PREFACE
The Edge Question
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
by Steven Pinker
John Horgan
We Have No Souls
Paul Bloom
The Rejection of Soul
David Buss
The Evolution of Evil
Irene Pepperberg
The Differences Between Humans and Nonhumans Are Quantitative, Not Qualitative
Steven Pinker
Groups of People May Differ Genetically in Their Average Talents and Temperaments
J. Craig Venter
The Genetic Basis of Human Behavior
Jerry Coyne
Marionettes on Genetic Strings
V. S. Ramachandran
Francis Crick’s Dangerous Idea
Rodney Brooks
Being Alone in the Universe
Scott D. Sampson
Life as an Agent of Energy Dispersal
Keith Devlin
We Are Entirely Alone
Martin Rees
Science May Be Running Out of Control
Frank J. Tipler
Why I Hope the Standard Model Is Wrong About Why There Is More Matter Than Antimatter
Jeremy Bernstein
The Idea That We Understand Plutonium
W. Daniel Hillis
The Idea That We Should All Share Our Most Dangerous Ideas
Daniel Gilbert
The Idea That Ideas Can Be Dangerous
Paul C. W. Davies
The Fight Against Global Warming Is Lost
Gregory Benford
Think Outside the Kyoto Box
Oliver Morton
Our Planet Is Not in Peril
April Gornik
The Effect of Art Can’t Be Controlled or Anticipated
Denis Dutton
A “Grand Narrative”
Marc D. Hauser
Our Universal Moral Grammar’s Immunity to Religion
Nicholas Humphrey
Bertrand Russell’s Dangerous Idea
David Pizarro
Hodgepodge Morality
Robert Shapiro
We Will Understand the Origin of Life Within the Next Five Years
George Dyson
Understanding Molecular Biology Without Discovering the Origins of Life
Marco Iacoboni
The Problem with Super Mirrors
Daniel Goleman
Cyberdisinhibition
Alun Anderson
Brains Cannot Become Minds Without Bodies
David Gelernter
What Are People Well Informed About in the Information Age?
Kevin Kelly
More Anonymity Is Good
Paul W. Ewald
A New Golden Age of Medicine
Samuel Barondes
Using Medications to Change Personality
Helen Fisher
Drugs May Change the Patterns of Human Love
David G. Myers
A Marriage Option for All
Diane F. Halpern
Choosing the Sex of One’s Child
Seth Lloyd
The Idea of Ideas
Karl Sabbagh
The Human Brain Will Never Understand the Universe
Lawrence M. Krauss
The World May Be Fundamentally Inexplicable
Leonard Susskind
The “Landscape”
Lee Smolin
Seeing Darwin in the Light of Einstein; Seeing Einstein in the Light of Darwin
Brian Greene
The Multiverse
Carlo Rovelli
What Twentieth-Century Physics Says About the World Might Be True
Paul Steinhardt
It’s a Matter of Time
Piet Hut
A Radical Re-evaluation of the Character of Time
Marcelo Gleiser
It’s OK Not to Know Everything
Steven Strogatz
The End of Insight
Terrence Sejnowski
When Will the Internet Become Aware of Itself?
Neil Gershenfeld
Democratizing Access to the Means of Invention
Rudy Rucker
Mind Is a Universally Distributed Quality
Thomas Metzinger
The Forbidden Fruit Intuition
Philip W. Anderson
The Posterior Probability of Any Particular God Is Pretty Small
Sam Harris
Science Must Destroy Religion
John Allen Paulos
The Self Is a Conceptual Chimera
Carolyn C. Porco
The Greatest Story Ever Told
Jordan Pollack
Science as Just Another Religion
Robert R. Provine
This Is All There Is
Stephen M. Kosslyn
A Science of the Divine?
Jesse Bering
Science Will Never Silence God
Scott Atran
Religion Is the Hope That Is Missing in Science
Todd E. Feinberg
Myths and Fairy Tales Are Not True
David Lykken
Parental Licensure
Judith Rich Harris
Zero Parental Influence
John Gottman
The Focus on Emotional Intelligence
Alison Gopnik
A Cacophony of “Controversy”
Stewart Brand
Applied History
Jared Diamond
Tribal Peoples Often Damage Their Environments and Make War
Charles Seife
Nothing
Susan Blackmore
Everything Is Pointless
Daniel C. Dennett
There Aren’t Enough Minds to House the Population Explosion of Memes
Randolph M. Nesse
Unspeakable Ideas
Kai Krause
Anty Gravity: Chaos Theory in an All-Too-Practical Sense
Rupert Sheldrake
Navigating by New Scientific Principles
Simon Baron-Cohen
A Political System Based on Empathy
Tor Nørretranders
Social Relativity
Gregory Cochran
There Is Something New Under the Sun—Us
Donald D. Hoffman
A Spoon Is Like a Headache
Gerald Holton
Projection of the Longevity Curve
Ray Kurzweil
The Near-Term Inevitability of Radical Life Extension and Expansion
Freeman J. Dyson
The Domestication of Biotechnology
Philip Campbell
Public Engagement in Science and Technology
Joel Garreau
Suppose Faulkner Was Right?
Eric Fischl
What If the Unknown Becomes Known and Is Not Replaced with a New Unknown?
Michael Shermer
Where Goods Cross Frontiers, Armies Won’t
Matt Ridley
Government Is the Problem, Not the Solution
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Free Market
Arnold Trehub
Modern Science Is a Product of Biology
Roger C. Schank
No More Teacher’s Dirty Looks
Clifford Pickover
We Are All Virtual
Geoffrey Miller
Runaway Consumerism Explains the Fermi Paradox
Sherry Turkle
Simulation Versus Authenticity
Dan Sperber
Culture Is Natural
Timothy Taylor
The Human Brain Is a Cultural Artifact
Eric R. Kandel
Free Will Is Exercised Unconsciously
Clay Shirky
Free Will Is Going Away
Mahzarin R. Banaji
The Limits of Introspection
Barry C. Smith
What We Know May Not Change Us
Richard E. Nisbett
Telling More Than We Can Know
Andy Clark
The Quick-Thinking Zombies Inside Us
Philip G. Zimbardo
The Banality of Evil, the Banality of Heroism
Douglas Rushkoff
Open-Source Currency
David Bodanis
Is the West Already on a Downhill Course?
Juan Enriquez
Technology Can Untie the United States
Haim Harari
Democracy May Be on Its Way Out
James O’Donnell
Marx Was Right: The State Will Evaporate
Howard Gardner
Following Sisyphus
Ernst Pöppel
How Can I Trust, in the Face of So Many Unknowables?
Leo M. Chalupa
A Twenty-Four-Hour Period of Absolute Solitude
AFTERWORD
by Richard Dawkins
About the Author
Books By John Brockman
Copyright
About the Publisher