This Explains Everything
Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works
Edited by
JOHN BROCKMAN
CONTENTS
PREFACE: The Edge Question, by John Brockman
Evolution by Means of Natural Selection
SUSAN BLACKMORE
Life Is a Digital Code
MATT RIDLEY
Redundancy Reduction and Pattern Recognition
RICHARD DAWKINS
The Power of Absurdity
SCOTT ATRAN
How Apparent Finality Can Emerge
CARLO ROVELLI
The Overdue Demise of Monogamy
AUBREY DE GREY
Boltzmann’s Explanation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics
LEONARD SUSSKIND
The Dark Matter of the Mind
JOEL GOLD
“There Are More Things in Heaven and Earth . . . Than Are Dreamt of in Your Philosophy.”
ALAN ALDA
An Unresolved (and Therefore Unbeautiful) Reaction to the Edge Question
REBECCA NEWBERGER GOLDSTEIN
Ptolemy’s Universe
JAMES J. O’DONNELL
Quasi-Elegance
PAUL STEINHARDT
Mathematical Object or Natural Object?
SHING-TUNG YAU
Simplicity
FRANK WILCZEK
Simplicity Itself
THOMAS METZINGER
Einstein Explains Why Gravity Is Universal
SEAN CARROLL
Evolutionary Genetics and the Conflicts of Human Social Life
STEVEN PINKER
The Faurie-Raymond Hypothesis
JONATHAN GOTTSCHALL
Group Polarization
DAVID G. MYERS
The Price Equation
ARMAND MARIE LEROI
Unconscious Inferences
GERD GIGERENZER
Snowflakes and the Multiverse
MARTIN J. REES
Einstein’s Photons
ANTON ZEILINGER
Go Small
JEREMY BERNSTEIN
Why Is Our World Comprehensible?
ANDREI LINDE
Alfvén’s Cosmos
GEORGE DYSON
Our Universe Grew Like a Baby
MAX TEGMARK
Kepler et al. and the Nonexistent Problem
GINO SEGRÈ
How Incompatible Worldviews Can Coexist
FREEMAN DYSON
Impossible Inexactness
SATYAJIT DAS
The Next Level of Fundamental Matter?
HAIM HARARI
Observers Observing
ROBERT PROVINE
Genes, Claustrum, and Consciousness
V. S. RAMACHANDRAN
Overlapping Solutions
DAVID M. EAGLEMAN
Our Bounded Rationality
MAHZARIN BANAJI
Swarm Intelligence
ROBERT SAPOLSKY
Language and Natural Selection
KEITH DEVLIN
Commitment
RICHARD H. THALER
Tit for Tat
JENNIFER JACQUET
True or False: Beauty Is Truth
JUDITH RICH HARRIS
Eratosthenes and the Modular Mind
DAN SPERBER
Dan Sperber’s Explanation of Culture
CLAY SHIRKY
Metarepresentations Explain Human Uniqueness
HUGO MERCIER
Why the Human Mind May Seem to Have an Elegant Explanation Even If It Doesn’t
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY
Fitness Landscapes
STEWART BRAND
On Oceans and Airport Security
KEVIN P. HAND
Plate Tectonics Elegantly Validates Continental Drift
PAUL SAFFO
Why Some Sea Turtles Migrate
DANIEL C. DENNETT
A Hot Young Earth: Unquestionably Beautiful and Stunningly Wrong
CARL ZIMMER
Sexual-Conflict Theory
DAVID M. BUSS
The Seeds of Historical Dominance
DAVID PIZARRO
The Importance of Individuals
HOWARD GARDNER
Subjective Environment
ANDRIAN KREYE
My Favorite Annoying Elegant Explanation: Quantum Theory
RAPHAEL BOUSSO
Einstein’s Revenge: The New Geometric Quantum
ERIC R. WEINSTEIN
What Time Is It?
DAVE WINER
Realism and Other Metaphysical Half-Truths
TANIA LOMBROZO
All We Need Is Help
SEIRIAN SUMNER
In the Beginning Is the Theory
HELENA CRONIN
Thompson on Development
PAUL BLOOM
How Do You Get from a Lobster to a Cat?
JOHN McWHORTER
Germs Cause Disease
GREGORY COCHRAN
Dirt Is Matter Out of Place
CHRISTINE FINN
Information Is the Resolution of Uncertainty
ANDREW LIH
Everything Is the Way It Is Because It Got That Way
PZ MYERS
The Idea of Emergence
DAVID CHRISTIAN
Frames of Reference
DIMITAR D. SASSELOV
Epigenetics—the Missing Link
HELEN FISHER
Flocking Behavior in Birds
JOHN NAUGHTON
Lemons Are Fast
BARRY C. SMITH
Falling into Place: Entropy and the Desperate Ingenuity of Life
JOHN TOOBY
Why Things Happen
PETER ATKINS
Why We Feel Pressed for Time
ELIZABETH DUNN
Why the Sun Still Shines
BART KOSKO
Boscovich’s Explanation of Atomic Forces
CHARLES SIMONYI
Birds Are the Direct Descendants of Dinosaurs
GREGORY S. PAUL
Complexity Out of Simplicity
BRUCE HOOD
Russell’s Theory of Descriptions
A. C. GRAYLING
Feynman’s Lifeguard
TIMO HANNAY
The Limits of Intuition
BRIAN ENO
The Higgs Mechanism
LISA RANDALL
The Mind Thinks in Embodied Metaphors
SIMONE SCHNALL
Metaphors Are in the Mind
BENJAMIN K. BERGEN
The Pigeonhole Principle
JON KLEINBERG
Why Programs Have Bugs
MARTI HEARST
Cagepatterns
HANS-ULRICH OBRIST
The True Rotational Symmetry of Space
SETH LLOYD
The Pigeonhole Principle Revisited
CHARLES SEIFE
Moore’s Law
RODNEY A. BROOKS
Cosmic Complexity
JOHN C. MATHER
The Gaia Hypothesis
SCOTT SAMPSON
The Continuity Equations
LAURENCE C. SMITH
Pascal’s Wager
TIM O’REILLY
Evolutionarily Stable Strategies
S. ABBAS RAZA
The Collingridge Dilemma
EVGENY MOROZOV
Trusting Trust
ERNST PÖPPEL
It Just Is?
BRUCE PARKER
Subverting Biology
PATRICK BATESON
Sex at Your Fingertips
SIMON BARON-COHEN
Why Do Movies Move?
ALVY RAY SMITH
Would You Like Blue Cheese with It?
ALBERT-LÁSZLÓ BARABÁSI
Mother Nature’s Laws
STUART PIMM
The Oklo Pyramid
KARL SABBAGH
Kitty Genovese and Group Apathy
ADAM ALTER
The Wizard of I
GERALD SMALLBERG
One Coincidence; Two Déjà Vus
DOUGLAS COUPLAND
Occam’s Razor
KATINKA MATSON
Deep Time
ALUN ANDERSON
Placing Psychotherapy on a Scientific Basis: Five Easy Lessons
ERIC R. KANDEL
Transitional Objects
SHERRY TURKLE
Natural Selection Is Simple but the Systems It Shapes Are Unimaginably Complex
RANDOLPH NESSE
How to Have a Good Idea
MARCEL KINSBOURNE
Out of the Mouths of Babes
NICHOLAS A. CHRISTAKIS
The Beauty in a Sunrise
PHILIP CAMPBELL
The Origin of Money
DYLAN EVANS
The Precession of the Simulacra
DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF
Time Perspective Theory
PHILIP ZIMBARDO
Developmental Timing Explains the Woes of Adolescence
ALISON GOPNIK
Implications of Ivan Pavlov’s Great Discovery
STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN AND ROBIN ROSENBERG
Nature Is Cleverer Than We Are
TERRENCE J. SEJNOWSKI
Imposing Randomness
MICHAEL I. NORTON
The Unification of Electricity and Magnetism
LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS
Furry Rubber Bands
NEIL GERSHENFELD
The Principle of Inertia
LEE SMOLIN
Seeing Is Believing: From Placebos to Movies in Our Brain
ERIC J. TOPOL
The Discontinuity of Science and Culture
GERALD HOLTON
Hormesis Is Redundancy
NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB
The Beautiful Law of Unintended Consequences
ROBERT KURZBAN
We Are What We Do
TIMOTHY D. WILSON
Personality Differences: The Importance of Chance
SAMUEL BARONDES
Metabolic Syndrome: Cell Energy Adaptations in a Toxic World?
BEATRICE GOLOMB
Death Is the Final Repayment
EMANUEL DERMAN
Denumerable Infinities and Mental States
DAVID GELERNTER
Inverse Power Laws
RUDY RUCKER
How the Leopard Got His Spots
SAMUEL ARBESMAN
The Universal Algorithm for Human Decision Making
STANISLAS DEHAENE
Lord Acton’s Dilemma
MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
Fact, Fiction, and Our Probabilitic World
VICTORIA STODDEN
Elegant = Complex
GEORGE CHURCH
Tinbergen’s Questions
IRENE PEPPERBERG
The Universal Turing Machine
GLORIA ORIGGI
A Matter of Poetics
RICHARD FOREMAN
The Origins of Biological Electricity
JARED DIAMOND
Why the Greeks Painted Red People on Black Pots
TIMOTHY TAYLOR
Language As an Adaptive System
ANDY CLARK
The Mechanism of Mediocrity
NICHOLAS J. CARR
The Principle of Empiricism, or See for Yourself
MICHAEL SHERMER
We Are Stardust
KEVIN KELLY
Excerpt from Thinking
The Normal Well-Tempered Mind
Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also By John Brockman
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Copyright
About the Publisher
PREFACE
THE EDGE QUESTION
In 1981, I founded the Reality Club. From its founding through 1996, the club held its meetings in Chinese restaurants, artists’ lofts, the boardrooms of investment-banking firms, ballrooms, museums, and living rooms, among other venues. The Reality Club differed from the Algonquin Round Table, the Apostles, and the Bloomsbury Group, but it offered the same quality of intellectual adventure. Perhaps the closest resemblance was to the late 18th-and early 19th-century Lunar Society of Birmingham, an informal gathering of the leading cultural figures of the new industrial age—James Watt, Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Franklin. In a similar fashion, the Reality Club was an attempt to gather together those people exploring the themes of the post–Industrial Age.
In 1997, the Reality Club went online, rebranded as Edge. The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer science, neurophysiology, psychology, cosmology, and physics. Emerging out of these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic assumptions.
For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I and a number of Edge stalwarts, including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and George Dyson, get together to plan the annual Edge Question—usually one that comes to one or another of us or our correspondents in the middle of the night. It’s not easy coming up with a question. (As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator, used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?”) We look for questions that inspire unpredictable answers—that provoke people into thinking thoughts they normally might not have. For this year’s question, our thanks go, once again, to Steven Pinker.
Perhaps the greatest pleasure in science comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant.” Historical examples are Kepler’s explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Niels Bohr’s explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and James Watson and Francis Crick’s explanation of genetic replication via the double helix. The great theoretical physicist P. A. M. Dirac famously said that “it is more important to have beauty in one’s equations than to have them fit experiment.”
The Edge Question 2012
WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?
The online response to the Edge website this year (http://edge.org/annual-question/) was enormous—some 200 provocative (and often lengthy) discussions. What follows is necessarily an edited selection. In the spirit of Edge, the contributions presented here embrace scientific thinking in the broadest sense: as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything—including such fields of inquiry as philosophy, mathematics, economics, history, language, and human behavior. The common thread is that a simple and nonobvious idea is proposed as the explanation for a diverse and complicated set of phenomena.
JOHN BROCKMAN
Publisher & Editor, Edge
EVOLUTION BY MEANS OF NATURAL SELECTION
SUSAN BLACKMORE
Psychologist; author, Consciousness: An Introduction
Of course it has to be Darwin. Nothing else comes close. Evolution by means of natural selection (or indeed any kind of selection—natural or unnatural) provides the most beautiful, elegant explanation in all of science. This simple three-step algorithm explains, with one simple idea, why we live in a universe full of design. It explains not only why we are here but why trees, kittens, Urdu, the Bank of England, Chelsea football team, and the iPhone are here.
You might wonder why, if this explanation is so simple and powerful, no one thought of it before Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace did, and why even today so many people fail to grasp it. The reason, I think, is that at its heart there seems to be a tautology. It seems as though you are saying nothing when you s
ay that “Things that survive survive” or “Successful ideas are successful.” To turn these tautologies into power, you need to add the context of a limited world in which not everything survives and competition is rife, and also realize that this is an ever-changing world in which the rules of the competition keep shifting.
In that context, being successful is fleeting, and now the three-step algorithm can turn tautology into deep and elegant explanation. Copy the survivors many times with slight variations and let them loose in this ever-shifting world, and only those suited to the new conditions will carry on. The world fills with creatures, ideas, institutions, languages, stories, software, and machines that have all been designed by the stress of this competition.
This beautiful idea is hard to grasp, and I have known many university students who have been taught evolution at school and thought they understood it, but have never really done so. One of the joys of teaching, for me, was to see that astonished look on students’ faces when they suddenly got it. That was heartwarming indeed. But I also call it heartwarming because, unlike some religious folk, when I look out of my window past my computer to the bridge over the river and the trees and cows in the distance, I delight in the simple and elegant competitive process that brought them all into being, and at my own tiny place within it all.
LIFE IS A DIGITAL CODE
MATT RIDLEY
Science writer; founding chairman, International Centre for Life; author, The Rational Optimist
It’s hard now to recall just how mysterious life was on the morning of February 28 and just how much that had changed by lunchtime. Look back at all the answers to the question “What is life?” from before that, and you get a taste of just how we, as a species, floundered. Life consisted of three-dimensional objects of specificity and complexity (mainly proteins). And it copied itself with accuracy. How? How do you set about making a copy of a three-dimensional object? How do you grow it and develop it in a predictable way? This is the one scientific question whose answer absolutely nobody came close to guessing. Erwin Schrödinger had a stab but fell back on quantum mechanics, which was irrelevant. True, he used the phrase “aperiodic crystal,” and if you are generous you can see that as a prediction of a linear code, but I think that’s stretching generosity.
Indeed, the problem had just got even more baffling, thanks to the realization that DNA played a crucial role—because DNA was monotonously simple. All the explanations of life before February 28, 1953, are handwaving waffle and might as well have spoken of protoplasm and vital sparks for all the insight they gave.
Then came the double helix, and the immediate understanding that, as Francis Crick wrote to his son a few weeks later, “some sort of code”—digital, linear, two-dimensional, combinatorially infinite, and instantly self-replicating—was all the explanation you needed. Here’s part of Crick’s letter, March 17, 1953:
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