Summer Reading from the EDGE Archive

Summer Reading from the Archive A BOZO OF A BABOON A Conversation with Robert Sapolsky [June 2003] For the humans who would like to know what it takes to be an alpha man—if I were 25 and asked that question, I would certainly say competitive prowess is important—balls, translated into the more abstractly demanding social realm of humans. What's clear to me now at 45 is, screw the alpha male stuff, go for an alternative strategy. Go for the social affiliation, build relationships with females, don't waste your time trying to figure out how to be the most adept socially cagy male-male competitor. Amazingly enough, that's not what pays off in that system. Go for the affiliative stuff and bypass the male crap. I could not have said that when I was 25. Introduction While an undergraduate at Harvard, Robert Sapolsky asked himself: "Am I a neurobiologist? Am I a zoologist?" He has spent the past 25 years reconciling his interest in being a lab scientist using "a very reductive approach to figure out how the brain works" with his work in figuring out primate physiology and social behavior in East Africa. These areas come together in his thesis that "moral development is very heavily built around...the frontal cortex." According to Sapolsky, this is "the part of the brain that keeps us from belching loudly during the wedding ceremony, or telling somebody exactly what we think of the meal they made, or being a serial murderer. It's the part of the brain that controls impulsivity, that accepts the postponement of gratification, that does constraint and anticipation, and that makes you work hard because you will get into an amazing nursing home one day if you just keep pushing hard enough. It's all about this very human realm of holding off for later." His ideas run counter to what he terms "a dogma of neural development...that by the time you're a couple of years old, you have your maximal number of neurons, and all of them are wired up and functioning." He maintains that "we make new neurons throughout life, and parts of the brain don't come fully online until later. And, amazingly, the last area to do so is the frontal cortex, not until around age 30 or so. It's the last part of the brain to develop, and thus it's the part whose development is most subject to experience, environment, reinforcement, and the social world around you. That is incredibly interesting." So what does this have to do with "a wonderful guy I named Benjamin. A total bozo of a baboon"? Read on... —JB [ [Read...]( ] --------------------------------------------------------------- THE CLOCK OF THE LONG NOW A Conversation with Stewart Brand [November 1998] In a sense, what we're doing with the clock is even more for time than what the photograph of the Earth did for space. Like understanding the earthly environment as one whole thing—we're trying to understand a period of time reaching 10,000 years into the past and 10,000 years into the future as one containable thought. Introduction When Danny Hillis first started talking about his 10,000-year clock, many of his friends worried that he was going through some kind of mid-life crisis. I was one of them. But eventually we all started listening. A group of Danny's friends, led by Stewart Brand, got together and created "The Long Now Foundation" to build the clock, and also to begin to address the bigger issue involved: how to get people to think in a longer term, how to stretch out their sense of time. It's fitting that Stewart Brand got behind Danny's project. When I met him in 1965, he was sporting a button on which was printed: "America Needs Indians." His next conceptual piece was his 1968 campaign for a picture of "The Whole Earth," which led, in no small part, to the creation of the ecology movement. In 1983 he urged me to get involved with something called "online conferencing." This led to "The WELL," (the Whole Earth "Lectronic Link"), a precursor of the radical changes that our use of the Internet is bringing to human communications. Stewart is the king of initially obscure, ultimately compelling conceptual art. Call it reality. A couple of years ago he was featured on the cover of The Los Angeles Times Magazine: "Always two steps ahead of others....[he] is the least recognized, most influential thinker in America." No question about it. —JB [ [Read...]( ] [EDGE.ORG]( Copyright (c) 2021 by Edge Foundation, Inc., 260 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10001. All Rights Reserved. Want to change how you receive these emails? You can [update your preferences]( or [unsubscribe from this list](