Religion
Gregory Cochran: There is something new under the sun — us
Robert Provine: This is all there is
Jamshed Bharucha: Education as we know it does not accomplish what we believe it does
Roger Shank: No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks
John Allen Paulos: The self is a conceptual chimera
Sean Carroll and Peter Woit also discuss the Edge question responses.
*That does not imply I agree with all of them!
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Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
