This Explains Everything Read online

  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

  Back Ad

  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: