There's something ironic about seeing a promotion for John Brockman's latest collection of science musings, This Idea Must Die, right under his Edge site's featured conversation, Death is Optional.
Because a lot of ideas don't die. They recede for a while--like Lamarck's notion of the inheritance of acquired traits--and then insinuate their way back into scientific consciousness.
But that's a minor complaint. Brockman's new anthology, in which he asks a host of leading intellectuals what ideas should be consigned to the dustbin, is engaging.
All the usual suspects are here: Steven Pinker, Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett. Not to take anything away from their contributions, but as you browse, it's the lesser known scientists and philosophers who provide the more interesting posts.
For example, philosopher-novelist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein attacks the idea that science makes philosophy obsolete.
"You can't argue for science making philosophy obsolete without indulging in philosophical arguments," she writes. "You're going to need to argue, for example, for a clear criterion for distinguishing between scientific and non-scientific theories of the world."
But perhaps the old demarcation problem of distinguishing the scientific is misguided, she adds. "The more important demarcation is distinguishing all that is implicated in and reconcilable with the scientific claims of knowledge." She then suggests that the idea of 'science' itself be discarded. "Lets retire it in favor of the more inclusive 'knowledge'."
Cal Tech cosmologist Sean Carroll also has a go at the demarcation problem, arguing that Karl Popper's famous criterion of falsifiability--that any theory which cannot be tested isn't truly scientific--should be retired.
"The falsifiability criterion gestures toward something true and important about science, but it's a blunt instrument in a situation calling for subtlety and precision," he writes. "It's better to emphasize two central features of good scientific theories: they're definite and they're empirical."
Any scientific theory is ultimately judged by its ability to account for the data, but the steps involved in the process leading to that accounting, he argues, can be indirect.
Also refreshing is author Douglas Rushkoff's impatience with 'the atheism prerequisite': Science's unearned commitment to materialism in his view, "has led us into convoluted assumptions about the origins of spacetime, in which time itself simply must be accepted as a by-product of the Big Bang, and consciousness (if it even exists) as a by-product of matter."
Isn't it more rational, he asks, to work with the possibility that time predates matter and that consciousness is less the consequence of a physical cause-and-effect reality than a pre-cursor?
Andrew Lih, author and associate professor at the American University in Washington, D.C., says it's high time that universities dump calculus requirements. "Calculus has become a hazing ritual for those interested in going into one of the most essential fields today: computer science."
But the subject has little relevance to the day-to-day work of coders, hackers and entrepreneurs, he writes, and it poses a significant obstacle to recruiting much needed candidates for the digital workforce.
The problem is particularly urgent in the area of coding and programming, according to Lih.
Undergraduate computer-science programs are starting to bounce back from a dearth of enrollment that plagued them in the early Internet era, but we could do a lot more to fill the ranks if we rid ourselves of the lingering view that computer science is an extension of mathematics--a view that dates from an era when computers were primarily crafted as the ultimate calculators. [p. 475]
But there is one idea that seems to have escaped discussion in this collection. Why didn't anyone suggest that it's time to discard the notion that teleology, the exploration of final causes, is dead? And I note that U.C. Berkeley's Terrence Deacon, author of Incomplete Nature, is conspicuously absent from these pages. I imagine he might have had something to say on that score.
That aside, This Idea Must Die is an excellent gathering of thoughts, rants and lamentations to add to your book list.
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