What is your dangerous idea? : today's leading thinkers on the unthinkable

What is your dangerous idea? : today's leading thinkers on the unthinkable / edited by John Brockman ; with an introduction by Steven Pinker and an afterword by Richard Dawkins.

Book

1st ed.

New York : Harper Perennial, c2007.

xxxiii, 301 p. ; 21 cm.

<Publisher description> http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0911/2006047171-d.html <Contributor biographical information> http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy1203/2006047171-b.html

Brockman, John, 1941-

We have no souls / John Horgan
The rejection of soul / Paul Bloom
The evolution of evil / David Buss
The differences between humans and nonhumans are quantitative, not qualitative / Irene Pepperberg
Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments / Steven Pinker
The genetic basis of human behavior / J. Craig Venter
Marionettes on genetic strings / Jerry Coyne
Francis Crick's dangerous idea / V.S. Ramachandran
Being alone in the universe / Rodney Brooks
Life as an agent of energy dispersal / Scott D. Sampson
We are entirely alone / Keith Devlin
Science may be running out of control / Martin Rees
Why I hope the standard model is wrong about why there is more matter than antimatter / Frank J. Tipler
The idea that we understand plutonium / Jeremy Bernstein
The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas / W. Daniel Hillis
The idea that ideas can be dangerous / Daniel Gilbert
The fight against global warming is lost / Paul C.W. Davies
Think outside the Kyoto box / Gregory Benford
Our planet is not in peril / Oliver Morton
The effect of art can't be controlled or anticipated / April Gornik
A "grand narrative" / Denis Dutton

Modern science is a product of biology / Arnold Trehub
No more teacher's dirty looks / Roger C. Schank
We are all virtual / Clifford Pickover
Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi paradox / Geoffrey Miller
Simulation versus authenticity / Sherry Turkle
Culture is natural / Dan Sperber
The human brain is a cultural artifact / Timothy Taylor
Free will is exercised unconsciously / Eric R. Kandel
Free will is going away / Clay Shirky
The limits of introspection / Mahzarin R. Banaji
What we know may not change us / Barry C. Smith
Telling more than we can know / Richard E. Nisbett
The quick-thinking zombies inside us / Andy Clark
The banality of evil, the banality of heroism / Philip G. Zimbardo
Open-source currency / Douglas Rushkoff
Is the West already on a downhill course? / David Bodanis
Technology can untie the United States / Juan Enriquez
Democracy may be on its way out / Haim Harari
Marx was right : the state will evaporate / James O'Donnell
Following Sisyphus / Howard Gardner
How can I trust, in the face of so many unknowables? / Ernst Pöppel
A twenty-four-hour period of absolute solitude / Leo M. Chalupa.

Our universal moral grammar's immunity to religion / Marc D. Hauser
Bertrand Russell's dangerous idea / Nicholas Humphrey
Hodgepodge morality / David Pizarro
We will understand the origin of life within the next five years / Robert Shapiro
Understanding molecular biology without discovering the origins of life / George Dyson
The problem with super mirrors / Marco Iacoboni
Cyberdisinhibition / Daniel Goleman
Brains cannot become minds without bodies / Alun Anderson
What are people well informed about in the information age? / David Gelernter
More anonymity is good / Kevin Kelly
A new golden age of medicine / Paul W. Ewald
Using medications to change personality / Samuel Barondes
Drugs may change the patterns of human love / Helen Fisher
A marriage option for all / David G. Myers
Choosing the sex of one's child / Diane F. Halpern
The idea of ideas / Seth Lloyd
The human brain will never understand the universe / Karl Sabbagh
The world may be fundamentally inexplicable / Lawrence M. Krauss
The "landscape' / Leonard Susskind
Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein ; Seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin / Lee Smolin
The multiverse / Brian Greene

What twentieth-century physics says about the world might be true / Carlo Rovelli
It's a matter of time / Paul Steinhardt
A radical re-evaluation of the character of time / Piet Hut
It's OK not to know everything / Marcelo Gleiser
The end of insight / Steven Strogatz
When will the Internet become aware of itself? / Terrence Sejnowski
Democratizing access to the means of invention / Neil Gershenfeld
Mind is a universally distributed quality / Rudy Rucker
The forbidden fruit intuition / Thomas Metzinger
The posterior probability of any particular god is pretty small / Philip W. Anderson
Science must destroy religion / Sam Harris
The self is a conceptual chimera / John Allen Paulos
The greatest story every told / Carolyn C. Porco
Science as just another religion / Jordan Pollack
This is all there is / Robert R. Provine
A science of the divine? / Stephen M. Kosslyn
Science will never silence god / Jesse Bering
Religion is the hope that is missing in science / Scott Atran
Myths and fairy tales are not true / Todd E. Feinberg
Parental licensure / David Lykken
Zero parental influence / Judith Rich Harris
The focus on emotional intelligence / John Gottman
A cacophony of "controversy" / Alison Gopnik
Applied history / Stewart Brand

Tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war / Jared Diamond
Nothing / Charles Seife
Everything is pointless / Susan Blackmore
There aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes / Daniel C. Dennett
Unspeakable ideas / Randolph M. Nesse
Anty gravity : chaos theory in an all-too-practical sense / Kai Krause
Navigating by new scientific principles / Rupert Sheldrake
A political system based on empathy / Simon Baron-Cohen
Social relativity / Tor Nørrtranders
There is something new under the sun, us / Gregory Cochran
A spoon is like a headache / Donald D. Hoffman
Projection of the longevity curve / Gerald Holton
The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion / Ray Kurzweil
The domestication of biotechnology / Freeman J. Dyson
Public engagement in science and technology / Philip Campbell
Suppose Faulkner was right? / Joel Garreau
What if the unknown becomes known and is not replaced with a new unknown? / Eric Fischl
Where goods cross frontiers, armies won't / Michael Shermer
Government is the problem, not the solution / Matt Ridley
The free market / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

From Copernicus to Darwin, to current-day thinkers, scientists have always promoted theories and unveiled discoveries that challenge everything society holds dear; ideas with both positive and dire consequences. Many thoughts that resonate today are dangerous not because they are assumed to be false, but because they might turn out to be true. What do the world's leading scientists and thinkers consider to be their most dangerous idea? Through the leading online forum "Edge" (www.edge.org), the call went out, and this compelling and easily digestible volume collects the answers. From using medication to permanently alter our personalities to contemplating a universe in which we are utterly alone, to the idea that the universe might be fundamentally inexplicable, "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?" takes an unflinching look at the daring, breathtaking, sometimes terrifying thoughts that could forever alter our world and the way we live in it.

Social ethics.

Discoveries in science Forecasting Science Miscellanea Thought experiments

0061214957 9780061214950

Search Results

Holdings

Select Campus