Dangerous Ideas

http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_index.html

Take a look- a compilation of radical ideas by leading thinkers (a vague term, but you get the gist). The contributions start about one third down the page.

Interesting ones include "Our planet is not in peril" by the News and Features editior of Nature magazine where he says that it is a myth that the Earth is in environmental danger (kudos to him!), "Let's stop beating Basil's car" by Richard Dawkins, where he argues that criminals should be looked at as broken machines, to be repaired, not punished... Dawkins this week starts a Channel 4 series in the UK where he argues that for the good of the planet, we must get rid of all religion; this thought is echoed on this website in Sam Harris' contribution "Science must destroy religion", and for a highly controversial one- "School is bad for children", by Roger Schank, Chief Learning Officer at Trump University.

Thoughts on any of these?

I'll post out in full some of the more striking ones, for those too lazy to go read links...

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MARTIN E.P. SELIGMAN
Psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, Author, Authentic Happiness

Relativism

In looking back over the scientific and artistic breakthroughs in the 20th century, there is a view that the great minds relativized the absolute. Did this go too far? Has relativism gotten to a point that it is dangerous to the scientific enterprise and to human well being?

The most visible person to say this is none other than Pope Benedict XVI in his denunciations of the "dictatorship of the relative." But worries about relativism are not only a matter of dispute in theology; there are parallel dissenters from the relative in science, in philosophy, in ethics, in mathematics, in anthropology, in sociology, in the humanities, in childrearing, and in evolutionary biology.

Here are some of the domains in which serious thinkers have worried about the overdoing of relativism:

• In philosophy of science, there is ongoing tension between the Kuhnians (science is about "paradigms," the fashions of the current discipline) and the realists (science is about finding the truth).

• In epistemology there is the dispute between the Tarskian correspondence theorists ("p" is true if p) versus two relativistic camps, the coherence theorists ("p" is true to the extent it coheres with what you already believe is true) and the pragmatic theory of truth ("p" is true if it gets you where you want to go).

• At the ethics/science interface, there is the fact/value dispute: that science must and should incorporate the values of the culture in which it arises versus the contention that science is and should be value free.

• In mathematics, Gödel's incompleteness proof was widely interpreted as showing that mathematics is relative; but Gödel, a Platonist, intended the proof to support the view that there are statements that could not be proved within the system that are true nevertheless. Einstein, similarly, believed that the theory of relativity was misconstrued in just the same way by the "man is the measure of all things" relativists.

• In the sociology of high accomplishment, Charles Murray (Human Accomplishment) documents that the highest accomplishments occur in cultures that believe in absolute truth, beauty, and goodness. The accomplishments, he contends, of cultures that do not believe in absolute beauty tend to be ugly, that do not belief in absolute goodness tend to be immoral, and that do not believe in absolute truth tend to be false.

• In anthropology, pre-Boasians believed that cultures were hierarchically ordered into savage, barbarian, and civilized, whereas much of modern anthropology holds that all social forms are equal. This is the intellectual basis of the sweeping cultural relativism that dominates the humanities in academia.

• In evolution, Robert Wright (like Aristotle) argues for a scala naturae, with the direction of evolution favoring complexity by its invisible hand; whereas Stephen Jay Gould argued that the fern is just as highly evolved as Homo sapiens. Does evolution have an absolute direction and are humans further along that trajectory than ferns?

• In child-rearing, much of twentieth century education was profoundly influenced by the "Summerhillians" who argued complete freedom produced the best children, whereas other schools of parenting, education, and therapy argue for disciplined, authoritative guidance.

• Even in literature, arguments over what should go into the canon revolve around the absolute-relative controversy.

• Ethical relativism and its opponents are all too obvious instances of this issue

I do not know if the dilemmas in these domains are only metaphorically parallel to one another. I do not know if illumination in one domain will not illuminate the others. But it might and it is just possible that the great minds of the twenty-first century will absolutize the relative.

PHILIP ZIMBARDO
Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University; Author: Shyness

The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism

Those people who become perpetrators of evil deeds and those who become perpetrators of heroic deeds are basically alike in being just ordinary, average people.

The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism. Both are not the consequence of dispositional tendencies, not special inner attributes of pathology or goodness residing within the human psyche or the human genome. Both emerge in particular situations at particular times when situational forces play a compelling role in moving individuals across the decisional line from inaction to action.

There is a decisive decisional moment when the individual is caught up in a vector of forces emanating from the behavioral context. Those forces combine to increase the probability of acting to harm others or acting to help others. That decision may not be consciously planned or taken mindfully, but impulsively driven by strong situational forces external to the person. Among those action vectors are group pressures and group identity, diffusion of responsibility, temporal focus on the immediate moment without entertaining costs and benefits in the future, among others.

The military police guards who abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the prison guards in my Stanford Prison experiment who abused their prisoners illustrate the "Lord of the Flies" temporary transition of ordinary individuals into perpetrators of evil. We set aside those whose evil behavior is enduring and extensive, such as tyrants like Idi Amin, Stalin and Hitler. Heroes of the moment are also contrasted with lifetime heroes.

The heroic action of Rosa Parks in a Southern bus, of Joe Darby in exposing the Abu Ghraib tortures, of NYC firefighters at the World Trade Center's disaster are acts of bravery at that time and place. The heroism of Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi is replete with valorous acts repeated over a lifetime. That chronic heroism is to acute heroism as valour is to bravery.

This view implies that any of us could as easily become heroes as perpetrators of evil depending on how we are impacted by situational forces. We then want to discover how to limit, constrain, and prevent those situational and systemic forces that propel some of us toward social pathology.

It is equally important for our society to foster the heroic imagination in our citizens by conveying the message that anyone is a hero-in-waiting who will be counted upon to do the right thing when the time comes to make the heroic decision to act to help or to act to prevent harm.

JAMES O'DONNELL
Classicist; Cultural Historian; Provost, Georgetown University; Author, Avatars of the Word

Marx was right: the "state" will evaporate and cease to have useful meaning as a form of human organization

From the earliest Babylonian and Chinese moments of "civilization", we have agreed that human affairs depend on an organizing power in the hands of a few people (usually with religious charisma to undergird their authority) who reside in a functionally central location. "Political science" assumes in its etymology the "polis" or city-state of Greece as the model for community and government.

But it is remarkable how little of human excellence and achievement has ever taken place in capital cities and around those elites, whose cultural history is one of self-mockery and implicit acceptance of the marginalization of the powerful. Borderlands and frontiers (and even suburbs) are where the action is.

But as long as technologies of transportation and military force emphasized geographic centralization and concentration of forces, the general or emperor or president in his capital with armies at his beck and call was the most obvious focus of power. Enlightened government constructed mechanisms to restrain and channel such centralized authority, but did not effectively challenge it.

So what advantage is there today to the nation state? Boundaries between states enshrine and exacerbate inequalities and prevent the free movement of peoples. Large and prosperous state and state-related organizations and locations attract the envy and hostility of others and are sitting duck targets for terrorist action. Technologies of communication and transportation now make geographically-defined communities increasingly irrelevant and provide the new elites and new entrepreneurs with ample opportunity to stand outside them. Economies construct themselves in spite of state management and money flees taxation as relentlessly as water follows gravity.

Who will undergo the greatest destabilization as the state evaporates and its artificial protections and obstacles disappear? The sooner it happens, the more likely it is to be the United States. The longer it takes ... well, perhaps the new Chinese empire isn't quite the landscape-dominating leviathan of the future that it wants to be. Perhaps in the end it will be Mao who was right, and a hundred flowers will bloom there.

DAVID LYKKEN
Behavioral geneticist and Emeritus Professor of Psychology, University of Minnesota; Author, Happiness

Laws requiring parental licensure

I believe that, during my grandchildren's lifetimes, the U.S. Supreme Court will find a way to approve laws requiring parental licensure.

Traditional societies in which children are socialized collectively, the method to which our species is evolutionarily adapted, have very little crime. In the modern U.S., the proportion of fatherless children, living with unmarried mothers, currently some 10 million in all, has increased more than 400% since 1960 while the violent crime rate rose 500% by 1994, before dipping slightly due to a delayed but equal increase in the number of prison inmates (from 240,000 to 1.4 million.) In 1990, across the 50 States, the correlation between the violent crime rate and the proportion of illegitimate births was 0.70.

About 70% of incarcerated delinquents, of teen-age pregnancies, of adolescent runaways, involve (I think result from) fatherless rearing. Because these frightening curves continue to accelerate, I believe we must eventually confront the need for parental licensure — you can't keep that newborn unless you are 21, married and self-supporting — not just for society's safety but so those babies will have a chance for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

ROGER C. SCHANK
Psychologist & Computer Scientist; Chief Learning Officer, Trump University; Author, Making Minds Less Well Educated than Our Own

No More Teacher's Dirty Looks

After a natural disaster, the newscasters eventually excitedly announce that school is finally open so no matter what else is terrible where they live, the kids are going to school. I always feel sorry for the poor kids.

My dangerous idea is one that most people immediately reject without giving it serious thought: school is bad for kids — it makes them unhappy and as tests show — they don't learn much.

When you listen to children talk about school you easily discover what they are thinking about in school: who likes them, who is being mean to them, how to improve their social ranking, how to get the teacher to treat them well and give them good grades.

Schools are structured today in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years philosophers and others have pointed out that school is really a bad idea:

We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a belly full of words and do not know a thing. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. — Oscar Wilde

Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them. The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have just been spoon fed.

The Government is and always has been the problem in education:

If the government would make up its mind to require for every child a good education, it might save itself the trouble of providing one. It might leave to parents to obtain the education where and how they pleased, and content itself with helping to pay the school fees of the poorer classes of children, and defraying the entire school expenses of those who have no one else to pay for them. — JS Mill

First, God created idiots. That was just for practice. Then He created school boards. — Mark Twain

Schools need to be replaced by safe places where children can go to learn how to do things that they are interested in learning how to do. Their interests should guide their learning. The government's role should be to create places that are attractive to children and would cause them to want to go there.

Whence it comes to pass, that for not having chosen the right course, we often take very great pains, and consume a good part of our time in training up children to things, for which, by their natural constitution, they are totally unfit. — Montaigne

We had a President many years ago who understood what education is really for. Nowadays we have ones that make speeches about the Pythagorean Theorem when we are quite sure they don't know anything about any theorem.

There are two types of education. . . One should teach us how to make a living, And the other how to live. — John Adams

Over a million students have opted out of the existing school system and are now being home schooled. The problem is that the states regulate home schooling and home schooling still looks an awful lot like school.

We need to stop producing a nation of stressed out students who learn how to please the teacher instead of pleasing themselves. We need to produce adults who love learning, not adults who avoid all learning because it reminds them of the horrors of school. We need to stop thinking that all children need to learn the same stuff. We need to create adults who can think for themselves and are not convinced about how to understand complex situations in simplistic terms that can be rendered in a sound bite.

Just call school off. Turn them all into apartment houses.

HAIM HARARI
Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science

Democracy may be on its way out

Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that Democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).

Falling boundaries between countries, cross border commerce, merging economies, instant global flow of information and numerous other features of our modern society, all lead to multinational structures. If you extrapolate this irreversible trend, you get the entire planet becoming one political unit. But in this unit, anti-democracy forces are now a clear majority. This majority increases by the day, due to demographic patterns. All democratic nations have slow, vanishing or negative population growth, while all anti-democratic and uneducated societies multiply fast. Within democratic countries, most well-educated families remain small while the least educated families are growing fast. This means that, both at the individual level and at the national level, the more people you represent, the less economic power you have. In a knowledge based economy, in which the number of working hands is less important, this situation is much more non-democratic than in the industrial age. As long as upward mobility of individuals and nations could neutralize this phenomenon, democracy was tenable. But when we apply this analysis to the entire planet, as it evolves now, we see that democracy may be doomed.

To these we must add the regrettable fact that authoritarian multinational corporations, by and large, are better managed than democratic nation states. Religious preaching, TV sound bites, cross boundary TV incitement and the freedom of spreading rumors and lies through the internet encourage brainwashing and lack of rational thinking. Proportionately, more young women are growing into societies which discriminate against them than into more egalitarian societies, increasing the worldwide percentage of women treated as second class citizens. Educational systems in most advanced countries are in a deep crisis while modern education in many developing countries is almost non-existent. A small well-educated technological elite is becoming the main owner of intellectual property, which is, by far, the most valuable economic asset, while the rest of the world drifts towards fanaticism of one kind or another. Add all of the above and the unavoidable conclusion is that Democracy, our least bad system of government, is on its way out.

Can we invent a better new system? Perhaps. But this cannot happen if we are not allowed to utter the sentence: "There may be a political system which is better than Democracy". Today's political correctness does not allow one to say such things. The result of this prohibition will be an inevitable return to some kind of totalitarian rule, different from that of the emperors, the colonialists or the landlords of the past, but not more just. On the other hand, open and honest thinking about this issue may lead either to a gigantic worldwide revolution in educating the poor masses, thus saving democracy, or to a careful search for a just (repeat, just) and better system.

I cannot resist a cheap parting shot: When, in the past two years, Edge asked for brilliant ideas you believe in but cannot prove, or for proposing new exciting laws, most answers related to science and technology. When the question is now about dangerous ideas, almost all answers touch on issues of politics and society and not on the "hard sciences". Perhaps science is not so dangerous, after all.

JEREMY BERNSTEIN
Professor of Physics, Stevens Institute of Technology; Author, Hitler's Uranium Club

The idea that we understand plutonium

The most dangerous idea I have come across recently is the idea that we understand plutonium. Plutonium is the most complex element in the periodic table. It has six different crystal phases between room temperature and its melting point. It can catch fire spontaneously in the presence of water vapor and if you inhale minuscule amounts you will die of lung cancer. It is the principle element in the "pits" that are the explosive cores of nuclear weapons. In these pits it is alloyed with gallium. No one knows why this works and no one can be sure how stable this alloy is. These pits, in the thousands, are now decades old. What is dangerous is the idea that they have retained their integrity and can be safely stored into the indefinite future.

SCOTT SAMPSON
Chief Curator, Utah Museum of Natural History; Associate Professor Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Utah; Host, Dinosaur Planet TV series

The purpose of life is to disperse energy

The truly dangerous ideas in science tend to be those that threaten the collective ego of humanity and knock us further off our pedestal of centrality. The Copernican Revolution abruptly dislodged humans from the center of the universe. The Darwinian Revolution yanked Homo sapiens from the pinnacle of life. Today another menacing revolution sits at the horizon of knowledge, patiently awaiting broad realization by the same egotistical species.

The dangerous idea is this: the purpose of life is to disperse energy.

Many of us are at least somewhat familiar with the second law of thermodynamics, the unwavering propensity of energy to disperse and, in doing so, transition from high quality to low quality forms. More generally, as stated by ecologist Eric Schneider, "nature abhors a gradient," where a gradient is simply a difference over a distance — for example, in temperature or pressure. Open physical systems — including those of the atmosphere, hydrosphere, and geosphere — all embody this law, being driven by the dispersal of energy, particularly the flow of heat, continually attempting to achieve equilibrium. Phenomena as diverse as lithospheric plate motions, the northward flow of the Gulf Stream, and occurrence of deadly hurricanes are all examples of second law manifestations.

There is growing evidence that life, the biosphere, is no different. It has often been said the life's complexity contravenes the second law, indicating the work either of a deity or some unknown natural process, depending on one's bias. Yet the evolution of life and the dynamics of ecosystems obey the second law mandate, functioning in large part to dissipate energy. They do so not by burning brightly and disappearing, like a fire torching a forest, but through stable metabolic cycles that store chemical energy and continually reduce the solar gradient. Photosynthetic plants, bacteria, and algae capture energy from the sun and form the core of all food webs.

Virtually all organisms, including humans, are, in a real sense, sunlight transmogrified, temporary waypoints in the flow of energy. Ecological succession, viewed from a thermodynamic perspective, is a process that maximizes the capture and degradation of energy. Similarly, the tendency for life to become more complex over the past 3.5 billion years (as well as the overall increase in biomass and organismal diversity through time) is not due simply to natural selection, as most evolutionists still argue, but also to nature's "efforts" to grab more and more of the sun's flow. The slow burn that characterizes life enables ecological systems to persist over deep time, changing in response to external and internal perturbations.

Ecology has been summarized by the pithy statement, "energy flows, matter cycles. " Yet this maxim applies equally to complex systems in the non-living world; indeed it literally unites the biosphere with the physical realm. More and more, it appears that complex, cycling, swirling systems of matter have a natural tendency to emerge in the face of energy gradients. This recurrent phenomenon may even have been the driving force behind life's origins.

This idea is not new, and is certainly not mine. Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger was one of the first to articulate the hypothesis, as part of his famous "What is Life" lectures in Dublin in 1943. More recently, Jeffrey Wicken, Harold Morowitz, Eric Schneider and others have taken this concept considerably further, buoyed by results from a range of studies, particularly within ecology. Schneider and Dorian Sagan provide an excellent summary of this hypothesis in their recent book, "Into the Cool".

The concept of life as energy flow, once fully digested, is profound. Just as Darwin fundamentally connected humans to the non-human world, a thermodynamic perspective connects life inextricably to the non-living world. This dangerous idea, once broadly distributed and understood, is likely to provoke reaction from many sectors, including religion and science. The wondrous diversity and complexity of life through time, far from being the product of intelligent design, is a natural phenomenon intimately linked to the physical realm of energy flow.

Moreover, evolution is not driven by the machinations of selfish genes propagating themselves through countless millennia. Rather, ecology and evolution together operate as a highly successful, extremely persistent means of reducing the gradient generated by our nearest star. In my view, evolutionary theory (the process, not the fact of evolution!) and biology generally are headed for a major overhaul once investigators fully comprehend the notion that the complex systems of earth, air, water, and life are not only interconnected, but interdependent, cycling matter in order to maintain the flow of energy.

Although this statement addresses only naturalistic function and is mute with regard to spiritual meaning, it is likely to have deep effects outside of science. In particular, broad understanding of life's role in dispersing energy has great potential to help humans reconnect both to nature and to planet's physical systems at a key moment in our species' history.

Here's one relevant to us:

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DANIEL GOLEMAN
Psychologist; Author, Emotional Intelligence

Cyber-disinhibition

The Internet inadvertently undermines the quality of human interaction, allowing destructive emotional impulses freer reign under specific circumstances. The reason is a neural fluke that results in cyber-disinhibition of brain systems that keep our more unruly urges in check. The tech problem: a major disconnect between the ways our brains are wired to connect, and the interface offered in online interactions.

Communication via the Internet can mislead the brain's social systems. The key mechanisms are in the prefrontal cortex; these circuits instantaneously monitor ourselves and the other person during a live interaction, and automatically guide our responses so they are appropriate and smooth. A key mechanism for this involves circuits that ordinarily inhibit impulses for actions that would be rude or simply inappropriate — or outright dangerous.

In order for this regulatory mechanism to operate well, we depend on real-time, ongoing feedback from the other person. The Internet has no means to allow such realtime feedback (other than rarely used two-way audio/video streams). That puts our inhibitory circuitry at a loss — there is no signal to monitor from the other person. This results in disinhibition: impulse unleashed.

Such disinhibition seems state-specific, and typically occurs rarely while people are in positive or neutral emotional states. That's why the Internet works admirably for the vast majority of communication. Rather, this disinhibition becomes far more likely when people feel strong, negative emotions. What fails to be inhibited are the impulses those emotions generate.

This phenomenon has been recognized since the earliest days of the Internet (then the Arpanet, used by a small circle of scientists) as "flaming," the tendency to send abrasive, angry or otherwise emotionally "off" cyber-messages. The hallmark of a flame is that the same person would never say the words in the email to the recipient were they face-to-face. His inhibitory circuits would not allow it — and so the interaction would go more smoothly. He might still communicate the same core information face-to-face, but in a more skillful manner. Offline and in life, people who flame repeatedly tend to become friendless, or get fired (unless they already run the company).

The greatest danger from cyber-disinhibition may be to young people. The prefrontal inhibitory circuitry is among the last part of the brain to become fully mature, doing so sometime in the twenties. During adolescence there is a developmental lag, with teenagers having fragile inhibitory capacities, but fully ripe emotional impulsivity.

Strengthening these inhibitory circuits can be seen as the singular task in neural development of the adolescent years.

One way this teenage neural gap manifests online is "cyber-bullying," which has emerged among girls in their early teens. Cliques of girls post or send cruel, harassing messages to a target girl, who typically is both reduced to tears and socially humiliated. The posts and messages are anonymous, though they become widely known among the target's peers. The anonymity and social distance of the Internet allow an escalation of such petty cruelty to levels that are rarely found in person: face-to-face seeing someone cry typically halts bullying among girls — but that inhibitory signal cannot come via Internet.

A more ominous manifestation of cyber-disinhibition can be seen in the susceptibility of teenagers induced to perform sexual acts in front of webcams for an anonymous adult audience who pay to watch and direct. Apparently hundreds of teenagers have been lured into this corner of child pornography, with an equally large audience of pedophiles. The Internet gives strangers access to children in their own homes, who are tempted to do things online they would never consider in person.

Cyber-bullying was reported last week in my local paper. The Webcam teenage sex circuit was a front-page story in The New York Times two days later.

As with any new technology, the Internet is an experiment in progress. It's time we considered what other such downsides of cyber-disinhibition may be emerging — and looked for a technological fix, if possible. The dangerous thought: the Internet may harbor social perils our inhibitory circuitry was not designed to handle in evolution

ROBERT SHAPIRO
Professor Emeritus, Senior Research Scientist, Department of Chemistry, New York University. Author, Planetary Dreams

We shall understand the origin of life within the next 5 years

Two very different groups will find this development dangerous, and for different reasons, but this outcome is best explained at the end of my discussion.

Just over a half century ago, in the spring of 1953, a famous experiment brought enthusiasm and renewed interest to this field. Stanley Miller, mentored by Harold Urey, demonstrated that a mixture of small organic molecules (monomers) could readily be prepared by exposing a mixture of simple gases to an electrical spark. Similar mixtures were found in meteorites, which suggested that organic monomers may be widely distributed in the universe. If the ingredients of life could be made so readily, then why could they not just as easily assort themselves to form cells?

In that same spring, however, another famous paper was published by James Watson and Francis Crick. They demonstrated that the heredity of living organisms was stored in a very large large molecule called DNA. DNA is a polymer, a substance made by stringing many smaller units together, as links are joined to form a long chain.

The clear connection between the structure of DNA and its biological function, and the geometrical beauty of the DNA double helix led many scientists to consider it to be the essence of life itself. One flaw remained, however, to spoil this picture. DNA could store information, but it could not reproduce itself without the assistance of proteins, a different type of polymer. Proteins are also adept at increasing the rate of (catalyzing) many other chemical reactions that are considered necessary for life. The origin of life field became mired in the "chicken-or-the egg" question. Which came first: DNA or proteins? An apparent answer emerged when it was found that another polymer, RNA (a cousin of DNA) could manage both heredity and catalysis. In 1986, Walter Gilbert proposed that life began with an "RNA World." Life started when an RNA molecule that could copy itself was formed, by chance, in a pool of its own building blocks.

Unfortunately, a half century of chemical experiments have demonstrated that nature has no inclination to prepare RNA, or even the building blocks (nucleotides) that must be linked together to form RNA. Nucleotides are not formed in Miller-type spark discharges, nor are they found in meteorites. Skilled chemists have prepared nucleotides in well-equipped laboratories, and linked them to form RNA, but neither chemists nor laboratories were present when life began on the early Earth. The Watson-Crick theory sparked a revolution in molecular biology, but it left the origin-of-life question at an impasse.

Fortunately, an alternative solution to this dilemma has gradually emerged: neither DNA nor RNA nor protein were necessary for the origin of life. Large molecules dominate the processes of life today, but they were not needed to get it started. Monomers themselves have the ability to support heredity and catalysis. The key requirement is that a suitable energy source be available to assist them in the processes of self-organization. A demonstration of the principle involved in the origin of life would require only that a suitable monomer mixture be exposed to an appropriate energy source in a simple apparatus. We could then observe the very first steps in evolution.

Some mixtures will work, but many others will fail, for technical reasons. Some dedicated effort will be needed in the laboratory to prove this point. Why have I specified five years for this discovery? The unproductive polymer-based paradigm is far from dead, and continues to consume the efforts of the majority of workers in the field. A few years will be needed to entice some of them to explore the other solution. I estimate that several years more (the time for a PhD thesis) might be required to identify a suitable monomer-energy combination, and perform a convincing demonstration.

Who would be disturbed if such efforts should succeed? Many scientists have been attracted by the RNA World theory because of its elegance and simplicity. Some of them have devoted decades of their career in efforts to prove it. They would not be pleased if Freeman Dyson's description proved to be correct: "life began with little bags, the precursors of cells, enclosing small volumes of dirty water containing miscellaneous garbage."

A very different group would find this development as dangerous as the theory of evolution. Those who advocate creationism and intelligent design would feel that another pillar of their belief system was under attack. They have understood the flaws in the RNA World theory, and used them to support their supernatural explanation for life's origin. A successful scientific theory in this area would leave one less task less for God to accomplish: the origin of life would be a natural (and perhaps frequent) result of the physical laws that govern this universe. This latter thought falls directly in line with the idea of Cosmic Evolution, which asserts that events since the Big Bang have moved almost inevitably in the direction of life. No miracle or immense stroke of luck was needed to get it started. If this should be the case, then we should expect to be successful when we search for life beyond this planet. We are not the only life that inhabits this universe.

OLIVER MORTON
Chief News and Features Editor at Nature; Author, Mapping Mars

Our planet is not in peril

The truth of this idea is pretty obvious. Environmental crises are a fundamental part of the history of the earth: there have been sudden and dramatic temperature excursions, severe glaciations, vast asteroid and comet impacts. Yet the earth is still here, unscathed.

There have been mass extinctions associated with some of these events, while other mass extinctions may well have been triggered by subtler internal changes to the biosphere. But none of them seem to have done long-term harm. The first ten million years of the Triassic may have been a little dull by comparison to the late Palaeozoic, what with a large number of the more interesting species being killed in the great mass extinction at the end of the Permian, but there is no evidence that any fundamentally important earth processes did not eventually recover. I strongly suspect that not a single basic biogeochemical innovation — the sorts of thing that underlie photosynthesis and the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, the sulphur cycle and so on — has been lost in the past 4 billion years.

Indeed, there is an argument to be made that mass extinctions are in fact a good thing, in that they wipe the slate clean a bit and thus allow exciting evolutionary innovations. This may be going a bit far. While the Schumpeter-for-the-earth-system position seems plausible, it also seems a little crudely progressivist. While to a mammal the Tertiary seems fairly obviously superior to the Cretaceous, it's not completely clear to me that there's an objective basis for that belief. In terms of primary productivity, for example, the Cretaceous may well have had an edge. But despite all this, it's hard to imagine that the world would be a substantially better place if it had not undergone the mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic.

Against this background, the current carbon/climate crisis seems pretty small beer. The change in mean global temperatures seems quite unlikely to be much greater than the regular cyclical change between glacial and interglacial climates. Land use change is immense, but it's not clear how long it will last, and there are rich seedbanks in the soil that will allow restoration. If fossil fuel use goes unchecked, carbon dioxide levels may rise as high as they were in the Eocene, and do so at such a rate that they cause a transient spike in ocean acidity. But they will not stay at those high levels, and the Eocene was not such a terrible place.

The earth doesn't need ice caps, or permafrost, or any particular sea level. Such things come and go and rise and fall as a matter of course. The planet's living systems adapt and flourish, sometimes in a way that provides negative feedback, occasionally with a positive feedback that amplifies the change. A planet that made it through the massive biogeochemical unpleasantness of the late Permian is in little danger from a doubling, or even a quintupling, of the very low carbon dioxide level that preceded the industrial revolution, or from the loss of a lot of forests and reefs, or from the demise of half its species, or from the thinning of its ozone layer at high latitudes.

But none of this is to say that we as people should not worry about global change; we should worry a lot. This is because climate change may not hurt the planet, but it hurts people. In particular, it will hurt people who are too poor to adapt. Significant climate change will change rainfall patterns, and probably patterns of extreme events as well, in ways that could easily threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of people supporting themselves through subsistence agriculture or pastoralism. It will have a massive effect on the lives of the relatively small number of people in places where sea ice is an important part of the environment (and it seems unlikely that anything we do now can change that). In other, more densely populated places local environmental and biotic change may have similarly sweeping effects.

Secondary to this, the loss of species, both known and unknown, will be experienced by some as a form of damage that goes beyond any deterioration in ecosystem services. Many people will feel themselves and their world diminished by such extinctions even when they have no practical consequences, despite the fact that they cannot ascribe an objective value to their loss. One does not have to share the values of these people to recognise their sincerity.

All of these effects provide excellent reasons to act. And yet many people in the various green movements feel compelled to add on the notion that the planet itself is in crisis, or doomed; that all life on earth is threatened. And in a world where that rhetoric is common, the idea that this eschatological approach to the environment is baseless is a dangerous one. Since the 1970s the environmental movement has based much of its appeal on personifying the planet and making it seem like a single entity, then seeking to place it in some ways "in our care". It is a very powerful notion, and one which benefits from the hugely influential iconographic backing of the first pictures of the earth from space; it has inspired much of the good that the environmental movement has done. The idea that the planet is not in peril could thus come to undermine the movement's power. This is one of the reasons people react against the idea so strongly. One respected and respectable climate scientist reacted to Andy Revkin's recent use of the phrase "In fact, the planet has nothing to worry about from global warming" in the New York Times with near apoplectic fury.

If the belief that the planet is in peril were merely wrong, there might be an excuse for ignoring it, though basing one's actions on lies is an unattractive proposition. But the planet-in-peril idea is an easy target for those who, for various reasons, argue against any action on the carbon/climate crisis at all. In this, bad science is a hostage to fortune. What's worse, the idea distorts environmental reasoning, too. For example, laying stress on the non-issue of the health of the planet, rather than the real issues of effects that harm people, leads to a general preference for averting change rather than adapting to it, even though providing the wherewithal for adaptation will often be the most rational response.

The planet-in-peril idea persists in part simply through widespread ignorance of earth history. But some environmentalists, and perhaps some environmental reporters, will argue that the inflated rhetoric that trades on this error is necessary in order to keep the show on the road. The idea that people can be more easily persuaded to save the planet, which is not in danger, than their fellow human beings, who are, is an unpleasant and cynical one; another dangerous idea, not least because it may indeed hold some truth. But if putting the planet at the centre of the debate is a way of involving everyone, of making us feel that we're all in this together, then one can't help noticing that the ploy isn't working out all that well. In the rich nations, many people may indeed believe that the planet is in danger — but they don't believe that they are in danger, and perhaps as a result they're not clamouring for change loud enough, or in the right way, to bring it about.

There is also a problem of learned helplessness. I suspect people are flattered, in a rather perverse way, by the idea that their lifestyle threatens the whole planet, rather than just the livelihoods of millions of people they have never met. But the same sense of scale that flatters may also enfeeble. They may come to think that the problems are too great for them to do anything about.

Rolling carbon/climate issues into the great moral imperative of improving the lives of the poor, rather than relegating them to the dodgy rhetorical level of a threat to the planet as a whole, seems more likely to be a sustainable long-term strategy. The most important thing about environmental change is that it hurts people; the basis of our response should be human solidarity.

The planet will take care of itself.

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Anyway, there are lots of VERY interesting ideas there.

I do agree that schools need to be revamped. Children aren't taught how to think, but what to think which is funded by the government. It's all geared towards the standard tests. Homeschooling is becoming big here, and for many states it it not regulated by the government. The government is trying to get their foot in the door of these states by offering free supplies, though most homeschools won't accept them for fear that if you take from the government, the government will take from you.

Besides kids spend all day in school, and wind up with 2 plus hours of school at home taking away their home time, when in a normal homeschool family, it only takes a student about 4 hours to finish all their schooling per day.

Take a look at this one:

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W.DANIEL HILLIS
Physicist, Computer Scientist; Chairman, Applied Minds, Inc.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone

The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas

I don't share my most dangerous ideas. Ideas are the most powerful forces that we can unleash upon the world, and they should not be let loose without careful consideration of their consequences. Some ideas are dangerous because they are false, like an idea that one race of humans is more worthy that another, or that one religion has monopoly on the truth. False ideas like these spread like wildfire, and have caused immeasurable harm. They still do. Such false ideas should obviously not be spread or encouraged, but there are also plenty of trues idea that should not be spread: ideas about how to cause terror and pain and chaos, ideas of how to better convince people of things that are not true.

I have often seen otherwise thoughtful people so caught up in such an idea that they seem unable to resist sharing it. To me, the idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas is, itself, a very dangerous idea. I just hope that it never catches on.

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There always has to be someone trying to be a smart-ass, eh?

Oh, we should all just go to US schools and be taught not think...That will solve it.

as far as the "planet in peril" part, i agree. the planet is in no danger by our actions. and though we may have a hand in accellerating or maybe causing climate change, its the human race that will suffer, not the earth.

"If the belief that the planet is in peril were merely wrong, there might be an excuse for ignoring it, though basing one's actions on lies is an unattractive proposition. But the planet-in-peril idea is an easy target for those who, for various reasons, argue against any action on the carbon/climate crisis at all. In this, bad science is a hostage to fortune. What's worse, the idea distorts environmental reasoning, too. For example, laying stress on the non-issue of the health of the planet, rather than the real issues of effects that harm people, leads to a general preference for averting change rather than adapting to it, even though providing the wherewithal for adaptation will often be the most rational response."

by exagerating the danger to mankind and saying "save the planet", environmental groups fuel the opposition and allow themselves to be discredited. but i must say, i see no argument against human influenced global warming, in fact the acknowledgement of the possibility.

Geez, there is loads of opposition to the general consensus on global warming. In fact, counter-opinion on that area is one of the most firecely debated scientific areas, though you hear little about it.

Originally posted by Ushgarak
Geez, there is loads of opposition to the general consensus on global warming. In fact, counter-opinion on that area is one of the most firecely debated scientific areas, though you hear little about it.

im just saying that the acknowledgement of possibility is there.
dont think you dug up the holy grail on the anti-man made global warming theory 😛

And when did I ever imply that it did?

I would point out though that he doesn't say the Human race will suffer- he says some humans will.

well of coarse not ush. only a global catastrophy would put ALL humans in danger. but the possibility is there and the current state of debate is a ridiculous stalemate on both ends. one side exagerating and lying "THE WORLD IS DOOMED" while the other just uses that as fuel to discredit the whole theory on man made global warming. i think the main point of this passage was to illustrate that.