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A review by kevin_shepherd
Life: The Leading Edge of Evolutionary Biology, Genetics, Anthropology, and Environmental Science by John Brockman
4.0
The Reality Club
For fifteen years (1981 - 1996) a select group of intellectuals, most from New York City, met regularly and informally to discuss a wide variety of philosophical and scientific topics…
"…to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” -James Lee Byars
In 1997 The Reality Club marshaled its assets and became The Edge Foundation, a brain pool of heavy hitters now publicly accessible at edge.org
Life is the fifth book in the “Best of Edge” series (the others being Mind, Culture, Thinking, and The Universe). This is a collection of essays, interviews, lectures, and transcribed discussions from individuals who are trailblazers in their respective fields.
Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist, Oxford), David Haig (evolutionary biologist and geneticist, Harvard), Robert Trivers (evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, Rutgers), Ernst Mayr (evolutionary biologist and taxonomist, Humboldt University), Steve Jones (geneticist, University College London), E.O. Wilson (biologist, naturalist, ecologist, entomologist, and founder of sociobiology, Harvard), Freeman Dyson (theoretical physicist, Princeton), and Drew Endy (bioengineer, Stanford) are but a few of the names on the long list of prestigious contributors.
Topics, eighteen in all, include Evolvability, Genomic Imprinting, Bio-Computation, Aesthetic Evolution, and Neanderthal Genomics—plus some really weird sh*t that I’ll let you discover on your own.
As much as I enjoyed this, I find it a wee bit arduous to critique collections of this nature. There’s just a LOT of interesting pieces here that I want to comment on (the juxtaposition of Richard Dawkins’ genotype with Robert Trivers’ phenotype alone would fill a small notebook!).
The only peccadillo I have is that I’m not a huge fan of transcribed round table discussions (see Life: What a Concept! with Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George M. Church, Seth Lloyd, Robert Shapiro, et al). Unless I’m intimately familiar with the personalities on hand (see The Four Horsemen) I get a little disoriented.
Four stars.
For fifteen years (1981 - 1996) a select group of intellectuals, most from New York City, met regularly and informally to discuss a wide variety of philosophical and scientific topics…
"…to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” -James Lee Byars
In 1997 The Reality Club marshaled its assets and became The Edge Foundation, a brain pool of heavy hitters now publicly accessible at edge.org
Life is the fifth book in the “Best of Edge” series (the others being Mind, Culture, Thinking, and The Universe). This is a collection of essays, interviews, lectures, and transcribed discussions from individuals who are trailblazers in their respective fields.
Richard Dawkins (evolutionary biologist, Oxford), David Haig (evolutionary biologist and geneticist, Harvard), Robert Trivers (evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist, Rutgers), Ernst Mayr (evolutionary biologist and taxonomist, Humboldt University), Steve Jones (geneticist, University College London), E.O. Wilson (biologist, naturalist, ecologist, entomologist, and founder of sociobiology, Harvard), Freeman Dyson (theoretical physicist, Princeton), and Drew Endy (bioengineer, Stanford) are but a few of the names on the long list of prestigious contributors.
Topics, eighteen in all, include Evolvability, Genomic Imprinting, Bio-Computation, Aesthetic Evolution, and Neanderthal Genomics—plus some really weird sh*t that I’ll let you discover on your own.
As much as I enjoyed this, I find it a wee bit arduous to critique collections of this nature. There’s just a LOT of interesting pieces here that I want to comment on (the juxtaposition of Richard Dawkins’ genotype with Robert Trivers’ phenotype alone would fill a small notebook!).
The only peccadillo I have is that I’m not a huge fan of transcribed round table discussions (see Life: What a Concept! with Freeman Dyson, J. Craig Venter, George M. Church, Seth Lloyd, Robert Shapiro, et al). Unless I’m intimately familiar with the personalities on hand (see The Four Horsemen) I get a little disoriented.
Four stars.