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This idea must die : scientific theories that are blocking progress / edited by John Brockman.

Contributor(s): Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, NY : Harper Perennial, [2015]Edition: First editionDescription: vii, 568 pages ; 21 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 0062374346 (pbk.)
  • 9780062374349 (pbk.) :
Subject(s):
Contents:
The theory of everything / Geoffrey West -- Unification / Marcelo Gleiser -- Simplicity / A.C. Grayling -- The universe / Seth Lloyd -- IQ / Scott Atran -- Brain plasticity / Leo M. Chalupa -- Changing the brain / Howard Gardner -- "The rocket scientist" / Victoria Wyatt -- Indivi-duality / Nigel Goldenfeld -- The bigger an animal's brain, the greater its intelligence / Nicholas Humphrey -- The big bang was the first moment of time / Lee Smolin -- The universe began in a state of extraordinarily low entropy / Alan Guth -- Entropy / Bruce Parker -- The uniformity and uniqueness of the universe / Andrei Linde -- Infinity / Max Tegmark -- The laws of physics are predetermined / Lawrence M. Krauss -- Theories of anything / Paul Steinhardt -- M-theory/string theory is the only game in town / Eric R. Weinstein -- String theory / Frank Tipler -- Our world has only three space dimensions / Gordon Kane -- The "naturalness" argument / Peter Woit -- The collapse of the wave function / Freeman Dyson -- Quantum jumps / David Deutsch -- Cause and effect / W. Daniel Hillis -- Race / Nina Jablonski -- Essentialism / Richard Dawkins -- Human nature/ Peter Richerson -- The Urvogel / Julia Clarke -- Numbering nature / Kurt Gray -- Hardwired=permanent / Michael Shermer -- The atheism prerequisite / Douglas Rushkoff -- Evolution is "true" / Roger Highfield -- There is no reality in the quantum world / Anton Zeilinger -- Spacetime / Steve Giddings -- The universe / Amanda Gefter -- The Higgs particle closes a chapter in particle physics / Haim Harari -- Aesthetic motivation / Sarah Demers -- Naturalness, hierarchy, and spacetime / Maria Spiropulu -- Scientists ought to know everthing scientifically knowable / Ed Regis -- Falsifiability / Sean Carroll -- Anti-anecdotalism / Nicholas G. Carr -- Science makes philosophy obsolete / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein -- "Science" / Ian Bogost -- Our narrow definition of "science" / Sam Harris -- The hard problem / Daniel C. Dennett -- The neural correlates of consciousness / Susan Blackmore -- Long-term memory is immutable / Todd C. Sacktor -- The self / Bruce Hood -- Cognitive agency / Thomas Metzinger -- Free will / Jerry Coyne -- Common sense / Robert Provine -- There can be no science of art / Jonathan Gottschall -- Science and technology / George Dyson -- Things are either true or false / Alan Alda -- Simple answers / Gavin Schmidt -- We'll never hit barriers to scientific understanding / Martin Rees -- Life evolves via a shared genetic toolkit / Seirian Sumner -- Fully random mutations / Kevin Kelly -- One genome per individual / Eric J. Topol -- Nature versus nurture / Timo Hannay -- The particularist use of "a" gene-environment interaction / Robert Sapolsky -- Natrual selection is the only engine of evolution / Athena Vouloumanos -- Behavior = genes + environment / Steven Pinker -- Innateness / Alison Gopnik -- Moral blank-slateism / Kiley Hamlin -- Associationism / Oliver Scott Curry -- Radical behaviorism / Simon Baron-Cohen -- "Instinct" and "innate" / Daniel L. Everett -- Altruism / Tor Nørretranders -- The altruism hierarchy / Jamil Zaki -- Humans are by nature social animals / Adam Waytz -- Evidence-based medicine / Gary Klein --
Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder / David M. Buss -- Romantic love and addiction / Helen Fisher -- Emotion is peripheral / Brian Knutson -- Science can maximize our happiness / Paul Bloom -- Culture / Pascal Boyer -- Culture / Laura Betzig -- Learning and culture / John Tooby -- "Our" intutitions / Stephen Stich -- We're stone age thinkers / Alun Anderson -- Inclusive fitness / Martin Nowak -- Human evolutionary exceptionalism / Michael McCullough -- Animal mindlessness / Kate Jeffery -- Humaniqueness / Irene Pepperberg -- Human being = homo sapiens / Steve Fuller -- Anthropocentricity / Satyajit Das -- Truer perceptions are fitter perceptions / Donald D. Hoffman -- The intrinsic beauty and elegance of mathematics allows it to describe nature / Gregory Benford -- Geometry / Carlo Rovelli -- Calculus / Andrew Lih -- Computer science / Neil Gershenfeld -- Science advances by funerals / Samuel Barondes -- Planck's cynical view of scientific change / Hugo Mercier -- New ideas triumph by replacing old ones / Jared Diamond -- Max Planck's faith / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- The illusion of certainty / Mary Catherine Bateson -- The pursuit of parsimony / Jonathan Haidt -- The clinician's law of parsimony / Gerald Smallberg -- Essentialist views of the mind / Lisa Barrett -- The distinction between antisociality and mental illness / Abigail Marsh -- Repression / David G. Myers -- Mental illness is nothing but brain illness / Joel Gold and Ian Gold -- Psychogenic illness / Beatrice Golomb -- Crime entails only the actions of criminals / Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán -- Statistical significance / Charles Seife -- Scientific inference via statistical rituals / Gerd Gigerenzer -- The power of statistics / Emanuel Derman -- Reproducibility / Victoria Stodden -- The average / Nicholas A. Christakis -- Standard deviation / Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- Statistical independence / Bart Kosko -- Certainty. Absolute truth. Exactitude / Richard Saul Wurman -- The illusion of scientific progress / Paul Saffo.
Large randomized controlled trials / Dean Ornish -- Multiple regression as a means of discovering causality / Richard Nisbett -- Mouse models / Azra Raza -- The somatic mutation theory of cancer / Paul Davies -- The linear no-threshold (LNT) radiation dose hypotheses / Stewart Brand -- Universal grammar / Benjamin K. Bergen -- A science of language should deal only with "competence" / N.J. Enfield -- Languages condition worldviews / John McWhorter -- The standard approach to meaning / Dan Sperber -- The uncertainty principle / Kai Krause -- Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! / Ian McEwan -- Big data / Gary Marcus -- The stratigraphic column / Christine Finn -- The habitable-zone concept / Dimitar D. Sasselov -- Robot companions / Sherry Turkle -- "Artificial intelliggence" / Roger Schank --The mind is just the brain / Tania Lombrozo -- Mind versus matter / Frank Wilczek -- Intelligence as a property / Alexander Wissner-Gross -- The grand analogy / David Gelernter -- Grandmother cells / Terrence J. Sejnowski -- Brain modules / Patricia S. Churchland -- Bias is always bad / Tom Griffiths -- Cartesian hydraulicism / Robert Kurzban -- The computational metaphor / Rodney A. Brooks -- Left-brain/right-brain / Sarah-Jayne Blakemore -- Left-brain/right-brain / Stephen M. Kosslyn -- Moore's Law / Andrian Kreye -- The continuity of time / Ernst Pöppel -- The input-output model of perception and action / Andy Clark -- Knowing is half the battle / Laurie R. Santos and Tamar Gendler -- Informaiton overload / Jay Rosen -- The rational individual / Alex (Sandy) Pentland -- Homo economicus / Margaret Levi -- Don't discard wrong theories, just don't treat them as true / Richard H. Thaler -- Rational actor models : the competence corollary / Susan Fiske -- Malthusianism / Matt Ridley -- Economic growth / Cesar Hidalgo -- Unlimited and eternal growth / Hans Ulrich Obrist -- The tragedy of the commons / Luca De Biase -- Markets are bad, markets are good / Michael I. Norton -- Stationarity / Giulio Boccaletti -- Stationarity / Laurence C. Smith -- The carbon footprint / Daniel Goleman -- Unbridled scientific and technological optimism / Stuart Pimm -- Scientists should stick to science / Buddhini Samarasinghe -- Nature = objects / Scott Sampson -- Scientific morality / Edward Slingerland -- Science is self-correcting / Alex Holcombe -- Replication as a safety net / Adam Alter -- Scientific knowledge structured as "literature" / Brian Christian -- The way we produce and advance science / Cathryn Clancy -- Allocating funds via peer review / Aubrey De Grey -- Some questions are too hard for young scientists to tackle / Ross Anderson -- Only scientists can do science / Kate Mills -- The scientific method / Melanie Swan -- Big effects have big explanations / Fiery Cushman -- Science = big science / Samuel Arbesman -- Sadness is always bad, happiness is always good / June Gruber -- Opposites can't both be right / Eldar Shafir -- People are sheep / David Berreby --
Summary: The bestselling editor of This Explains Everything brings together 175 of the world's most brilliant minds to tackle Edge.org's 2014 question: What scientific idea has become a relic blocking human progress? Each year, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org--"The world's smartest website" (The Guardian)--challenges some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers to answer a provocative question crucial to our time. In 2014 he asked 175 brilliant minds to ponder: What scientific idea needs to be put aside in order to make room for new ideas to advance? The answers are as surprising as they are illuminating.
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Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 500 T448 Available 33111007955970
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:



Reporting from the cutting edge of scientific discovery, today's visionary thinkers target the greatest roadblocks to innovation.

Few truly new ideas are developed without first abandoning old ones. In the past, discoveries often had to wait for the rise of the next generation to see questions in a new light and let go of old truisms. Today, in a world that is defined by a rapid rate of change, staying on the cutting edge has as much to do with shedding outdated notions as adopting new ones. In this spirit, John Brockman, publisher of the online salon Edge.org ("the world's smartest website"--The Guardian), asked 175 of the world's most influential scientists, economists, artists, and philosophers: What scientific idea is ready for retirement

Jared Diamond explores the diverse ways that new ideas emerge * Nassim Nicholas Taleb takes down the standard deviation * Richard Thaler and novelist Ian McEwan reveal the usefulness of "bad" ideas * Steven Pinker dismantles the working theory of human behavior * Richard Dawkins renounces essentialism * Sherry Turkle reevaluates our expectations of artificial intelligence * Physicist Andrei Linde suggests that our universe and its laws may not be as unique as we think * Martin Rees explains why scientific understanding is a limitless goal * Alan Guth rethinks the origins of the universe * Sam Harris argues that our definition of science is too narrow * Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek disputes the division between mind and matter * Lawrence Krauss challenges the notion that the laws of physics were preordained * plus contributions from Daniel Goleman, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Nicholas Carr, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Matt Ridley, Stewart Brand, Sean Carroll, Daniel C. Dennett, Helen Fisher, Douglas Rushkoff, Lee Smolin, Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson, and others.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 545-547) and index.

The theory of everything / Geoffrey West -- Unification / Marcelo Gleiser -- Simplicity / A.C. Grayling -- The universe / Seth Lloyd -- IQ / Scott Atran -- Brain plasticity / Leo M. Chalupa -- Changing the brain / Howard Gardner -- "The rocket scientist" / Victoria Wyatt -- Indivi-duality / Nigel Goldenfeld -- The bigger an animal's brain, the greater its intelligence / Nicholas Humphrey -- The big bang was the first moment of time / Lee Smolin -- The universe began in a state of extraordinarily low entropy / Alan Guth -- Entropy / Bruce Parker -- The uniformity and uniqueness of the universe / Andrei Linde -- Infinity / Max Tegmark -- The laws of physics are predetermined / Lawrence M. Krauss -- Theories of anything / Paul Steinhardt -- M-theory/string theory is the only game in town / Eric R. Weinstein -- String theory / Frank Tipler -- Our world has only three space dimensions / Gordon Kane -- The "naturalness" argument / Peter Woit -- The collapse of the wave function / Freeman Dyson -- Quantum jumps / David Deutsch -- Cause and effect / W. Daniel Hillis -- Race / Nina Jablonski -- Essentialism / Richard Dawkins -- Human nature/ Peter Richerson -- The Urvogel / Julia Clarke -- Numbering nature / Kurt Gray -- Hardwired=permanent / Michael Shermer -- The atheism prerequisite / Douglas Rushkoff -- Evolution is "true" / Roger Highfield -- There is no reality in the quantum world / Anton Zeilinger -- Spacetime / Steve Giddings -- The universe / Amanda Gefter -- The Higgs particle closes a chapter in particle physics / Haim Harari -- Aesthetic motivation / Sarah Demers -- Naturalness, hierarchy, and spacetime / Maria Spiropulu -- Scientists ought to know everthing scientifically knowable / Ed Regis -- Falsifiability / Sean Carroll -- Anti-anecdotalism / Nicholas G. Carr -- Science makes philosophy obsolete / Rebecca Newberger Goldstein -- "Science" / Ian Bogost -- Our narrow definition of "science" / Sam Harris -- The hard problem / Daniel C. Dennett -- The neural correlates of consciousness / Susan Blackmore -- Long-term memory is immutable / Todd C. Sacktor -- The self / Bruce Hood -- Cognitive agency / Thomas Metzinger -- Free will / Jerry Coyne -- Common sense / Robert Provine -- There can be no science of art / Jonathan Gottschall -- Science and technology / George Dyson -- Things are either true or false / Alan Alda -- Simple answers / Gavin Schmidt -- We'll never hit barriers to scientific understanding / Martin Rees -- Life evolves via a shared genetic toolkit / Seirian Sumner -- Fully random mutations / Kevin Kelly -- One genome per individual / Eric J. Topol -- Nature versus nurture / Timo Hannay -- The particularist use of "a" gene-environment interaction / Robert Sapolsky -- Natrual selection is the only engine of evolution / Athena Vouloumanos -- Behavior = genes + environment / Steven Pinker -- Innateness / Alison Gopnik -- Moral blank-slateism / Kiley Hamlin -- Associationism / Oliver Scott Curry -- Radical behaviorism / Simon Baron-Cohen -- "Instinct" and "innate" / Daniel L. Everett -- Altruism / Tor Nørretranders -- The altruism hierarchy / Jamil Zaki -- Humans are by nature social animals / Adam Waytz -- Evidence-based medicine / Gary Klein --

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder / David M. Buss -- Romantic love and addiction / Helen Fisher -- Emotion is peripheral / Brian Knutson -- Science can maximize our happiness / Paul Bloom -- Culture / Pascal Boyer -- Culture / Laura Betzig -- Learning and culture / John Tooby -- "Our" intutitions / Stephen Stich -- We're stone age thinkers / Alun Anderson -- Inclusive fitness / Martin Nowak -- Human evolutionary exceptionalism / Michael McCullough -- Animal mindlessness / Kate Jeffery -- Humaniqueness / Irene Pepperberg -- Human being = homo sapiens / Steve Fuller -- Anthropocentricity / Satyajit Das -- Truer perceptions are fitter perceptions / Donald D. Hoffman -- The intrinsic beauty and elegance of mathematics allows it to describe nature / Gregory Benford -- Geometry / Carlo Rovelli -- Calculus / Andrew Lih -- Computer science / Neil Gershenfeld -- Science advances by funerals / Samuel Barondes -- Planck's cynical view of scientific change / Hugo Mercier -- New ideas triumph by replacing old ones / Jared Diamond -- Max Planck's faith / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi -- The illusion of certainty / Mary Catherine Bateson -- The pursuit of parsimony / Jonathan Haidt -- The clinician's law of parsimony / Gerald Smallberg -- Essentialist views of the mind / Lisa Barrett -- The distinction between antisociality and mental illness / Abigail Marsh -- Repression / David G. Myers -- Mental illness is nothing but brain illness / Joel Gold and Ian Gold -- Psychogenic illness / Beatrice Golomb -- Crime entails only the actions of criminals / Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán -- Statistical significance / Charles Seife -- Scientific inference via statistical rituals / Gerd Gigerenzer -- The power of statistics / Emanuel Derman -- Reproducibility / Victoria Stodden -- The average / Nicholas A. Christakis -- Standard deviation / Nassim Nicholas Taleb -- Statistical independence / Bart Kosko -- Certainty. Absolute truth. Exactitude / Richard Saul Wurman -- The illusion of scientific progress / Paul Saffo.

Large randomized controlled trials / Dean Ornish -- Multiple regression as a means of discovering causality / Richard Nisbett -- Mouse models / Azra Raza -- The somatic mutation theory of cancer / Paul Davies -- The linear no-threshold (LNT) radiation dose hypotheses / Stewart Brand -- Universal grammar / Benjamin K. Bergen -- A science of language should deal only with "competence" / N.J. Enfield -- Languages condition worldviews / John McWhorter -- The standard approach to meaning / Dan Sperber -- The uncertainty principle / Kai Krause -- Beware of arrogance! Retire nothing! / Ian McEwan -- Big data / Gary Marcus -- The stratigraphic column / Christine Finn -- The habitable-zone concept / Dimitar D. Sasselov -- Robot companions / Sherry Turkle -- "Artificial intelliggence" / Roger Schank --The mind is just the brain / Tania Lombrozo -- Mind versus matter / Frank Wilczek -- Intelligence as a property / Alexander Wissner-Gross -- The grand analogy / David Gelernter -- Grandmother cells / Terrence J. Sejnowski -- Brain modules / Patricia S. Churchland -- Bias is always bad / Tom Griffiths -- Cartesian hydraulicism / Robert Kurzban -- The computational metaphor / Rodney A. Brooks -- Left-brain/right-brain / Sarah-Jayne Blakemore -- Left-brain/right-brain / Stephen M. Kosslyn -- Moore's Law / Andrian Kreye -- The continuity of time / Ernst Pöppel -- The input-output model of perception and action / Andy Clark -- Knowing is half the battle / Laurie R. Santos and Tamar Gendler -- Informaiton overload / Jay Rosen -- The rational individual / Alex (Sandy) Pentland -- Homo economicus / Margaret Levi -- Don't discard wrong theories, just don't treat them as true / Richard H. Thaler -- Rational actor models : the competence corollary / Susan Fiske -- Malthusianism / Matt Ridley -- Economic growth / Cesar Hidalgo -- Unlimited and eternal growth / Hans Ulrich Obrist -- The tragedy of the commons / Luca De Biase -- Markets are bad, markets are good / Michael I. Norton -- Stationarity / Giulio Boccaletti -- Stationarity / Laurence C. Smith -- The carbon footprint / Daniel Goleman -- Unbridled scientific and technological optimism / Stuart Pimm -- Scientists should stick to science / Buddhini Samarasinghe -- Nature = objects / Scott Sampson -- Scientific morality / Edward Slingerland -- Science is self-correcting / Alex Holcombe -- Replication as a safety net / Adam Alter -- Scientific knowledge structured as "literature" / Brian Christian -- The way we produce and advance science / Cathryn Clancy -- Allocating funds via peer review / Aubrey De Grey -- Some questions are too hard for young scientists to tackle / Ross Anderson -- Only scientists can do science / Kate Mills -- The scientific method / Melanie Swan -- Big effects have big explanations / Fiery Cushman -- Science = big science / Samuel Arbesman -- Sadness is always bad, happiness is always good / June Gruber -- Opposites can't both be right / Eldar Shafir -- People are sheep / David Berreby --

The bestselling editor of This Explains Everything brings together 175 of the world's most brilliant minds to tackle Edge.org's 2014 question: What scientific idea has become a relic blocking human progress? Each year, John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org--"The world's smartest website" (The Guardian)--challenges some of the world's greatest scientists, artists, and philosophers to answer a provocative question crucial to our time. In 2014 he asked 175 brilliant minds to ponder: What scientific idea needs to be put aside in order to make room for new ideas to advance? The answers are as surprising as they are illuminating.

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