SYNC, AND SWIM TOGETHER
By Daniel Kahneman and Andrew M. Rosenfield

When faced with disaster, the natural response of people — and businesses — is to fight for time and hope for the best. The likely outcome of this strategy would be a succession of failures that would spare no one. We believe that there is a better way: simultaneous bankruptcy filing by all three companies would substantially reduce both the uncertainty and the stigma for each one.

DANIEL KAHNEMAN, an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton, received the Nobel in economics in 2002. ANDREW M. ROSENFIELD is a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School and the chairman of an investment advisory firm.

Daniel Kahneman's Edge Bio Page

Andrew M. Rosenfield's Edge Bio Page

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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

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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

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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.

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

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]

"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

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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

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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

...

...Alex Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is leading the dormitory research project, was a co-founder of Sense Networks. He is part of a new generation of researchers who have relatively effortless access to data that in the past was either painstakingly assembled by hand or acquired from questionnaires or interviews that relied on the memories and honesty of the subjects.

The Media Lab researchers have worked with Hitachi Data Systems, the Japanese technology company, to use some of the lab’s technologies to improve businesses’ efficiency. For example, by equipping employees with sensor badges that generate the same kinds of data provided by the students’ smartphones, the researchers determined that face-to-face communication was far more important to an organization’s work than was generally believed.

Productivity improved 30 percent with an incremental increase in face-to-face communication, Dr. Pentland said. The results were so promising that Hitachi has established a consulting business that overhauls organizations via the researchers’ techniques.

Dr. Pentland calls his research “reality mining” to differentiate it from an earlier generation of data mining conducted through more traditional methods.

Dr. Pentland “is the emperor of networked sensor research,” said Michael Macy, a sociologist at Cornell who studies communications networks and their role as social networks. People and organizations, he said, are increasingly choosing to interact with one another through digital means that record traces of those interactions. “This allows scientists to study those interactions in ways that five years ago we never would have thought we could do,” he said.

The Tesla Roadster is an electric car that goes fast, looks sensational and excites envy. The seductive appearance, however, obscures some inconvenient truths: its all-electric technology remains woefully immature and don’t-even-ask expensive. If enough billionaires step forward to inject additional capital to keep the doors of its manufacturer, Tesla Motors, open, I’m happy for all parties. ...

...Tesla’s backers in Silicon Valley can be forgiven for hoping for a miraculous technical breakthrough, because Moore’s Law makes miracles appear in the Valley every day: costs drop by half every two years, again and again and again. The law is actually a rule of thumb, not a scientific law, and is based on the recurring doubling of transistors placed on an integrated circuit.

Unfortunately for Tesla, batteries are based on chemistry and have nothing to do with Moore’s Law. Lawrence H. Dubois, chief technology officer at ATMI, a semiconductor industry supplier, said, “With batteries, you can’t just squeeze more energy into a smaller and smaller space the way you can squeeze more transistors.”

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, said his company would benefit from what he called “a weak Moore’s Law,” referring to the 8 percent annual improvements in the price performance of lithium-ion batteries. But 8 percent, compounded, would bring too few benefits, too late to Tesla: it would take nine years to halve the price of its battery pack. ...

MANAGING COMPETITIVE COMMUNICATIONS IN A DIGITAL AGE

Keynote by Douglas Rushkoff

"Insights into latest research on the transformative nature of the internet on the economic and social dynamics of consumers and users, and their commercial implications — vital information for regulators, industry and investors as they seek to remain relevant in this new ecology".

If biologists have learnt one thing about evolution over the past 40 years, it is that natural selection does not work for the good of the group. The defining insight of modern Darwinism is that selection 'sees' individuals and acts on them through the genes they embody. To imagine otherwise, generations of students have been warned, is to fall into a naive error definitively exposed as such in the mid-1960s.

Yet group selection — the idea that evolution can choose between groups, not just the individuals that make them up — has a higher profile today than at any time since its apparent banishment from mainstream evolutionary theory. And it gets better press, too. This is in part owing to the efforts of David Sloan Wilson, of Binghamton University in New York, who argues that the dismissal of group selection was a major historical error that needs to be rectified. And it does not hurt that he has been joined by Edward O. Wilson, the great naturalist and authority on social insects. They and many others have worked to reposition group selection within the broader theme of selection that acts simultaneously at multiple levels. ...

...Kin selection was easily and powerfully expressed in mathematics, and became the new orthodoxy, its ascendancy cemented in place by its forceful and compelling popularization in Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (Oxford Univ. Press, 1976). Group selection might be possible in theory, these thinkers allowed, but it could be ignored in practice. As the theorist George C. Williams declared in his 1966 book Adaptation and Natural Selection (Princeton Univ. Press) — a rallying call against group selection that had great influence in America — "the higher levels of selection are impotent".

Editorial

DARWIN200: BEYOND THE ORIGIN

This issue of Nature anticipates next year's bicentenary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of On The Origin of Species. We begin here with a look 50 years into the future.

One distinct possibility is that evidence of life beyond Earth will be found by detecting tell-tale features in the spectra of planets orbiting other stars. Although astronomers are hardly likely to be able to observe variation and evolution of that life in the next 50 years, detection alone could provide insight into the frequency of life's origination. And that, in turn, could help illuminate how life came to be on Earth — a problem that classical Darwinism is hard put to answer.

An even more likely development is that life will be created de novo here on Earth. The first experiments in whole-organism synthetic biology, such as the synthetic mycoplasma being worked on at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, will cleave quite closely to the designs already developed by natural selection.

NEIL Turok may not be a visitor from another dimension, but he could certainly play one on TV. With an other-worldly energy, he evinces the gentle curiosity of an outsider accustomed to crossing barriers. When he walks into a room, the dust of three continents trails behind him.

Turok is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose journey has taken him from his South African homeland to some of the world's most renowned scientific institutions, including Fermilab, Princeton and Cambridge. Now, at 50, Turok finds himself in starting anew once again, taking the reins of what may be the most ambitious intellectual experiment on Earth. ...

...All of this suits Turok who, like Lazaridis, is no stranger to going against the grain. As a scientist he is best known, along with collaborator Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, for conceiving the "ekpyrotic universe", which re-imagines the big bang as a collision between two branes - constructs of string theory - in a higher-dimensional space. According to the theory, the collisions occur again and again, producing a cyclic universe. ...

...Key to this was the notion of inflation, introduced by physicist Alan Guth to explain several cosmological puzzles, including that the universe appeared close to flat even after 14 billion years of expansion. A flat universe is like the top of a hill. If you are a little away from it - a bit open or a bit closed - the expansion of the universe soon drives you far away from this value, just as a ball that is a short distance from a hilltop will roll down to the bottom. Inflation, on the other hand, drives the universe towards flatness - just as blowing up a ball reduces the curvature of its surface.

But as Guth emphasised, there is another reason for favouring a flat universe: it is fundamentally beautiful. In a flat universe, the total gravitational energy is precisely zero. ...

EVEN IF YOU CAN'T BUY IT, HAPPINESS IS BIG BUSINESS

Patricia Leigh Brown

SAN FRANCISCO — The stock market has been on a roller coaster, banks are going under, unemployment is skyrocketing, and foreclosed homes pepper the landscape. What better time for a happiness conference? ...

...Planned before the current crises, the first American “Happiness and Its Causes” conference was equal parts Aristotle and Oprah. It brought together heavy hitters like Paul Ekman, the psychologist known for deciphering facial “microexpressions” that reveal feelings, and Robert Sapolsky, the Stanford biologist. They considered topics like “Compassion and the Pursuit of Happiness” and “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers."

...Professor Sapolsky of Stanford made a similar point about humans and baboons. Modern stress disorders contributing to hypertension, heart disease and other illnesses are the result of a disjuncture between primitive conditions and our own — or, as he put it, “running for your life in the savannah versus 30-year mortgages.”

The relatively new field of behavioral neurogenetics is exploring a handful of genes that seem to be related to depression, anxiety, addictive personality, sensation seeking and other traits. But, Professor Sapolsky said in a follow-up e-mail message, a person’s risk seems not predetermined but rather the result of interactions of genes and the environment, especially stressors in childhood.

Social support is vital, no matter how healthy you are, he told the crowd. “How much you groom somebody else is more important than who grooms you.” ...

BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Polly Wanna Cracker? Squawk! Do Better, That’s So Bush League
By Michiko Kakutani

When Alex the African gray parrot died in 2007, the world mourned. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Boston Globe ran articles reviewing his life achievements. The Economist devoted its obituary for the week of Sept. 22, 2007, to Alex. (Earlier weeks had featured Luciano Pavarotti and Ingmar Bergman.) ABC News, CNN and National Public Radio did segments about his lifetime collaboration with the scientist Irene M. Pepperberg. And an Internet condolence book (remembering-alex.org) was set up so that fans could grieve in public.

“Alex, the African gray parrot who was smarter than the average U.S. president, has died at the relatively tender age of 31,” read an obituary in The Guardian of London. “He could count to six, identify colors, understand concepts such as bigger and smaller and had a vocabulary of 150 words. To his supporters he was proof that the phrase ‘birdbrain’ should be expunged from the dictionary.”

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Missionary Linguist Loses Faith

Daniel Everett on the Pirahã language and culture.

Part 1 of 2
Part 2 of 2

EL MUNDO por dentro
24 de noviembre

HOY SÍ QUE ESTÁ EL PERIÓDICO EN EL FILO (EDGE) DE LA NOTICIA
Arcadi Espada

El periódico está, destacadamente, en la cover de Edge.

Para hablar de esta noticia extraordinaria debo vencer el pudor de estar vinculado al asunto. Debo y puedo. Edge es uno de los lugares del mundo de hoy. Todo lo que allí se piensa tiene interés. Por si fuera poco las notas de sociedad de la página, y los sombreros de Brockman, rezuman un inconfundible encanto californiano. Hay otra cuestión, naturalmente. El periódico fue el único de los que se editan en España que habló de la presentación en Madrid de Tercera Cultura. Mérito de su sección de Ciencia. Mérito especial cuando se sacan ahora las correspondientes sumas y restas: ¿Cómo es posible que un asunto al que Edge dedica su cover sólo merezca la atención de un periódico español? Y por otra parte. Edge ha publicado su página sin que haya mediado iniciativa alguna para que lo hiciera por parte de los responsables de Cultura 3.0. Lo ha hecho porque tiene un competente servicio de prensa que repasa la actualidad de la Tercera Cultura en un buen número de periódicos del mundo. Lo ha hecho, en fin, porque un periódico en el mundo se había hecho eco de la presentación de Madrid.

Buenos días.

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Google Translation

Everywhere we look, we see screens. The other day I watched clips from a movie as I pumped gas into my car. The other night I saw a movie on the backseat of a plane. We will watch anywhere. Screens playing video pop up in the most unexpected places — like A.T.M. machines and supermarket checkout lines and tiny phones; some movie fans watch entire films in between calls. These ever-present screens have created an audience for very short moving pictures, as brief as three minutes, while cheap digital creation tools have empowered a new generation of filmmakers, who are rapidly filling up those screens. We are headed toward screen ubiquity.

When technology shifts, it bends the culture. Once, long ago, culture revolved around the spoken word. The oral skills of memorization, recitation and rhetoric instilled in societies a reverence for the past, the ambiguous, the ornate and the subjective. Then, about 500 years ago, orality was overthrown by technology. Gutenberg’s invention of metallic movable type elevated writing into a central position in the culture. By the means of cheap and perfect copies, text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability. From printing came journalism, science and the mathematics of libraries and law. The distribution-and-display device that we call printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a sentence), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact) and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book. In the West, we became people of the book. ...

"The purpose of this initiative is to establish a movement in Spain based on this new way of perceiving culture, and promote it as a vehicle for development of critical opinion in our country. More and more people willing to educate themselves and get rid of superstitions and dogmas which reduces your field of personal and social action. Democracy works with people armed with critical thinking. A society of illiterates in the hands of scoundrels (Perez Reverte), can never be democratic." — Arcadi Espada

Presentación Tercera Cultura
[Slide Show]

AÚNA CIENCIA Y HUMANISMO

NACE LA PLATAFORMA TERCERA CULTURA
(Birth of the Third Culture Platform)

Pretende crear puentes entre la ciencia de vanguardia y el pensamiento crítico

Participan prestigiosos intelectuales y científicos españoles

Rosa M. Tristan

MADRID.- Aunar la ciencia con el pensamiento crítico es el objetivo de la Plataforma Tercera Cultura (Cultura 3.0), que acaba de ser puesta en marcha por un grupo de intelectuales e investigadores de diversas áreas. Se trata de una nueva vía contra los prejuicios y los dogmas que pretende crear un puente entre disciplinas que hasta ahora no han tenido un nexo en el de bate cotidiano.

Entre los fundadores de la nueva plataforma, que tendrá su canal de comunicación en la web www.terceracultura.net, están el escritor y columnista de EL MUNDO Arcadi Espada, el director de la revista Muy Interesante, José Pardina, el editor de la web La Revolución Naturalista, Eduardo Robredo y la antropóloga Teresa Giménez Barbat.. ...

Google Translation