[Paleopsych] Edge Annual Question 2001: What Questions Have Disappeared?

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Edge Annual Question 2001: What Questions Have Disappeared?

For its fourth anniversary edition--"The World Question Center 2001"--Edge 
has reached out to a wide group of individuals distinguished by their 
significant achievements and asked them to respond to the following 
question:  "What Questions Have Disappeared?"  At publication, 83 
responses (34,000 words plus) have been posted. Additional responses are 
expected in the coming weeks and will be posted on Edge as they are 
received.  Happy New Year!  John Brockman Publisher & Editor 
[Simultaneously published in German by Frankfurter Allgemeine 
Zeitung--Frank Schirrmacher, Publisher.] Join the Edge public forum at


New Minds Meet Online to Offer New Perspectives on Old Questions January 
9, 2001 By THE NEW YORK TIMES (free registration required)  Once a year, 
John Brockman of New York, a writer and literary agent who represents many 
scientists, poses a question in his online journal, The Edge, and invites 
the thousand or so people on his mailing list to answer it.  At the end of 
1998, for example, he asked readers to name the most important invention 
in 2,000 years; the question generated 117 responses as diverse as hay and 
birth control pills. This year, Mr. Brockman offered a question about 
questions: "What questions have disappeared, and why?"  Here are edited 
excerpts from some of the answers, to be posted today at www.edge.org.....


New "Welche Fragen sind verschwunden?"  Die Sphinx in der New Economy: 
Eine Umfrage unter f½hrenden Wissenschaftlern NEW YORK, 8. January Auch 
die Zukunft kommt nicht ohne Traditionen aus. Selbst eine mit Mlle. de 
Scud»ry zeitreisende Mme. de S»vign» m½œte sich nicht gar zu sehr wundern, 
wenn sie beim Netzsurfen auf ein Internetmagazin stieœe, das sich 
unerschrocken preziñs "Salon" nennt. Wo immer aber ein Salon zum 
Verweilen, Sinnieren und Brillieren lîdt, kann eine Preisfrage nicht weit 
sein.  Elektronisch funktioniert sie nicht viel anders als zu Zeiten der 
Aufklîrung und ihrer Debattierzirkel. In seinem Internetsalon 
(www.edge.org) verf½hrt der Verleger und Literaturagent John Brockman zum 
Anfang des Jahres gelehrte Koryphîen gern zu Antworten auf solche Fragen. 
Diesmal hat er den Ritus selbst thematisiert und fragt nach Fragen, die 
keiner mehr stellt. An die hundert Wissenschaftler, Philosophen und 
Publizisten der sogenannten "Dritten Kultur" nehmen am Spiel teil, haben 
aber die Spielregeln nicht alle gleich verstanden. Warum eine Frage 
verschwindet, kann schlieœlich viele Gr½nde haben. Vielleicht ist sie 
beantwortet, vielleicht auch nicht zu beantworten, was freilich in der 
Regel den intellektuellen Spieleifer um so heftiger stimuliert, vielleicht 
aber war die Frage auch von Anfang an nicht fragenswert......

Izumi Aizu ° Alun Anderson ° Philip W. Anderson ° Robert Aunger ° John 
Barrow ° Thomas A. Bass ° David Berreby ° Susan Blackmore ° Stewart Brand 
° Rodney A. Brooks ° David M. Buss ° Jason McCabe Calacanis ° William H. 
Calvin ° Andy Clark ° Ann Crittenden ° Paul Davies ° Richard Dawkins ° 
Stanislas Dehaene ° David Deutsch ° Keith Devlin ° Denis Dutton ° George 
B. Dyson ° J. Doyne Farmer ° Kenneth Ford ° Howard Gardner ° Joel Garreau 
° David Gelernter ° Brian Goodwin ° David Haig ° Judy Harris ° Marc D. 
Hauser ° Geoffrey Hinton ° John Horgan ° Verena Huber-Dyson ° Nicholas 
Humphrey ° Mark Hurst ° Piet Hut ° Raphael Kasper ° Kevin Kelly ° Lance 
Knobel ° Marek Kohn ° Stephen M. Kosslyn ° Kai Krause ° Lawrence M. Krauss 
° Leon Lederman ° Joseph Le Doux ° Pamela McCorduck ° Dan McNeill ° John 
H. McWhorter ° Geoffrey Miller ° David Myers ° Randolph M. Nesse ° Tor 
Norretranders ° Rafael E. Núñez ° James J. O'Donnell ° Jay Ogilvy ° Sylvia 
Paull ° John Allen Paulos ° Christopher Phillips ° Cliff Pickover ° Steven 
Pinker ° Jordan Pollack ° David G. Post ° Rick Potts ° Robert Provine ° 
Eduardo Punset ° Tracy Quan ° Martin Rees ° Howard Rheingold ° Douglas 
Rushkoff ° sKarl Sabbagh ° Roger Schank ° Stephen H. Schneider ° Al Seckel 
° Terrence J. Sejnowski ° Michael Shermer ° Lee Smolin ° Dan Sperber ° Tom 
Standage ° Timothy Taylor ° Joseph Traub ° Colin Tudge ° Sherry Turkle ° 
Henry Warwick ° Margaret Wertheim ° Dave Winer ° Naomi Wolf ° Milford 
Wolpoff ° Eberhard Zangger ° Carl Zimmer °

Izumi Aizu "Who should make the truly global decisions, and how?"  As we 
all use the global medium, Internet, people who are running it behind is 
making the decisions on how to run this medium. So far so good. But not 
anymore.  With all the ICANN process, commercialization of Domain Name 
registration, expanding the new gTLDs, one can ask: who are entitled to 
make these decisions, and how come they can decide that way?  Despite the 
growing digital divide, the number of people who use the Net is still 
exploding, even in the developing side of the world. What is fair, what is 
democratic, what kind of principles can we all agree on this single global 
complex system, from all corners of the world is my question of the year 
to come.  IZUMI AIZU, a researcher and promoter of the Net in Asia since 
mid 80s, is principal, Asia Network Research and Senior Research Fellow at 
GLOCOM (Center for Global Communications), at the International University 
of Japan.

Alun Anderson "Why are humans smarter than other animals?"  Such a simple 
question. Many of you might think "Has that question really disappeared?" 
Some questions disappear for ever because they have been answered. Some 
questions go extinct because they were bad questions to begin with. But 
there are others that appear to vanish but then we find that they are back 
with us again in a slightly different guise. They are questions that are 
just too close to our hearts for us to let them die completely.  For 
millennia, human superiority was taken for granted. From the lowest forms 
of life up to humans and then on to the angels and God, all living thing 
were seen as arranged in the Great Chain of Being. Ascend the chain and 
perfection grows. It is a hierarchical philosophy that conveniently allows 
for the exploitation of dumber beasts--of other species or races--as a 
right by their superiors. We dispose of them as God disposes of us.  The 
idea of human superiority should have died when Darwin came on the scene. 
Unfortunately, the full implications of what he said have been difficult 
to take in: there is no Great Chain of Being, no higher and no lower. All 
creatures have adapted effectively to their own environments in their own 
way. Human "smartness" is just a particular survival strategy among many 
others, not the top of a long ladder.  It took a surprisingly long time 
for scientist to grasp this. For decades, comparative psychologists tried 
to work out the learning abilities of different species so that they could 
be arranged on a single scale. Animal equivalents of intelligence tests 
were used and people seriously asked whether fish were smarter than birds. 
It took the new science of ethology, created by Nobel-prize winners Konrad 
Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch, to show that each species had 
the abilities it needed for its own lifestyle and they could not be not 
arranged on a universal scale. Human smartness is no smarter than anyone 
else's smartness. The question should have died for good.  Artificial 
intelligence researchers came along later but they too could not easily 
part from medieval thinking. The most important problems to tackle were 
agreed to be those that represented our "highest" abilities. Solve them 
and everything else would be easy. As a result, we have ended up with 
computer programs that can play chess as well as a grandmaster. But 
unfortunately we have none that can make a robot walk as well as a 2-year 
old, yet alone run like a cat. The really hard problems turn out to be 
those that we share with "lower" animals.  Strangley enough, even 
evolutionary biologists still get caught up with the notion that humans 
stand at the apex of existence. There are endless books from evolutionary 
biologists speculating on the reasons why humans evolved such wonderful 
big brains, but a complete absence of those which ask if a big brains is a 
really useful organ to have. The evidence is far from persuasive. If you 
look at a wide range of organisms, those with bigger brains are generally 
no more successful than those with smaller brains--hey go extinct just as 
fast.  Of course, it would be really nice to sample a large range of 
different planets where life is to be found and see if big-brained 
creatures do better over really long time scales (the Earth is quite a 
young place). Unfortunately, we cannot yet do that, although the fact that 
we have never been contacted by any intelligent life from older parts of 
the Universe suggests that it usually comes to a bad end.  Still, as we 
are humans it's just so hard not to be seduced by the question "What makes 
us so special" which is just the same as the question above but in a 
different form. When you switch on a kitchen light and see a cockroach 
scuttle for safety you can't help seeing it as a lower form of life. 
Unfortunately, there are a lot more of them than there are of us and they 
have been around far, far longer. Cockroach philosophers doubtless 
entertain their six-legged friends by asking "What makes us so special". 
ALUN ANDERSON is Editor-in-Chief of New Scientist.

Philip W. Anderson "A question no longer: what is the Theory of Every 
Thing?"  My colleagues in the fashionable fields of string theory and 
quantum gravity advertise themselves as searching desperately for the 
'Theory of Everything", while their experimental colleagues are gravid 
with the "God Particle", the marvelous Higgson which is the somewhat 
misattributed source of all mass. (They are also after an understanding of 
the earliest few microseconds of the Big Bang.) As Bill Clinton might 
remark, it depends on what the meaning of "everything" is. To these 
savants, "everything" means a list of some two dozen numbers which are the 
parameters of the Standard Model. This is a set of equations which already 
exists and does describe very well what you and I would be willing to 
settle for as "everything". This is why, following Bob Laughlin, I make 
the distinction between "everything" and "every thing". Every thing that 
you and I have encountered in our real lives, or are likely to interact 
with in the future, is no longer outside of the realm of a physics which 
is transparent to us: relativity, special and general; electromagnetism; 
the quantum theory of ordinary, usually condensed, matter; and, for a few 
remote phenomena, hopefully rare here on earth, our almost equally 
cut-and-dried understanding of nuclear physics. [Two parenthetic remarks: 
1) I don't mention statistical mechanics only because it is a powerful 
technique, not a body of facts; 2) our colleagues have done only a sloppy 
job so far of deriving nuclear physics from the Standard Model, but no one 
really doubts that they can.] I am not arguing that the search for the 
meaning of those two dozen parameters isn't exciting, interesting, and 
worthwhile: yes, it's not boring to wonder why the electron is so much 
lighter than the proton, or why the proton is stable at least for another 
35 powers of ten years, or whether quintessence exists. But learning why 
can have no real effect on our lives, spiritually inspiring as it would 
indeed be, even to a hardened old atheist like myself.  When I was 
learning physics, half a century ago, the motivation for much of what was 
being done was still "is quantum theory really right?" Not just QED, 
though the solution of that was important, but there were still great 
mysteries in the behavior of ordinary matter--like superconductivity, for 
instance. It was only some twenty years later that I woke up to the fact 
that the battle had been won, probably long before, and that my motivation 
was no longer to test the underlying equations and ideas, but to 
understand what is going on. Within the same few years , the molecular 
biology pioneers convinced us we needed no mysterious "life force" to 
bring all of life under the same umbrella. Revolutions in geology, in 
astrophysics, and the remarkable success of the Standard Model in sorting 
out the fundamental forces and fields, leave us in the enviable position I 
described above: given any problematic phenomenon, we know where to start, 
at least. And nothing uncovered in string theory or quantum gravity will 
make any difference to that starting point.  Is this Horgan's End of 
Science? Absolutely not. It's just that the most exciting frontier of 
science no longer lies at the somewhat sophomoric--or 
quasi-religious--level of the most "fundamental" questions of "what are we 
made of?" and the like; what needs to be asked is "how did all this 
delightful complexity arise from the stark simplicity of the fundamental 
theory?" We have the theory of every thing in any field of science you 
care to name, and that's about as far as it gets us. If you like, science 
is now almost universally at the "software" level; the fundamental 
physicists have given us all the hardware we need, but that doesn't solve 
the problem, in physics as in every other field. It's a different game, 
probably a much harder one in fact, as it has often been in the past; but 
the game is only begun.  PHILIP W. ANDERSON is a Nobel laureate physicist 
at Princeton and one of the leading theorists on superconductivity. He is 
the author of A Career in Theoretical Physics, and Economy as a Complex 
Evolving System.

Robert Aunger "Is the Central Dogma of biology inviolate?"  In 1957, a few 
years after he co-discovered the double helix, Francis Crick proposed a 
very famous hypothesis. It states that "once 'information' has passed into 
protein it cannot get out again. In more detail, the transfer of 
information from nucleic acid to nucleic acid, or from nucleic acid to 
protein may be possible, but transfer from protein to protein, or from 
protein to nucleic acid is impossible." After it had proven to form the 
foundation of molecular biology, he later called this hypothesis the 
"Central Dogma" of biology.  In the last years of the last millennium, 
Crick's dogma fell. The reason? Direct protein-to-protein information 
transfer was found to be possible in a class of proteins called "prions." 
With the aid of a catalyst, prions (short for "proteinaceous infectious 
particles") cause another molecule of the same class to adopt an 
infectious shape like their own simply through contact. Thus, prions are 
an important and only recently discovered mechanism for the inheritance of 
information through means other than DNA. Such an important discovery 
merited a recent Nobel Prize for Stanley Prusiner, who doggedly pursued 
the possibility of a rogue biological entity replicating without the 
assistance of genes against a back-drop of resistance and disbelief among 
most of his colleagues. Further testimony to the significance of prions 
comes from the current BSE crisis in Europe. Now that we know how they 
work, prions--and the diseases they cause--may begin popping up all over 
the place.  ROBERT AUNGER is an anthropologist studying cultural 
evolution, both through the now much-maligned method of fieldwork in 
nonwestern societies, and the application of theory adapted from 
evolutionary biology. He is at the Department of Biological Anthropology 
at the University of Cambridge, and the editor of Darwinizing Culture: The 
Status of Memetics as a Science.

John Barrow "How does a slide rule work?" My vanished question is:"'How 
does a slide rule work?"' Slide rules were once ubiquitous in labs, 
classrooms, and the pockets of engineers. They are now as common as 
dinosaurs; totally replaced by electronic calulators and computers. The 
interesting question to ponder is: what is it that in the future will do 
to computers what computers did to slide rules?  JOHN BARROW is a 
physicist at Cambridge University.. He is the author of The World Within 
the World, Pi in the Sky, Theories of Everything, The Origins of the 
Universe (Science Masters Series),The Left Hand of Creation, The Artful 
Universe, and Impossibility: The Limits of Science and the Science of 
Limits.

Thomas A. Bass "The questions that have disappeared are eschatological." 
The twentieth century will be remembered as one of the most violent in 
history. There were two world wars, numerous genocides, and millions of 
murders conducted in the name of progress. Driving this violence was the 
urge to find truth or purity. The violence was lit by the refining fire of 
belief. The redemptive ideal was called national socialism, communism, 
stalinism, maoism.  Today, these gods have feet of clay, and we mock their 
pretensions. Global consumerism is the new world order, but global 
consumerism is not a god. Market capitalism does not ask questions about 
transcendent meaning. Western democracies, nodding into the sleep of 
reason, have grown numb with self-congratulation about having won the hot, 
the cold, and, now, the star wars.  The questions that have disappeared 
are eschatological. But they have not really disappeared. They are a 
chtonic force, waiting underground, searching for a new language in which 
to express themselves. This observation sprang to mind while I was 
standing in the Place de la Revolution, now known as the Place de la 
Concorde, awaiting the arrival of the third millennium. During the French 
revolution this square was so soaked in blood that oxen refused to cross 
it. On New Year's Eve it was soaked in rain and champagne, as we counted 
down to a display of fireworks that never materialized. Instead, there was 
a Ferris wheel, lit alternately in mauve and chartreuse, and some lasers 
illuminating the Luxor obelisk which today is the square's secular center. 
No one staring at it knew how to read the hieroglyphics carved on its 
face, but this obelisk was once a transcendent object, infused with 
meaning, and so, too, was the guillotine that formerly stood in its place. 
THOMAS A. BASS, who currently lives in Paris, is the author of The 
Eudaemonic Pie, Vietnamerica, The Predictors, and other books.

David Berreby ''How does [fill in the blank] in human affairs relate to 
the great central theory?'' I do not, of course, mean any particular Great 
Central Theory. I am referring to the once-pervasive habit of relating 
everything that had human scale--Chinese history, the Odyssey, your 
mother's fear of heights--to an all-explaining principle. This principle 
was set forth in a short shelf of classic works and then worked to a fine 
filigree by close-minded people masquerading as open-minded people. The 
precise Great Central Theory might be, as it was in my childhood milieu, 
the theories of Freud. It might be Marx. It might be Levi-Strauss or, more 
recently, Foucault. At the turn of the last century, there was a Darwinist 
version going, promulgated by Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer and their 
ilk.  These monolithic growths had begun, I suppose, as the answers to 
specific questions, but then they metastasized; their adherents would 
expect the great central theory to answer any question. Commitment to a 
Great Central Theory thus became more a religious act than an intellectual 
one. And, as with all religions, the worldview of the devout crept into 
popular culture. (When I was in high school we'd say So-and-So was really 
anal about his locker or that What's-his-name's parents were really 
bourgeois.) For decades, this was what intellectual life appeared to be: 
Commit to an overarching explanation, relate it to everything you 
experienced, defend it against infidels. Die disillusioned, or, worse, die 
smug.  So why has this sort of question vanished? My guess is that, 
broadly speaking, it was a product of the Manichean worldview of the last 
century. Depression, dictators, war, genocide, nuclear terror--all of 
these lend themselves to a Yes-or-No, With-Us-or-With-Them, Federation vs. 
Klingons mindset. We were, to put it simply, all a little paranoid. And 
paranoids love a Great Key: Use this and see the single underlying cause 
for what seems to be unrelated and random!  Nowadays the world, though no 
less dangerous, seems to demand attention to the seperateness of things, 
the distinctiveness of questions. ''Theories of everything'' are terms 
physicists use to explain their near-theological concerns, but at the 
human scale most people care about, where we ask questions like ''why 
can't we dump the Electoral College?'' or ''How come Mom likes my sister 
better?'', the Great Central Theory question has vanished with the 
black-or-white arrangement of the human world.  What's next?  Three 
possibilities.  One, some new Great Central Theory slouches in; some of 
the Darwinians think they've got the candidate, and they certainly evince 
signs of quasi-religious commitment. (For example, as a Freudian would say 
you doubted Freud because of your neuroses, I have heard Darwinians say I 
doubted their theories because of an evolved predisposition not to believe 
the truth. I call this quasi-religious because this move makes the theory 
impregnable to evidence or new ideas.)  Two, the notion that overarching 
theory is impossible becomes, itself, a new dogma. I lean toward this 
prejudice myself but I recognize its dangers. An intellectual life that 
was all boutiques could be, in its way, as stultifying as a giant 
one-product factory.  Three, we learn from the mistakes of the last two 
centuries and insist that our answers always match our questions, and that 
the distinction between theory and religious belief be maintained.  DAVID 
BERREBY'S writing about science and culture has appeared in The New York 
Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, The Sciences and many other 
publications.

Susan Blackmore "Do we survive death?" This question was long considered 
metaphysical, briefly became a scientific question, and has now 
disappeared again. Victorian intellectuals such as Frederic Myers, Henry 
Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney founded the Society for Psychical Research in 
1882 partly because they realised that the dramatic claims of spiritualist 
mediums could be empirically tested. They hoped to prove "survival" and 
thus overturn the growing materialism of the day. Some, like Faraday, 
convinced themselves by experiment that the claims were false, and lost 
interest. Others, like Myers, devoted their entire lives to ultimately 
inconclusive research. The Society continues to this day, but survival 
research has all but ceased. I suggest that no one asks the question any 
more because the answer seems too obvious. To most scientists it is 
obviously "No", while to most New Agers and religious people it is 
obviously "Yes". But perhaps we should. The answer may be obvious (it's 
"No"--I'm an unreligious scientist) but its implications for living our 
lives and dealing compassionately with other people are profound. SUSAN 
BLACKMORE is a psychologist and ex-parapsychologist, who--when she found 
no evidence of psychic phenomena--turned her attention to why people 
believe in them. She is author of several skeptical books on the 
paranormal and, more recently, The Meme Machine.

Stewart Brand "How will Americans handle a surplus of leisure?"  "Can the 
threat of recombinant DNA possibly be contained?"  "How will Americans 
handle a surplus of leisure?"  That was a brow-furrower in the late '50s 
and early '60s for social observers and forecasters. Whole books addressed 
the problem, most of them opining that Americans would have to become very 
interested in the arts. Turned out the problem never got around to 
existing, and the same kind of people are worrying now about how Americans 
will survive the stress of endless multi-tasking.  "Can the threat of 
recombinant DNA possibly be contained?"  That was the brand new bogey of 
the mid-'70s. At a famous self regulating conference at Asilomar 
conference center in California, genetic researchers debated the question 
and imposed rules (but not "relinquishment") on the lab work. The question 
was answered: the threat was handily contained, and it was not as much of 
a threat as feared anyway. Most people retrospectively applaud the 
original caution. Similar fears and debate now accompany the introduction 
of Genetically Modified foods and organisms. Maybe it's the same question 
rephrased, and it will keep being rephrased as long as biotech is making 
news. Can the threat of frankenfoods possibly be contained? Can the threat 
of gene-modified children possibly be contained? Can the threat of 
bioweapons possibly be contained? Can the threat of human life extension 
possibly be contained?  It won't be a new question until it reaches 
reflexivity: "Are GM humans really human?"  STEWART BRAND is founder of 
the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well, cofounder of Global 
Business Network, cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation. He 
is the original editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, author of The Media 
Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT , How Buildings Learn, and The Clock of 
the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (MasterMinds Series).

Rodney A. Brooks "What is it that makes something alive?"  With the 
success of molecular biology explaining the mechanisms of life we have 
lost sight of the question one level up. We do not have any good answers 
at a more systems level of what it takes for something to be alive. We can 
list general necessities for a system to be alive, but we can not predict 
whether a given configuration of molecules will be alive or not. As 
evidence that we really do not understand what it takes for something to 
be alive, we have not been able to build machines that are alive. 
Everything else that we understand leads to machines that capitalize on 
that understanding--machines that fly, machines that run, machines that 
calculate, machines that make polymers, machines that communicate, 
machines that listen, machines that play games. We have not built any 
machines that live.  RODNEY A. BROOKS is director of the MIT Artificial 
Intelligence Laboratory and Chairman of iRobot Corporation. He builds 
robots.

David M. Buss "Do Men and Women Differ Psychologically?" Psychology for 
much of the 20th century was dominated by the view that men and women were 
psychologically identical. So pervasive was this assumption that research 
articles in psychology journals prior to the 1970's rarely bothered to 
report the sex of their study participants. Women and men were understood 
to be interchangeable. Findings for one sex were presumed to be applicable 
to the other. Once the American Psychological Association required sex of 
participants to be reported in published experiments, controversy erupted 
over whether men and women were psychologically different. The past three 
decades of empirical research has resolved this issue, at least in 
delimited domains. Although women and men show great psychological 
similarity, they also differ in profound ways. They diverge in the sexual 
desires they express and mating strategies they pursue. They differ in the 
time they allocate to friends and relentlessness with which they pursue 
status. They display distinct abilities in reading other's minds, feeling 
other's feelings, and responding emotionally to specific traumas in their 
lives. Men opt for a wider range of risky activities, are more prone to 
violence against others, make sharper in-group versus out-group 
distinctions, and commit the vast majority of homicides worldwide. The 
question 'Do men and women differ psychologically?' has been replaced with 
more interesting questions. In what ways do these sex differences create 
conflict between men and women? Have the selection pressures that created 
these differences vanished in the modern world? How can societies premised 
on equality grapple with the profound psychological divergences of the 
sexes? DAVID M. BUSS is Professor of Psychology at the University of 
Texas, Austin, and author of several books, most recently The Dangerous 
Passion: Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Evolutionary Psychology: 
The New Science of the Mind , and The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of 
Human Mating.

Jason McCabe Calacanis "How long before all nations obey the basic 
principles of the human rights as outlined in the Universal Declaration of 
Human Rights on December 10th, 1948?"  The distinctive Amnesty 
International arched sticker, with a burning candle surrounded by a swoosh 
of barbed wire, seemed to adorn every college dorm-room door, beat up 
Honda Accord, and office bulletin board when I started college in the late 
'80s at Fordham University. Human rights was the "in" cause. So, we all 
joined Amnesty and watched our heroes including Bruce Springsteen, Sting, 
and Peter Gabriel sing on the "Human Rights Now" tour (brought to you, of 
course, by Reebok).  As quickly as it took center stage, however, human 
rights seemed to fall off the map. Somewhere in the mid-90s, something 
stole our fire and free time, perhaps it was the gold rush years of the 
Internet or the end of the Cold War. The wild spread of entrepreneurship 
and capitalism may have carried some democracy along with it. Yet just 
because people are starting companies and economic markets are opening up 
doesn't mean that there are fewer tortures, rapes, and murders for 
political beliefs. (These kinds of false perceptions may stem from giving 
places like China "Most Favored Nation" status).  Youth inspired by 
artists created the foundation of Amnesty's success in the '80s, so maybe 
a vacuum of activist artists is to blame for human rights disappearing 
from the collective consciousness. Would a homophobic, misogynistic, and 
violent artist like Eminem ever take a stand for anyone other than 
himself? Could anyone take him seriously if he did? Britney Spears' fans 
might not have a problem with her dressing in a thong at the MTV Music 
Awards but how comfortable would they be if she addressed the issue of the 
rape, kidnapping, and torture of young women in Sierra Leone?  Of course, 
you don't have to look around the world to find human-rights abuses. 
Rodney King and Abner Louima taught us that human rights is an important 
and pressing issue right in our backyard. (Because of these examples, some 
narrow-minded individuals may see is as only a race specific issue.) One 
bright spot in all of this, however, is that the technology that was 
supposed to create a Big Brother state, like video cameras, is now being 
used to police Big Brother himself. (Check out witness.org and send them a 
check--or a video camera--if you have the means.)  Eleanor Roosevelt 
considered her fight to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 
her greatest accomplishment. How ashamed would she be that 50 years has 
elapsed since her battle, and now, no one seems to care.  JASON McCABE 
CALACANIS is Editor and Publisher of Silicon Alley Daily; The Digital 
Coast Weekly, Silicon Alley Reporter and Chairman CEO, Rising Tide 
Studios.

William H. Calvin "Where did the moon go?"  When, every few years, you see 
a bite taken out of the sun or moon, you ought to remember just how 
frightening that question used to be. It became clockwork when the right 
viewpoint was eventually discovered by science (imagining yourself high 
above the north pole, looking at the shadows cast by the earth and the 
moon). But there was an intermediate stage of empirical knowledge, when 
the shaman discovered that the sixth full moon after a prior eclipse had a 
two-third's chance of being associated with another eclipse. And so when 
the shaman told people to pray hard the night before, he was soon seen as 
being on speaking terms with whomever ran the heavens. This helped convert 
part-time shamen into full-time priests, supported by the community. This 
can be seen as the entry-level job for philosophers and scientists, who 
prize the discoveries they can pass on to the next generation, allowing us 
to see farther, always opening up new questions while retiring old ones. 
It's like climbing a mountain that keeps providing an even better 
viewpoint.  WILLIAM H. CALVIN is a neurobiologist at the University of 
Washington, who writes about brains, evolution, and climate. His recent 
books are The Cerebral Code, How Brains Think, and (with the linguist 
Derek Bickerton) Lingua ex Machina.

Andy Clark  "Why Is There Something Instead of Nothing?" This is a 
question that the ancients asked, and one that crops up a few times in 
20th century philosophical discussions. When it is mentioned, it is 
usually as an example of a problem that looks to be both deep and in 
principle insoluble. Unsurprisingly, then, it seems to have fallen by the 
scientific, cosmological and philosophical waysides. But sometimes I 
wonder whether it really is insoluble (or senseless), or whether science 
may one day surprise us by finding an answer. ANDY CLARK is Professor of 
Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, UK. He was 
previously Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at 
Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Microcognition: 
Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing, 
Associative Engines, and Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World 
Together Again.

Ann Crittenden "Is human nature innately good or evil?" Another question 
that has fallen into the dustbin of history is this: Is human nature 
innately good or evil? This became a gripping topic in the late 17th 
century, as Enlightment thinkers began to challenge the Christian 
assumption that man was born a fallen creature. It was a great debate 
while it lasted: original sin vs. tabla rasa and the perfectability of 
man; Edmund Burke vs. Tom Paine; Dostoyevsky vs. the Russian reformers. 
But Darwin and Freud undermined the foundations of both sides, by 
discrediting the very possibility of discussing human nature in moral or 
teleological terms. Now the debate has been recast as "nature vs. nurture" 
and in secular scientific circles at least, man is the higher primate -- a 
beast with distinctly mixed potential.  ANN CRITTENDEN is an award-winning 
journalist and author. She was a reporter for The New York Times from 1975 
to 1983, where her work on a broad range of economic issues was nominated 
for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of several books inncluding The 
Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the 
Least Valued. Her articles have appeared in numerous magazines, including 
The Nation, Foreign Affairs, McCall's, Lear's, and Working Woman.

Paul Davies   "How fast is the Earth moving?" A hundred years ago, one of 
the most fundamental questions in physical science was: How fast is the 
Earth moving? Many experiments had been performed to measure the speed of 
the Earth through space as it orbits the sun, and as the solar system 
orbits the galaxy. The most famous was conducted in 1887 by Albert 
Michelson and Edward Morley using an optical interferometer. The result 
they obtained was... zero. Today, scientists regard the question of the 
Earth's speed through space as meaningless and misconceived, although many 
non-scientists still refer to the concept.  Why has the question 
disappeared? Einstein's theory of relativity, published in 1905, denied 
any absolute frame of rest in the universe; speed is meaningful only 
relative to other bodies or physical systems. Ironically, some decades 
later, it was discovered there is a special frame of reference in the 
universe defined by the cosmic microwave background radiation, the fading 
afterglow of the big bang. The Earth sweeps through this radiation at 
roughly 600 km per second (over a million miles per hour) in the direction 
of the constellation Leo. This is the closest that modern astronomy gets 
to the notion of an absolute cosmic velocity.  PAUL DAVIES is an 
internationally acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in 
South Australia. Professor Davies is the author of some twenty books, 
including Other Worlds, God and the New Physics, The Edge of Infinity, The 
Mind of God, The Cosmic Blueprint, Are We Alone? and About Time. He is the 
recipient of a Glaxo Science Writers' Fellowship, an Advance Australia 
Award and a Eureka prize for his contributions to Australian science, and 
in 1995 he won the prestigious Templeton Prize for his work on the deeper 
meaning of science.

Richard Dawkins   "As William Blake might have written to a coelacanth: 
Did he who made the haplochromids make thee?" Different people on the Edge 
list seem to have chosen to understand 'questions that have disappeared' 
in three very different senses:  1. Questions that were once popular but 
have now been answered  2. Questions that should never have been asked in 
the first place  3. Questions that have disappeared although they never 
received a satisfactory answer.  This third meaning is, I suspect, the one 
intended by the organizer of the forum. It is the most interesting of the 
three since it suggests real science that we should now be doing, rather 
than just raking over the historical coals.  The three meanings are too 
disparate to bring together easily, but I'll try. The popular question 
'Has there been enough time for evolution to take place?' can now 
confidently be answered in the affirmative. It should never have been put 
in the first place since, self-evidently, we are here. But what is more 
interesting is that the real question that faces us is almost the exact 
opposite. Why is evolution so slow, given that natural selection is so 
powerful? Far from there being too little time for evolution to play with, 
there seems to be too much.  Ledyard Stebbins did a theoretical 
calculation about an extremely weak selection pressure, acting on a 
population of mouse-sized animals to favor the largest individuals. His 
hypothetical selection pressure was so weak as to be below the threshold 
of detectability in field sampling studies. Yet the calculated time to 
evolve elephant-sized descendants from mouse-sized ancestors was only a 
few tens of thousands of generations: too short to be detected under most 
circumstances in the fossil record. To exaggerate somewhat, evolution 
could be yo-yo-ing from mouse to elephant, and back again, so fast that 
the changes could seem instantaneous in the fossil record.  Worse, 
Stebbins's calculation assumed an exceedingly weak selection pressure. The 
real selection pressures measured in the field by Ford and his colleagues 
on lepidoptera and snails, by Endler and his colleagues on guppies, and by 
the Grants and their colleagues on the Galapagos finches, are orders of 
magnitude stronger. If we fed into the Stebbins calculation a selection 
pressure as strong as the Grants have measured in the field, it is 
positively worrying to contemplate how fast evolution could go. The same 
conclusion is indirectly suggested by domestic breeding. We have gone from 
wolf to Yorkshire terrier in a few centuries, and could presumably go back 
to something like a wolf in as short a time.  It is indeed the case that 
evolution on the Galapagos archipelago has been pretty fast, though still 
nothing like as fast as the measured selection pressures might project. 
The islands have been in existence for five million years at the outside, 
and the whole of their famous endemic fauna has evolved during that time. 
But even the Galapagos islands are old compared to Lake Victoria. In the 
less than one million years of the lake's brief lifetime, more than 170 
species of the genus Haplochromis alone have evolved.  Yet the Coelacanth 
Latimeria, and the three genera of lungfish, have scarcely changed in 
hundreds of millions of years. Surviving Lingula ('lamp shells') are 
classified in the same genus as their ancestors of 400 million years ago, 
and could conceivably interbreed with them if introduced through a time 
machine. The question that still faces us is this. How can evolution be 
both so fast and so leadenly slow? How can there be so much variance in 
rates of evolution? Is stasis just due to stabilizing selection and lack 
of directional selection? Or is there something remarkably special going 
on in the (non) evolution of living fossils? As William Blake might have 
written to a coelacanth: Did he who made the haplochromids make thee? 
RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi 
Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of 
New College; author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype , The 
Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (ScienceMasters Series), Climbing 
Mount Improbable, and Unweaving the Rainbow.

Stanislas Dehaene  "The definition of life and consciousness?"  Some 
scientific questions cannot be resolved, but rather are dissolved, and 
vanish once we begin to better understand their terms.  This is often the 
case for "definitional questions". For instance, what is the definition of 
life? Can we trace a sharp boundary between what is living and what is not 
living? Is a virus living? Is the entire earth a living organism? It seems 
that our brain predisposes us to ask questions that require a yes or no 
answer. Moreover, as scientists, we'd like to keep our mental categories 
straight and, therefore, we would like to have neat and tidy definitions 
of the terms we use. However, especially in the biological sciences, the 
objects of reality do not conform nicely to our categorical expectations. 
As we delve into research, we begin to realize that what we naively 
conceived of as a essential category is, in fact, a cluster of loosely 
bound properties that each need to be considered in turn (in the case of 
life: metabolism, reproduction, autonomy, homeostasy, etc..). Thus, what 
was initially considered as a simple question, requiring a straightforward 
answer, becomes a complex issue or even a whole domain of research. We 
begin to realize that there is no single answer, but many different 
answers depending on how one frames the terms of the question. And 
eventually, the question is simply dropped. It is not longer relevant.  I 
strongly suspect that one of today's hottest scientific question,s the 
definition of consciousness, is of this kind. Some scientists seem to 
believe that what we call consciousness is an essence of reality, a single 
coherent phenomenon that can be reduced to a single level such as a 
quantum property of microtubules. Another possibility, however, that 
consciousness is a cluster of properties that, most of the time, cohere 
together in awake adult humans. A minimal list probably includes the 
ability to attend to sensory inputs or internal thoughts, to make them 
available broadly to multiple cerebral systems, to store them in working 
memory and in episodic memory, to manipulate them mentally, to act 
intentionally based on them, and in particular to report them verbally. As 
we explore the issue empirically, we begin to find many situations (such 
as visual masking or specific brain lesions) in which those properties 
break down. The neat question "what is consciousness" dissolves into a 
myriad of more precise and more fruitful research avenues.  Any biological 
theory of consciousness, which assumes that consciousness has evolved, 
implies that "having consciousness" is not an all-or-none property. The 
biological substrates of consciousness in human adults are probably also 
present, but only in partial form, in other species, in young children or 
brain-lesioned patients. It is therefore a partially arbitrary question 
whether we want to extend the use of the term "consciousness" to them. For 
instance, several mammals, and even very young human children, show 
intentional behavior, partially reportable mental states, some working 
memory ability--but perhaps no theory of mind, and more "encapsulated" 
mental processes that cannot be reported verbally or even non-verbally. Do 
they have consciousness, then? My bet is that once a detailed cognitive 
and neural theory of the various aspects of consciousness is available, 
the vacuity of this question will become obvious.  STANISLAS DEHAENE, 
researcher at the Institut National de la Santé, studies cognitive 
neuropsychology of language and number processing in the human brain; 
author of The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge Is Embedded In Our 
Brains.

David Deutsch  "And why?"  "What Questions Have Disappeared...And Why?" 
Funny you should ask that. "And why? " could itself be the most important 
question that has disappeared from many fields.  "And why?": in other 
words, "what is the explanation for what we see happening?" "What is it in 
reality that brings about the outcome that we predict?" Whenever we fail 
to take that question seriously enough, we are blinded to gaps in our 
favoured explanation. And so, when we use that explanation to interpret 
regularities that we may observe, instead of understanding that the 
explanation was an assumption in our analysis, we regard it as the 
inescapable implication of our observations.  "I just can't feel myself 
split", complained Bryce DeWitt when he first encountered the 
many-universes interpretation of quantum theory. Then Hugh Everett 
convinced him that this was the same circular reasoning that Galileo 
rejected when he explained how the Earth can be in motion even though we 
observe it to be at rest. The point is, both theories are consistent with 
that observation. Thanks to Everett, DeWitt and others, the "and why" 
question began gradually to return to quantum theory, whence it had 
largely disappeared during the 1930s. I believe that its absence did great 
harm both in impeding progress and in encouraging all sorts of mystical 
fads and pseudo-science. But elsewhere, especially in the human 
philosophies (generally known as social sciences), it is still largely 
missing. Although behaviourism--the principled refusal to ask "and 
why?"--is no longer dominant as an explicit ideology, it is still 
widespread as a psychological attitude in the human philosophies.  Suppose 
you identified a gene G, and a human behaviour B, and you undertook a 
study with 1000 randomly chosen people, and the result was that of the 500 
people who had G in their genome, 499 did B, while of the 500 who lacked 
G, 499 failed to do B. You'd conclude, wouldn't you, that G is the 
predominant cause of B? Obviously there must be other mechanisms involved, 
but they have little influence on whether a person does B or not. You'd 
inform the press that all those once-trendy theories that tried to explain 
B through people's upbringing or culture, or attributed it to the exercise 
of free will or the logic of the situation or any combination of such 
factors--were just wrong. You've proved that when people choose to do B, 
they are at the very least responding to a powerful influence from their 
genes. And if someone points out that your results are perfectly 
consistent with B being 100% caused by something other than G (or any 
other gene), or with G exerting an influence in the direction of not doing 
B, you will shrug momentarily, and then forget that possibility. Won't 
you?  DAVID DEUTSCH's research in quantum physics has been influential and 
highly acclaimed. His papers on quantum computation laid the foundations 
for that field, breaking new ground in the theory of computation as well 
as physics, and have triggered an explosion of research efforts worldwide. 
He is a member of the Centre for Quantum Computation at the Clarendon 
Laboratory, Oxford University and the author of The Fabric of Reality.

Keith Devlin "Why can't girls/women do math?"  Heavens, I take a couple of 
days off from reading email over Christmas and when I next log on already 
there are over twenty responses to the Edge question! Maybe the question 
we should all be asking is "Doesn't anyone take time off any more?"  As to 
questions that have disappeared, as a mathematician I hope we've seen the 
last of the question "Why can't girls/women do math?" With women now 
outnumbering men in mathematics programs in most US colleges and 
universities, that old wives' tale (old husbands' tale?) has surely been 
consigned to the garbage can. Some recent research at Brown University 
confirmed what most of us had long suspected: that past (and any remaining 
present) performance differences were based on cultural stereotyping. (The 
researchers found that women students performed worse at math tests when 
they were given in a mixed gender class than when no men were present. No 
communication was necessary to cause the difference. The sheer presence of 
men was enough.)  While I was enjoying my offline Christmas, Roger Schank 
already raised the other big math question: Why do we make such a big deal 
of math performance and of teaching math to everyone in the first place? 
But with the educational math wars still raging, I doubt we've seen the 
last of that one!  KEITH DEVLIN is a mathematician, writer, and 
broadcaster living in California. His latest book is The Math Gene: How 
Mathematical Thinking Evolved and Why Numbers Are Like Gossip.

Denis Dutton  "When will overpopulation create worldwide starvation?" 
They cordoned off the area and brought in disposal experts to defuse the 
bomb, but it turned out to be full of--sawdust. The Population Bomb is 
truly a dud, although this news and its implications have yet fully to 
sink into the general consciousness.  Ideas can become so embedded in our 
outlook that they are hard to shake by rational argument. As a Peace Corps 
Volunteer working in rural India in the 1960s, I vividly remember being 
faced with multiple uncertainties about what might work for the 
modernization of India. There was only one thing I and my fellow 
development workers could all agree on: India unquestionably would 
experience mass famine by the 1980s at the latest. For us at the time this 
notion was an eschatological inevitability and an article of faith.  For 
35 years since those days, India has grown in population by over a million 
souls a month, never failing to feed itself or earn enough to buy the food 
it needs (sporadic famine conditions in isolated areas, which still happen 
in India, are always a matter of communications and distribution 
breakdown).  Like so many of the doomsayers of the twentieth century, we 
left crucial factors out of our glib calculations. First, we failed to 
appreciate that people in developing countries will behave exactly like 
people in the rest of the world: as they improve their standard of living, 
they have fewer children. In India, the rate of population increase began 
to turn around in the 1970s, and it has declined since. More importantly, 
we underestimated the capacity of human intelligence to adapt changing 
situations.  Broadly speaking, instead of a world population of 25 or 30 
billion, which some prophets of the 1960s were predicting, it now looks as 
though the peak of world population growth might be reached within 25 to 
40 years at a maximum of 8.5 billion (just 2.5 billion above the present 
world population). Even without advances in food technology, the areas of 
land currently out of agricultural production in the United States and 
elsewhere will prevent starvation. But genetic technologies will increase 
the quantities and healthfulness of food, while at the same time making 
food production much more environmentally friendly. For example, combining 
gene modification with herbicides will make it possible to produce crops 
that induce no soil erosion. New varieties will requires less intensive 
application of nitrogen fertilizers and pesticides. If genetic techniques 
can control endemic pests, vast areas of Africa could be brought into 
productive cultivation.  There will be no way to add 2.5 billion people to 
the planet without environmental costs. Some present difficulties, such as 
limited supplies of fresh water in Third World localities, will only get 
worse. But these problems will not be insoluble. Moreover, there is not 
the slightest chance that population growth will in itself cause famine. 
What will be fascinating to watch, for those who live long enough to 
witness it, will be how the world copes with an aging, declining 
population, once the high-point has been reached.  The steady evaporation 
of the question, "When will overpopulation create worldwide starvation?", 
has left a gaping hole in the mental universe of the doomsayers. They have 
been quick to fill it with anxieties about global warming, cellphones, the 
ozone hole, and Macdonaldization. There appears to be a hard-wired human 
propensity to invent threats where they cannot clearly be discovered. 
Historically, this has been applied to foreign ethnic groups or odd 
individuals in a small-scale society (the old woman whose witchcraft must 
have caused village children to die). Today's anxieties focus on broader 
threats to mankind, where activism can mix fashionable politics with 
dubious science. In this respect alone, the human race is not about to run 
out of problems. Fortunately, it also shows no sign of running out of 
solutions.  DENIS DUTTON, founder and editor of the innovative Web page 
Arts & Letters Daily (www.cybereditions.com/aldaily/), teaches the 
philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand and writes 
widely on aesthetics. He is editor of the journal Philosophy and 
Literature, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Professor 
Dutton is a director of Radio New Zealand, Inc.

George B. Dyson  "What does the other side of the moon look like?" This 
can be elaborated by the following anecdote, from an interview (2.99) with 
Herbert York:  "Donald Hornig, who was head of PSAC [President's Science 
Advisory Committee, during the Johnson Administration] was not 
imaginative. I can give you an example of this. I was very enthusiastic 
about getting a picture of the other side of the moon. And there were 
various ways of doing it, sooner or later. And I argued with Hornig about 
it and he said, 'Why? It looks just like this side.' And it turned out it 
didn't. But nevertheless, that was it, and that's the real Hornig. 'Why 
are you so enthused about the other side of the moon? The other side of 
the moon looks just like this side, why would you be so interested to see 
it?'"  GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, has been excavating the 
history and prehistory of the digital revolution going back 300 years. His 
most recent book is Darwin Among the Machines.

J. Doyne Farmer  "What do these discarded questions tell us?"  The road of 
knowledge is littered with old questions, but by their very nature, none 
of them stands out above all others. The diversity of thoughtful responses 
given on the Edge forum, which just begin to scratch the surface, 
illustrates how progress happens. The evolution of knowledge is a 
Schumpterian process of creative destruction, in which weeding out the 
questions that no longer merit attention is an integral part of 
formulating better questions that should. Forgetting is a vital part of 
creation.  Maxwell once worried that the second law of thermodynamics 
could be violated by a demon who could measure the velocity of individual 
particles and separate the fast ones from the slow ones, and use this to 
do work. Charlie Bennet showed that that this is impossible, because to 
make a measurement the demon has to first put her instruments in a known 
state.  This involves erasing information. The energy needed to do this is 
more than can be gained. Thus, the fact that forgetting takes work is 
essential to the second law of thermodynamics. Why is this relevant? As 
Gregory Bateson once said, the second law of thermodynamics is the reason 
that it is easier to mess up a room than it is to clean it. Forgetting is 
an essential part of the process of creating order. Asking the right 
questions is the most important part of the creative process. There are 
lots of people who are good at solving problems, fewer who are good at 
asking questions.  Around the time I took my qualifying examination in 
physics, someone showed me the test that Lord Rayleigh took when he 
graduated as senior wrangler from Cambridge in 1865. I would have failed 
it. There were no questions on thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, 
quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, particle physics, condensed matter, or 
relativity, i.e. no questions covering most of what I had learned. 
However, the classical mechanics questions, which comprised most of the 
bets, were diabolically hard. Their solution involved techniques that are 
no longer taught, and that a modern physicist would have to work hard to 
recreate. Of course, in a field like philosophy this would not have 
surprised me--it just hadn't occurred to me that this was as true for 
physics as well. The physicists in Rayleigh's generation presumably worked 
just as hard, and knew just as many things. They just knew different 
things. After overcoming the shock of how much had seemingly been lost, I 
rationalized my ignorance with the belief that what I was taught was more 
useful than what Rayleigh was taught. Whether as a culture or as 
individuals, to learn new things, we have to forget old things. The notion 
of what is useful is constantly evolving.  The most important questions 
evolve through time as people understand little bits and pieces, and view 
them from different angles in the attempt to solve them. Each question is 
replaced by a new one that is (hopefully) better framed than its 
antecedant. Reflecting on those that have been cast aside is like sifting 
through flotsam on a beach, and asking what it tells us. Is there a common 
thread that might give us a clue to posing better questions in the future? 
When we examine questions such as "What is a vital force?", "How fast is 
the earth moving?", "Does God exist?", "Have we seen the end of science?", 
"Has history ended?", "Can machines think?", there are some common 
threads. One is that we never really understood what these questions meant 
in the first place. But these questions (to varying degrees) have been 
useful in helping us to formulate better, more focused questions. We just 
have to turn loose of our pet ideas, and make a careful distinction 
between what we know and what we only think we know, and try to be more 
precise about what we are really asking.  I would be curious to hear more 
discussion about the common patterns and the conclusions to be drawn from 
the questions that have disappeared.  J. DOYNE FARMER, one of the pioneers 
of what has come to be called chaos theory, is McKinsey Professor, Sante 
Fe, Institute, and the co founder and former co-president of Prediction 
Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Kenneth Ford  "When will we face another energy crisis, and how will we 
cope with it?"  This question (or pair of questions) was on everyone's 
lips in the 1970s, following the oil shortage and lines at gas stations. 
It stimulated a lot of good thinking and good work on alternative energy 
sources, renewable energy sources, and energy efficiency. Although this 
question is still asked by many knowledgeable and concerned people, it has 
disappeared from the public's radar screen (or, better, television 
screen). Even the recent escalation of fuel prices and the electricity 
shortage in California have not lent urgency to thinking ahead about 
energy.  But we should be asking, we should be worrying, and we should be 
planning. A real energy crisis is closer now than it was when the question 
had high currency. The energy-crisis question is only part of a larger 
question: How is humankind going to deal in the long term with its impact 
on the physical world we inhabit (of which the exhaustion of fossil fuels 
is only a part)? Another way to phrase the larger question: Are we going 
to manage more or less gracefully a transition to a sustainable world, or 
will eventual sustainability be what's left, willy nilly, after the chaos 
of unplanned, unanticipated change?  Science will provide no miracles (as 
the Wall Street Journal, in its justification of inaction, would have us 
believe), but science can do a lot to ameliorate the dislocations that 
this century will bring. We need to encourage our public figures to lift 
their eyes beyond the two-, four-, and six-year time horizons of their 
jobs.  KENNETH FORD is a retired physicist who teaches at Germantown 
Friends School in Philadelphia. He is the co-author, with John Wheeler, of 
Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.

Howard Gardner  "Has History Ended?" I am going to take slight liberty 
with your question. With the publication a decade ago of Francis 
Fukuyama's justly acclaimed article The End Of History, many pundits and 
non-pundits assumed that historical forces and trends had been spent. The 
era of the "isms" was at an end; liberal democracy, market forces, and 
globalization had triumphed; the heavy weight of the past was attenuating 
around the globe.  At the start of 2001, we are no longer asking "Has 
History Ended?" History seems all too alive. The events of Seattle 
challenged the globalization behemoth; the world is no longer beating a 
path to internet startups; Communist and fascist revivals have emerged in 
several countries; the historical legacies in areas like the Balkans and 
the Middle East are as vivid as ever; and, as I noted in response to last 
year's question, much of Africa is at war. As if to remind us of our 
naivete, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein have been in "office" as long as 
most Americans can remember. If George II is ignorant of this history, he 
is likely to see it repeated. HOWARD GARDNER, the major proponent of the 
theory of multiple intelligences, is Professor of Education at Harvard 
University and author of numerous books including The Mind's New Science 
and Extraordinary Minds: Portraits of Four Exceptional Individuals.

Joel Garreau  "What can government do to help create a better sort of 
human?"  The moral, intellectual, physical and social improvement of the 
human race was a hot topic of the Enlightenment. It helped shape the 
American and French revolutions. Creating the "New Soviet Man" was at the 
heart of the Russian revolution--that's what justified the violence.  A 
central theme of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was not just that human 
misery could be alleviated. It was that core human problems like crime 
could be fixed by the government eliminating root causes like want. 
That's all gone.  We now barely trust government to teach kids to read. 
JOEL GARREAU, the cultural revolution correspondent of The Washington 
Post, is a student of global culture, values, and change whose current 
interests range from human networks and the transmission of ideas to the 
hypothesis that the '90s--like the '50s--set the stage for a social 
revolution to come. He is the author of the best-selling books Edge City: 
Life on the New Frontier and The Nine Nations of North America, and a 
principal of The Edge City Group, which is dedicated to the creation of 
more liveable and profitable urban areas worldwide.

David Gelernter   "How should adult education work? How do we educate the 
masses? (That's right, The Masses.)...." How should adult education work? 
How do we educate the masses? (That's right, The Masses.) How do we widen 
the circle of people who love and support great art, great music, great 
literature? How do we widen the circle of adults who understand the 
science and engineering that our modern world is built on? How do we rear 
good American citizens? Or for that matter good German citizens, or 
Israeli or Danish or Chilean? And if this is the information age, why does 
the population at large grow worse-informed every year? (Sorry--that last 
one isn't a question people have stopped asking; they never started.) 
These questions have disappeared because in 2001, the "educated elite" 
never goes anywhere without its quote-marks. Here in America's fancy 
universities, we used to believe that everyone deserved and ought to have 
the blessings of education. Today we believe our children should have 
them--and to make up for that fact, to even the score, we have abolished 
the phrase. No more "blessings of education." That makes us feel better. 
Many of us can't say "truth and beauty" without snickering like 
10-year-old boys.  But the situation will change, as soon as we regain the 
presence of mind to start asking these questions again. We have the raw 
materials on hand for the greatest cultural rebirth in history. We have 
the money and the technical means. We tend to tell our children nowadays 
(implicitly) that their goal in life is to get rich, get famous and lord 
it over the world. We are ashamed to tell them that what they really ought 
to be is good, brave and true. (In fact I am almost ashamed to type it.) 
This terrible crisis of confidence we're going through was probably 
inevitable; at any rate it's temporary, and if we can't summon the courage 
to tell our children what's right, my guess is that they will figure it 
out for themselves, and tell us. I'm optimistic.  DAVID GELERNTER, 
Professor of Computer Science at Yale University and author of Mirror 
Worlds, The Muse in the Machine, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, and 
Drawiing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

Brian Goodwin  "Where Does Love Come From?"  What does science have to say 
about the origins of love in the scheme of things? Not a lot. In fact, it 
is still virtually a taboo subject, just as consciousness was until very 
recently. However, since feelings are a major component of consciousness, 
it seems likely that the ontology of love is now likely to emerge as a 
significant question in science.  Within Christian culture, as in many 
other religious traditions, love has its origin as a primal quality of God 
and so is co-eternal with Him. His creation is an outpouring of this love 
in shared relationship with beings that participate in the essential 
creativity of the cosmos. As in the world of Shakespeare and the 
Renaissance Magi, it is love that makes the world go round and animates 
all relationships.  This magical view of the world did not satisfy the 
emerging perspective of Galilean science, which saw relationships in 
nature as law-like, obeying self-consistent logical principles of order. 
God may well have created the world, but he did so according to 
intelligible principles. It is the job of the scientist to identify these 
and describe them in mathematical form. And so with Newton, love turned 
into gravity. The rotation of the earth around the sun, and the moon 
around the earth, was a result of the inverse square law of gravitational 
attraction. It was not a manifestation of love as an attractive principle 
between animated beings, however much humanity remained attached to 
romantic feelings about the full moon. Love was henceforth banished from 
scientific discourse and the mechanical world-view took over.  Now science 
itself is changing and mechanical principles are being replaced by more 
subtle notions of interaction and relationships. Quantum mechanics was the 
first harbinger of a new holistic world of non-local connectedness in 
which causality operates in a much more intricate way than conventional 
mechanism. We now have complexity theory as well, which seeks to 
understand how emergent properties arise in complex systems such as 
developing organisms, colonies of social insects, and human brains. Often 
these properties are not reducible to the behavior of their component 
parts and their interactions, though there is always consistency between 
levels: that is, there are no contradictions between the properties of the 
parts of a complex system and the order that emerges from them. 
Consciousness appears to be one of these emergent properties. With this 
recognition, science enters a new realm.  Consciousness involves feelings, 
or more generally what are called qualia, the experience of qualities such 
as pain, pleasure, beauty, and ŠŠ. love. This presents us with a major 
challenge. The scientific principle of consistency between levels in 
systems requires that feelings emerge from some property of the component 
parts (e.g., neurones) that is consistent with feeling, experience. But if 
matter is 'dead', without any feeling, and neurones are just made of this 
dead matter, even though organized in a complex way, then where do 
feelings come from ? This is the crunch question which presents us with a 
hard choice. We can either say that feelings are epiphenomena, illusions 
that evolution has invented because they are useful for survival. Or we 
can change our view of matter and ascribe to the basic stuff of reality 
some elementary component of feeling, sentience, however rudimentary. Of 
course, we could also take the view that nature is not self-consistent and 
that miracles are possible; that something can come from nothing, such as 
feeling from dead, insentient matter, thus returning to the magical 
world-view of the early renaissance. But if we are to remain scientific, 
then the choice is between the other two alternatives.  The notion that 
evolution has invented feelings because they are useful for survival is 
not a scientific explanation, because it gives no account of how feelings 
are possible as properties that emerge in the complex systems we call 
organisms (i.e., consistent emergent properties of life). So we are left 
with the other hard choice: matter must have some rudimentary property of 
sentience. This is the conclusion that the mathematician/philosopher A.N. 
Whitehead came to in his classic, Process and Reality, and it is being 
proposed as a solution to the Cartesian separation of mind and matter by 
some contemporary philosophers and scientists. It involves a radical 
reappraisal of what we call 'reality'. But it does suggest a world in 
which love exists as something real, in accord with most peoples' 
experience. And goodness knows, we could do with a little more of it in 
our fragmented world.  BRIAN GOODWIN is a professor of biology at the 
Schumacher College, Milton Keynes, and the author of Temporal Organization 
in Cells and Analytical Physiology, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The 
Evolution of Complexity, and (with Gerry Webster) Form and Transformation: 
Generative and Relational Principles in Biology. Dr. Goodwin is a member 
of the Board of Directors of the Sante Fe Institute.

David Haig  "questions that were asked in extinct languages" All those 
questions that were asked in extinct languages for which there is no 
written record. DAVID HAIG is an evolutionary geneticist/theorist at 
Harvard who is interested in conflicts and conflict resolution with the 
genome, with a particular interest in genomic imprinting and relations 
between parents and offspring. Hiscurrent interests include the evolution 
of linkage groups and the evolution of viviparity.

Judy Harris   "Do genes influence human behavior?"  This question bit the 
dust after a brief but busy life; it is entirely a second-half-of 
the-20th-century question. Had it been asked before the 20th century, it 
would have been phrased differently: "heredity" instead of "genes." But it 
wasn't asked back then, because the answer was obvious to everyone. 
Unfortunately, the answer everyone gave--yes!--was based on erroneous 
reasoning about ambiguous evidence: the difference in behavior between the 
pauper and the prince was attributed entirely to heredity. The fact that 
the two had been reared in very different circumstances, and hence had had 
very different experiences, was overlooked.   Around the middle of the 
20th century, it became politically incorrect and academically unpopular 
to use the word "heredity"; if the topic came up at all, a euphemism, 
"nature," was used in its place. The fact that the pauper and the prince 
had been reared in very different circumstances now came to the fore, and 
the behavioral differences between them was now attributed entirely to the 
differences in their experiences. The observation that the prince had many 
of the same quirks as the king was now blamed entirely on his upbringing. 
Unfortunately, this answer, too, was based on erroneous reasoning about 
ambiguous evidence.   That children tend to resemble their biological 
parents is ambiguous evidence; the fact that such evidence is 
plentiful--agreeable parents tend to have agreeable kids, aggressive 
parents tend to have aggressive kids, and so on--does not make it any less 
ambiguous. The problem is that most kids are reared by their biological 
parents. The parents have provided both the genes and the home 
environment, so the kids' heredity and environment are correlated. The 
prince has inherited not only his father's genes but also his father's 
palace, his father's footmen, and his father's Lord High Executioner (no 
reference to living political figures is intended).   To disambiguate the 
evidence, special techniques are required--ways of teasing apart heredity 
and environment by controlling the one and varying the other. Such 
techniques didn't begin to be widely used until the 1970s; their results 
didn't become widely known and widely accepted until the 1990s. By then so 
much evidence had piled up that the conclusion (which should have been 
obvious all along) was incontrovertible: yes, genes do influence human 
behavior, and so do the experiences children have while growing up.   (I 
should point out, in response to David Deutsch's contribution to the World 
Question Center, that no one study, and no one method, can provide an 
answer to a question of this sort. In the case of genetic influences on 
behavior, we have converging evidence--studies using a variety of methods 
all led to the same conclusion and even agreed pretty well on the 
quantitative details.)  Though the question has been answered, it has left 
behind a cloud of confusion that might not disappear for some time. The 
biases of the second half of the 20th century persist: when 
"dysfunctional" parents are found to have dysfunctional kids, the tendency 
is still to blame the environment provided by the parents and to overlook 
the fact that the parents also provided the genes.   Some would argue that 
this bias makes sense. After all, they say, we know how the environment 
influences behavior. How the genes influence behavior is still a 
mystery--a question for the 21st century to solve. But they are wrong. 
They know much less than they think they know about how the environment 
influences behavior.   The 21st century has two important questions to 
answer. How do genes influence human behavior? How is human behavior 
influenced by the experiences a child has while growing up?  JUDITH RICH 
HARRIS is a writer and developmental psychologist; co-author of The Child: 
A Contemporary View Of Development; winner of the 1997 George A. Miller 
Award for an outstanding article in general psychology, and author of The 
Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do.

Marc D. Hauser "Do animals have thoughts?"   The reason this question is 
dead is because traditional Skinnerianism, which viewed rats and pigeons 
as furry and feathered black boxes, guided by simple principles of 
reinforcement and punishment, is theoretically caput. It can no longer 
account for the extraordinary things that animals do, spontaneously. 
Thus, we now know that animals form cognitive maps of their environment, 
compute numerosities, represent the relationships among individuals in 
their social group, and most recently, have some understanding of what 
others know.  The questions for the future, then, are not "Do animals 
think?", but "What precisely do they think about, and to what extent do 
their thoughts differ from our own?"  MARC D. HAUSER is an evolutionary 
psychologist, and a professor at Harvard University where he is a fellow 
of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. He is a professor in the 
departments of Anthropology and Psychology, as well as the Program in 
Neurosciences. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, and 
Wild Minds: What AnimalsThink.

Geoffrey Hinton   "What is 'vital force'?"  Nobody asks what "vital force" 
is anymore. Organisms still have just as much vital force as they had 
before, but as understanding of biological mechanisms increased, the idea 
of a single essence evaporated. Hopefully the same will happen with 
"consciousness".  GEOFFREY HINTON, is an AI researcher at the Gatsby 
Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, where he does 
research on ways of using neural networks for learning, memory, perception 
and symbol processing and has over 100 publications in these areas. He was 
one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm that 
is now widely used for practical applications. His other contributions to 
neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed 
representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, and 
Helmholtz machines. His current main interest is in unsupervised learning 
procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input.

John Horgan "Is enlightenment a myth or a reality?"  Is enlightenment a 
myth or a reality? I mean the enlightenment of the east, not west, the 
state of supreme mystical awareness also known as nirvana, satori, cosmic 
consciousnesss, awakening. Enlightenment is the telos of the great Eastern 
religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and it crops up occasionally in western 
religions, too, although in a more marginal fashion. Enlightenment once 
preoccupied such prominent western intellectuals as William James, Aldous 
Huxley and Joseph Campbell, and there was a surge of scientific interest 
in mysticism in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Then mysticism became tainted by 
its association with the human potential and New Age movements and the 
psychedelic counterculture, and for the last few decades it has for the 
most part been banished from serious scientific and intellectual 
discourse. Recently a few scholars have written excellent books that 
examine mysticism in the light of modern psychology and neuroscience--Zen 
and the Brain by the neurologist James Austin; Mysticism, Mind, 
Consciousness by the philosopher Robert Forman; The Mystical Mind by the 
late psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili and the radiologist Andrew Newberg--but 
their work has received scant attention in the scientific mainstream. My 
impression is that many scientists are privately fascinated by mysticism 
but fear being branded as fuzzy-headed by disclosing their interest. If 
more scientists revealed their interest in mystical consciousness, perhaps 
it could become a legitimate subject for investigation once again.  JOHN 
HORGAN is a freelance writer and author of The End of Science and The 
Undiscovered Mind. A senior writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 
1997, he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, New 
Republic, Slate, London Times, Times Literary Supplement and other 
publications.

Verena Huber-Dyson  "Did Fermat's question, 'is it true that there are no 
integers x, y, z and n, all greater than 2, such that x^n + y^n = z^n?', 
F? for short, raised in the 17th century, disappear when Andrew Wiles 
answered it affirmatively by a proof of Fermat's theorem F in 1995?"  Did 
Fermat's question, "is it true that there are no integers x, y, z and n, 
all greater than 2, such that x^n + y^n = z^n?", F? for short, raised in 
the 17th century, disappear when Andrew Wiles answered it affirmatively by 
a proof of Fermat's theorem F in 1995?  The answer is no.  The question F? 
can be explained to every child, but the proof of F is extremely 
sophisticated requiring techniques and results way beyond the reach of 
elementary arithmetic, thus raising the quest for conceptually simpler 
proofs. What is going on here, why do such elementary theorems require 
such intricate machinery for their proof? The fact of the truth of F 
itself is hardly of vital interest. But, in the wake of Goedel's 
incompleteness proof of 1931, F? finds it place in a sequence of 
elementary number theoretic questions for which there provably cannot 
exist any algorithmic proof procedure!  Or take the question D? raised by 
the gut feeling that there are more points on a straight line segment than 
there are integers in the infinite sequence 1,2,3,4,.... Before it can be 
answered the question what is meant by "more" must be dealt with. This 
done by the 18th Century's progress in the Foundations, D? became amenable 
to Cantor's diagonal argument, establishing theorem D. But this was by no 
means the end of the question!  The proof gave rise to new fields of 
investigation and new ideas. In particular, the Continuum hypothesis C?, a 
direct descendant of D? was shown to be "independent" of the accepted 
formal system of set theory. A whole new realm of questions sprang up; 
questions X? that are answered by proofs of independence, bluntly by: 
"that depends"--on what you are talking about, what system you are using, 
on your definition of the word "is" and so forth. With this they give rise 
to comparative studies of systems without as well as with the assumption X 
added. Euclid's parallel axiom in geometry, is the most popular early 
example.  What about the question as to the nature of infinitesimal's, a 
question that has plagued us ever since Leibniz. Euler and his colleagues 
had used them with remarkable success boldly following their intuition. 
But in the 18th Century mathematicians became self conscious. By the time 
we were teaching our calculus classes by means of epsilon's, delta's and 
Dedekind cuts some of us might have thought that Cauchy, Weierstrass and 
Dedekind had chased the question away. But then along came logicians like 
Abraham Robinson with a new take on it with so-called non standard 
quantities--another favorite of the popular science press.  Finally, 
turning to a controversial issue; the question of the existence of God can 
neither be dismissed by a rational "No" nor by a politically expedient 
"Yes". Actually as a plain yes-or-no question it ought to have disappeared 
long ago. Nietzsche, in particular, did his very best over a hundred years 
ago to make it go away. But the concept of God persists and keeps a maze 
of questions afloat, such as "who means what by Him"?, "do we need a 
boogie man to keep us in line"?, "do we need a crutch to hold despair at 
bay"? and so forth, all questions concerning human nature.  Good questions 
do not disappear, they mature, mutate and spawn new questions.  VERENA 
HUBER-DYSON, is a mathematician who taught at UC Berkeley in the early 
sixties, then at the U of Illinois' at Chicago Circle, before retiring 
from the University of Calgary. Her research papers on the interface 
between Logic and Algebra concern decision problems in group theory. Her 
monograph Goedel's theorem: a workbook on formalization is an attempt at a 
self contained interdisciplinary introduction to logic and the foundations 
of mathematics.

Nicholas Humphrey  "...a set of questions that ought to have disappeared; 
questions that seek reasons for patterns that in reality are due to 
chance" There is a set of questions that ought to have disappeared, 
but--given human psychology--probably never will do: questions that seek 
reasons for patterns that in reality are due to chance.  Why is "one plus 
twelve" an anagram of "two plus eleven"? Why do the moon and the sun take 
up exactly the same areas in the sky as seen from Earth? Why did my friend 
telephone me just as I was going to telephone her? Whose face is it in the 
clouds?  The truth is that not everything has a reason behind it. We 
should not assume there is someone or something to be blamed for every 
pattern that strikes us as significant.  But we have evolved to have what 
the psychologist Bartlett called an "effort after meaning". We have always 
done better to find meaning where there was none than to miss meaning 
where there was.  We're human. When we win the lottery by betting on the 
numbers of our birthday, the question Why? will spring up, no matter what. 
NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist at the Centre for 
Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, and 
the author of Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the 
Mind, and Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for 
Supernatural Consolation.

Mark Hurst  "Do I have e-mail?" The sudden increase in digital 
information, or bits, in our everyday lives has destroyed any question of 
permanence or scarcity of those bits. Just consider the example of e-mail. 
Years ago when you first got online, you were excited to get e-mail, 
right? So every day, the big question when you logged in was, Will I have 
any e-mail? The chirpy announcement that "You've got mail!" actually meant 
something, since sometimes you didn't have mail.  Today there's no 
question. There's no such thing as no mail. You don't have to ask; you DO 
have mail. If it's not the mail you want (from friends or family), it's 
work-related mail or, worse, spam. Our inboxes may soon be so flooded with 
spam that we look for entirely different ways to use e-mail.  The death of 
that question, "Do I have e-mail?" has brought us a new, more interesting 
question as a result: "What do I do with all this e-mail?" More generally, 
what do we do with all these bits (e-mail, wireless messages, websites, 
Palm Pilot files, Napster downloads)? This is the question that will 
define our relationship with digital technology in coming years.  MARK 
HURST, founder of Internet consulting firm Creative Good, is widely 
credited for popularizing the term "customer experience" and the 
methodology around it. Hurst has worked since the birth of the Web to make 
Internet technology easier and more relevant to its "average" users. In 
1999, InfoWorld magazine named Hurst "Netrepreneur of the Year", saying 
that "Mark Hurst has done more than any other individual to make 
Web-commerce sites easier to use." Over 39,000 people subscribe to his 
Good Experience newsletter, available for free at goodexperience.com or 
update at goodexperie nce.com.

Piet Hut  "What is Reality?"  It has become unfashionable to ask about the 
structure of reality without already having chosen a framework in which to 
ponder the answer, be it scientific, religious or sceptical. A sense of 
wonder at the sheer appearance of the world, moment by moment, has been 
lost.  To look at the world in wonder, and to stay with that sense of 
wonder without jumping straight past it, has become almost impossible for 
someone taking science seriously. The three dominant reactions are: to see 
science as the only way to get at the truth, at what is really real; to 
accept science but to postulate a more encompassing reality around or next 
to it, based on an existing religion; or to accept science as one useful 
approach in a plurality of many approaches, neither of which has anything 
to say about reality in any ultimate way.  The first reaction leads to a 
sense of wonder scaled down to the question of wonder about the underlying 
mathematical equations of physics, their interpretation, and the 
complexity of the phenomena found on the level of chemistry and biology. 
The second reaction tends to allow wonder to occur only within the 
particular religous framework that is accepted on faith. The third 
reaction allows no room for wonder about reality, since there is no 
ultimate reality to wonder about.  Having lost our ability to ask what 
reality is like means having lost our innocence. The challenge is to 
regain a new form of innocence, by accepting all that we can learn from 
science, while simultaneously daring to ask 'what else is true?' In each 
period of history, the greatest philosophers struggled with the question 
of how to confront skepticism and cynicism, from Socrates and Descartes to 
Kant and Husserl in Europe, and Nagarjuna and many others in Asia and 
elsewhere. I hope that the question "What is Reality?" will reappear soon, 
as a viable intellectual question and at the same time as an invitation to 
try to put all our beliefs and frameworks on hold. Looking at reality 
without any filter may or may not be possible, but without at least trying 
to do so we will have given up too soon.  PIET HUT is professor of 
astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. He is 
involved in the project of building GRAPEs, the world's fastest 
special-purpose computers, at Tokyo University, and he is also a founding 
member of the Kira Institute.

Raphael Kasper  "What does all the information mean?"  The ubiquity of 
upscale coffee houses has eliminated the need to ask "Where can I get a 
cup of coffee?" But I suspect that the question "What questions have 
disappeared?" is meant to elicit even deeper and [perhaps] more meaningful 
responses.  The coffee house glut has been accompanied--although with no 
necessarily causal link--by an avalanche of information [or, at least, of 
data] and in the rush to obtain [or "to access"--groan] that information 
we’ve stopped asking "What does it all mean?" It is as though raw data, in 
and of itself, has real value, indeed all of the value, and thus there is 
no need to stop, to assimilate, to ponder. We grasp for faster computers, 
greater bandwidth, non-stop connectivity. We put computers in every 
classroom, rewire schools. But, with the exception of a great deal of 
concern about the business and marketing uses of the new "information 
age," we pay precious little attention to how the information can be used 
to change, or improve, our lives, nor do we seem to take the time to slow 
down and deliberate upon its meaning.  We wire the schools, but never ask 
what all those computers in classrooms will be used for, or whether 
teachers know what to do with them, or whether we can devise ways to 
employ the technology to help people learn in new or better ways. We get 
cable modems, or high-speed telephone lines, but don’t think about what we 
can do with them beyond getting more information faster. [Really, does 
being able to watch the trailer for "Chicken Run" in a 2-inch square 
window on the computer screen after a several minute long download, 
constitute a major advance--and if we could cut the download time to 
several seconds, would that qualify?]  Most insidious, I think, is that 
the rush to get more information faster almost forces people to avoid the 
act of thinking. Why stop and try to make sense of the information we’ve 
obtained when we can click on that icon and get still more data? And more. 
RAPHAEL KASPER, a physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at 
Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Superconducting 
Super Collider Laboratory.

Kevin Kelly  "What is the nature of our creator?"  This question was once 
entertained by the educated and non-educated alike, but is now out of 
fashion among the learned, except in two small corners of intellectual 
life. One corner is religious theology, which many scientists would hardly 
consider a legitimate form of inquiry at this time. In fact it would not 
be an exaggeration to say that modern thinking considers this question as 
fit only for the religious, and that it has no part in the realm of 
science at all. But even among the religious this question has lost favor 
because, to be honest, theology hasn't provided very many satisfactory 
answers for modern sensibilities, and almost no new answers in recent 
times. It feels like a dead end. A question that cannot be asked merely by 
musing in a book-lined room.  The other corner where this question is 
asked--but only indirectly--is in particle physics and cosmology. We get 
hints of answers here and there mainly as by-products of other more 
scientifically specific questions, but very few scientists set out to 
answer this question primarily. The problem here is that because the 
question of the nature of our creator is dismissed as a religious 
question, and both of these sciences require some of the most expensive 
equipment in the world paid by democracies committed to separation of 
church and state, it won't do to address the question directly.  But there 
is a third way of thinking emerging that may provide a better way to ask 
this question. This is the third culture of technology. Instead of asking 
this question starting from the human mind contemplating the mysteries of 
God, as humanists and theologists do, or starting from experiment, 
observation, and testing as scientists do, the third way investigates the 
nature of our creator by creating creations. This is the approach of nerds 
and technologists. Technologists are busy creating artificial worlds, 
virtual realities, artificial life, and eventually perhaps, parallel 
universes, and in this process they explore the nature of godhood. When we 
make worlds, what are the various styles of being god? What is the 
relation to the creator and the created? How does one make laws that 
unfold creatively? How much of what is created can be created without a 
god? Where is god essential? Sometimes there are theories (theology) but 
more often this inquiry is driven by pure pragmatic engineering: "We are 
as gods and may as well get good at it," to quote Stewart Brand.  While 
the third way offers a potential for new answers, more than the ways of 
the humanities or science, the truth is that even here this question--of 
the nature of our creator--is not asked directly very much. This really is 
a question that has disappeared from public discourse, although of course, 
it is asked every day by billions of people silently.   KEVIN KELLY is a 
founding editor of Wired magazine. In 1993 and 1996, under his 
co-authorship, Wired won it's industry's Oscar--The National Magazine 
Award for General Excellence. Prior to the launch of Wired , Kelly was 
editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox 
technical and cultural news. He is the author of New Rules for the New 
Economy; and Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, 
and the Economic World.

Lance Knobel "Are you hoping for a girl or a boy?" The moment of birth 
used to be attended by an answer to a nine-month mystery: girl or boy? 
Now, to anyone with the slightest curiosity and no mystical scruples, 
simple, non-invasive technology can provide the answer from an early stage 
of pregnancy. With both of our children, we chose to know the answer (in 
the UK about half of parents want to know), and I suspect the likelihood 
of the question continuing to be asked will diminish rapidly. What's 
interesting is this is the first of many questions about the anticipated 
child that will soon not be asked. These will range from the trivial (eye 
colour, mature height) to the important (propensity to certain diseases 
and illnesses). The uneasiness many people still have about knowing the 
sex of the child suggests that society is vastly unprepared for the 
pre-birth answers to a wide range of questions. LANCE KNOBEL is a managing 
director of Vesta Group, an Internet and wireless investment company based 
in London. He was formerly head of the programme of the World Economic 
Forum's Annual Meeting in Davos and Editor-in-Chief of World Link.

Marek Kohn  "What about the workers?" It may have been uttered as often in 
caricature as in anger, but the voice from the crowd asked a question that 
was accepted as reasonable even by those who winced at the jeering tone. 
Until fifteen or twenty years ago, the interest-earning and brain-working 
classes generally felt that they owed something to the workers, for doing 
the drudgery needed to keep an industrialised society going. And it was 
taken for granted that the workers were a class, with collective interests 
of their own. In some instances--British miners, for example--they enjoyed 
considerable respect and a romantic aura. Even in the United States, where 
perhaps the question was not put quite the same way, the sentiments were 
there. Now there is an underclass of dangerous and hopeless folk, an elite 
of the fabulous and beautiful, and everybody in between is middle class. 
Meritocracy is taken for granted, bringing with it a perspective that sees 
only individuals, not groups. There are no working classes, only low-grade 
employees. In a meritocracy, respect is due according to the rank that an 
individual has attained. And since achievement is an individual matter, 
those at the upper levels see no reason to feel they owe anything to those 
at lower ones. This state of affairs will probably endure until such time 
that people cease to think of their society as a meritocracy, with its 
upbeat tone of progress and fairness, and start to feel that they are 
living in a Red Queen world, where they have to run ever faster just to 
stay in the same place.  MAREK KOHN'S most recent book, published last 
year, is As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind. His other 
books include The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science and Dope 
Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground. He writes a weekly 
column on digital culture, Second Site, for the London Independent on 
Sunday.

Stephen M. Kosslyn  "How do people differ in the ways they think and 
learn?"  Most Americans, even (or, perhaps, especially) educated 
Americans, seem to believe that all people are basically the same--we have 
the same innate abilities and capacities, and only hard work and luck 
separates those who are highly skilled from those who are not. But this 
idea is highly implausible. People differ along every other dimension, 
from the size of their stomachs and shoes to the length of their toes and 
tibias. They even differ in the sizes of their brains. So, why shouldn't 
they also differ in their abilities and capacities? Of course, the answer 
is that they do. It's time to acknowledge this fact and take advantage of 
it.  In my view, the 21st century is going to be the "Century of 
Personalization." No more off-the-rack drugs: Gene and proteonomic chips 
will give readouts for each person, allowing drugs to be tailored to their 
individual physiologies. No more off-the-rack clothes: For example, you'll 
stick your feet in a box, lasers will measure every aspect of them, and 
shoes will be custom-made according to your preferred style. Similarly, no 
more off-the-rack teaching.  Specifically, the first step is to diagnose 
individual differences in cognitive abilities and capacities, so we can 
play to a given person's strengths and avoid falling prey to his or her 
weaknesses. But in order to characterize these differences, we first need 
to understand at least the broad outlines of general mechanisms that are 
common to the species.  All of us have biceps and triceps, but these 
muscles differ in their strength. So too with our mental muscles. All of 
us have a short-term memory, for example (in spite of how it may sometimes 
feel at the end of the day), and all of us are capable storing information 
in long-term memory. Differences among people in part reflect differences 
in the efficacy of such mechanisms. For example, there are at least four 
distinct ways that visual/spatial information can be processed (which I'm 
not going to go into here), and people differ in their relative abilities 
on each one. Presenting the same content in different ways will invite 
different sorts of processing, which will be more or less congenial for a 
given person.  But there's more to it than specifying mechanisms and 
figuring out how well people can use them (as daunting as that is). Many 
of the differences in cognitive abilities and capacities probably reflect 
how mechanisms work together and when they are recruited. Understanding 
such differences will tell us how to organize material so that it goes 
down smoothly. For example, how--for a given person-should examples and 
general principles be intermixed?  And, yet more. We aren't bloodless 
brains floating in vats, soaking up information pumped into us. Rather, 
it's up to us to decide what to pay attention to, and what to think about. 
Thus, it's no surprise that people learn better when they are motivated. 
We need to know how a particular student should be led to use the 
information during learning. For example, some people may "get" physics 
only when it's taught in the context of auto mechanics.  All of this 
implies that methods of teaching in the 21st Century will be tightly tied 
to research in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. At 
present, the study of individual differences is almost entirely divorced 
from research on general mechanisms. Even if this is remedied, it's going 
to be a challenge to penetrate the educational establishment and have this 
information put to use. So, the smart move will probably be to do an 
end-run around this establishment, using computers to tutor children 
individually outside of school. This in turn raises the specter of another 
kind of Digital Divide. Some of us may in fact still get off-the-rack 
education.  Finally, I'll leave aside another set of questions no one 
seems to be seriously asking: What should be taught? And should the same 
material be taught to everyone? You can imagine why this second question 
isn't being asked, but it's high time we seriously considered making the 
curriculum relevant for the 21st Century.  STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN, a full 
professor of psychology at Harvard at age 34, is a researcher focusing 
primarily on the nature of visual mental imagery. His books include Image 
and Mind, Ghosts in the Mind's Machine, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive 
Neuroscience, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate, and 
Psychology: The Brain, the Person, the World.

Kai Krause  "What is the difference between men and pigs?"  Questions... 
We ask many questions ...  ...about our species, our gender, our friends, 
lovers and ourselves, the mystery who each of us is and where in the ant 
hill the intelligence lies, if each ant has no clue.  We search for the 
variations amongst a set, try to define the set in its limits and borders 
against other sets, look for analogies, anomalies and statistical 
outliers....  There is in fact an almost universal algorithm, like cats 
stalking their prey, to makes sense of our nature by boundary conditions, 
alas compiled with spotty statistics and messy heuristics, gullible souls, 
political machinations, cheats, lies and video tape, in short: human 
nature. We search and probe, the literate digerati confer virtually, each 
wondering about the other, each looking at their unique sets of parents, 
and the impossibility to imagine them in the act of procreation.  In other 
words, we still have no idea what-so-ever who we really are, what mankind 
as a whole is all about. We have mild inclinations on where we have been, 
sort of, and contradictory intentions on where we may be headed, kind of, 
but all in all, we are remarkably clue-free.  But that question at least 
need no longer be asked and has indeed vanished after this:  Even when 
they had way too much to drink, pigs don´t turn into men.  KAI KRAUSE is 
currently building a research lab dubbed "Byteburg" in a thousand year old 
castle above the Rhein river in the geometric center of Europe. He asked 
not to be summed up by previous accomplishments, titles or awards.

Lawrence M. Krauss   "Does God Exist?"  In the 1960's and 70's it seemed 
just a matter of time before antiquated notions of god, heaven, and divine 
intervention would disappear from the intellectual spectrum, at least in 
the US. Instead, we find ourselves in an era when God appears to be on the 
lips of all politicians, creationism is rampant in our schools, and the 
separation of church and state seems more fragile than ever. What is the 
cause of this regression, and what can we do to combat it? Surely, one of 
the legacies of science is to learn to accept the Universe for what it is, 
rather than imposing our own belief systems on it. We should be prepared 
to offend any sensibilities, even religious ones, when they disagree with 
the evidence of experiment. Should scientists be more vocal in order to 
combat the born-again evangelists who are propagating ill-founded notions 
about the cosmos?  LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS is Ambrose Swasey Professor of 
Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Chair of the Physics Department at 
Case Western Reserve University. He is the recipient of the AAAS Award for 
Public Understanding of Science, and this year's Lilienfeld Prize from the 
American Physical Society. He is the author of numerous books, including 
The Physics of Star Trek.

Leon Lederman  "Does God play dice?" (...first asked by Albert Einstein 
some time in the 30's.)  Like mathematics whose symbols can represent 
physical properties when applied to some scientific problem, God is a 
convenient symbol for nature, for the way the world works. Einstein's 
reaction of utter incredibility to the quantum theory from its development 
in the late 20's until his death in 1955, was echoed by colleagues who had 
participated in the early creation of the quantum revolution, which 
Richard Feynman had termed the most radical theory ever.  Well does she? 
The simplest example of what sure looks like God playing dice happens when 
you walk past a store window on a sunny day. Of course you are not just 
admiring your posture and checking your attire, you are probably watching 
the guy undressing the manikin, but that is another story.  So how do you 
see yourself, albeit dimly, while the manikin abuser sees you very 
clearly? Everyone knows that light is a stream of photons, here from the 
sun, some striking your nose, then reflected in all directions. We focus 
on two photons heading for the window. We'll need thousands to get a good 
picture but two will do for a start. One penetrates the window and impacts 
the eye of the manikin dresser. The second is reflected from the store 
window and hits your eye, a fine picture of a good looking pedestrian! 
What determines what the photons will do? The photons are 
identical...trust me. Philosophers of science assure us that identical 
experiments give identical results.  Not so!  The only rational conclusion 
would seem to be that she plays dice at each impact of the photon. Using a 
die with 10 faces, good enough for managing this bit of the world, numbers 
one to nine determine that the photon goes through, a ten and the photon 
is reflected. Its random...a matter of probability.  Dress this concept up 
in shiny mathematics and we have quantum science which underlies physics, 
most of chemistry and molecular biology. It now accounts for 43.7% of our 
GNP. (this is consistent with 87.1% of all numbers being made up.)  So 
what was wrong with Einstein and his friends? Probabilistic nature which 
is applicable to the world of atoms and smaller, has implications which 
are bizarre, spooky, wierd. Granting that it works, Einstein could not 
accept it and hoped for a deeper explanation. Today, many really smart 
physicists are are seeking a kinder, gentler formulation but 99.3% of 
working physicists go along with the notion that she is one hell-of-a crap 
shooter.  LEON M. LEDERMAN , the director emeritus of Fermi National 
Accelerator Laboratory, has received the Wolf Prize in Physics (1982), and 
the Nobel Prize in Physics (1988). In 1993 he was awarded the Enrico Fermi 
Prize by President Clinton. He is the author of several books, including 
(with David Schramm) From Quarks to the Cosmos : Tools of Discovery, and 
(with Dick Teresi) The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What 
Is the Question?

Joseph Le Doux  "How do our brains become who we are?"  Many 
neuroscientists, myself included, went into brain research because of an 
interest in the fact that our brains make us who we are. But the topics we 
end up working on are typically more mundane. It's much easier to research 
the neural basis of perception, memory or emotion than the way perceptual, 
memory, and emotion systems are integrated in the process of encoding who 
we are. Questions about the neural basis of personhood, the self, have 
never been at the forefront of brain science, and so are not, strictly 
speaking, lost questions to the field. But they are lost questions for 
those of us who were drawn to neuroscience by an interest in them, and 
then settle for less when overcome with frustration over the magnitude of 
the problem relative to the means we have for solving it. But questions 
about the self and the brain may not be as hard to address as they seem. A 
simple shift in emphasis from issues about the way the brain typically 
works in all of us to the way it works in individuals would be an 
important entry point. This would then necessitate that research on 
cognitive processes, like perception or memory, take subjects' motivations 
and emotions into consideration, rather than doing everything possible to 
eliminate them. Eventually, researchers would study perception, memory, or 
emotion less as isolated brain functions than as activities that, when 
integrated, contribute to the real function of the brain-- the creation 
and maintenance of the self.  JOSEPH LEDOUX is a Professor of Neural 
Science at New York University. He is author of The Emotional Brain.

Pamela McCorduck   "Can machines think?" It burned through the sixties, 
seventies and even eighties, until the answer was, Of course. It was 
replaced with a different, less emotionally fraught question: How can we 
make them think smarter/better/deeper? The central issue is the social, 
not scientific, definition of "thinking". A generation of Western 
intellectuals who took their identity mainly from their intelligence has 
grown too old to ask the question with any conviction, and anyway, 
machines are all around them thinking up a storm. Machines don't yet think 
like Einstein, but then neither do most people, and we don't question 
their humanity on that account. PAMELA McCORDUCK is the author or coauthor 
of seven books, among them Machines Who Think, and coauthor with Nancy 
Ramsey of The Futures Of Women: Scenarios for the 21st Century.

Dan McNeill "Where is the Great American Novel?" This question haunted 
serious writers in the early 20th century, when critics sought a product 
that measured up to the European standard. Now it is dead, and the 
underlying notion is in ICU. What happened?  Well, the idea itself was 
never a very good one. It had breathtakingly hazy contours. It ignored the 
work of authors like Melville, Hawthorne, Wharton, and Twain. And it 
seemed to assume that a single novel could sum up this vast and complex 
nation. I'd like to think its disappearance reflects these problems.   But 
technology also helped shelve the question. As media proliferated, 
literature grew less central. If the Great American Novel appeared 
tomorrow, how many people would actually read it? My guess: Most would 
wait for the movie. DANIEL McNEILL is the author of The Face, and 
principal author of the best-selling Fuzzy Logic, which won the Los 
Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology, and was a New York 
Times "Notable Book of the Year".

John H. McWhorter  "Are subordinate clauses more typical of languages with 
a long literary tradition than integral features of human speech?" 
Contemporary linguists tend to assume in their work that subordinate 
clauses, such as "The boy that I saw yesterday" or "I knew what happened 
when she came down the steps", are an integral part of the innate 
linguistic endowment, and/or central features of "human speech" writ 
large. Most laymen would assume the same thing. However, the fact is that 
when we analyze a great many strictly spoken languages with no written 
tradition, subordinate clauses are rare to nonexistent. In many Native 
American languages, for example, the only way to express something like 
the men who were members is a clause which parses approximately as "The 
'membering' men"; the facts are similar in thousands of other languages 
largely used orally.  In fact, even in earlier documents in today's "tall 
building" literary languages, one generally finds a preference for 
stringing simple main clauses together--she came down the steps, and I 
knew what happened rather than embedding them in one another along the 
lines of when she came down the steps, I knew what happened. The guilty 
sense we often have when reading English of the first half of the last 
millennium that the writing is stylistically somewhat "clunky" is due 
largely to the marginality of the subordinate clause: here is Thomas 
Malory in the late fifteenth century:  And thenne they putte on their 
helmes and departed  and recommaunded them all wholly unto the Quene and 
there was wepynge and grete sorowe Thenne the Quene departed in to her 
chamber and helde her that no man shold perceyue here grete sorowes  Early 
Russian parses similarly, and crucially, so do the Hebrew Bible and the 
Greek of Homer.  At the time that these documents were written, writing 
conventions had yet to develop, and thus written language hewed closer to 
the way language is actually spoken on the ground. Over time, subordinate 
clauses, a sometime thing in speech, were developed as central features in 
written speech, their economy being aesthetically pleasing, and more 
easily manipulated via the conscious activity of writing than the 
spontaneous "on-line" activity of speaking. Educated people, exposed 
richly to written speech via education, tended to incorporate the 
subordinate clause mania into their spoken varieties. Hence today we think 
of subordinate clauses as "English", as the French do "French", and so 
on--even though if we listen to a tape recording of ourselves speaking 
casually, even we tend to embrace main clauses strung together in favor of 
the layered sentential constructions of Cicero.  But the "natural" state 
of language persists in the many which have had no written tradition. In 
the 1800s, various linguists casually speculated as to whether subordinate 
clauses were largely artifactual rather than integral to human language, 
with one (Karl Brugmann) even going as far as to assert that originally, 
humans spoke only with main clauses.  Today, however, linguistics operates 
under the sway of our enlightened valuation of "undeveloped" cultures, 
which has, healthily, included an acknowledgment of the fact that the 
languages of "primitive" peoples are as richly complex as written Western 
languages. (In fact, the more National Geographic the culture, the more 
fearsomely complex the language tends to be overall.) However, this sense 
has discouraged most linguists from treading into the realm of noting that 
one aspect of "complexity", subordinate clauses, is in fact not central to 
expression in unwritten languages and is most copiously represented in 
languages with a long written tradition. In general, the idea that First 
World written languages might exhibit certain complexities atypical of 
languages spoken by preliterate cultures has largely been tacitly taboo 
for decades in linguistics, generally only treated in passing in obscure 
venues.  The problem is that this could be argued to bode ill for 
investigations of the precise nature of Universal Grammar, which will 
certainly require a rigorous separation of the cultural and contingent 
from the encoded.  JOHN H. MCWHORTER is Assistant Professor of Linguistics 
at the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Cornell 
University before entering his current position at Berkeley. He 
specializes in pidgin and creole languages, particularly of the Caribbean, 
and is the author of Toward a New Model of Creole Genesis and The Word on 
the Street : Fact and Fable About American English. He also teaches black 
musical theater history at Berkeley and is currently writing a musical 
biography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

Geoffrey Miller  "Three Victorian questions about potential sexual 
partners: 'Are they from a good family?'; 'What are their 
accomplishments?'; 'Was their money and status acquired ethically?' "  To 
our "Sex and the City" generation, these three questions sound shamefully 
Victorian and bourgeois. Yet they were not unique to 19th century England: 
they obsessed the families of eligible young men and women in every 
agricultural and industrial civilization. Only with our socially-atomized, 
late-capitalist society have these questions become tasteless, if not 
taboo. Worried parents ask them only in the privacy of their own 
consciences, in the sleepless nights before a son or daughter's 
ill-considered marriage.  The "good family" question always concerned 
genetic inheritance as much as financial inheritance. Since humans evolved 
in bands of closely-related kin, we probably evolved an intuitive 
appreciation of the genetics relevant to mate choice--taking into account 
the heritable strengths and weakness that we could observe in each 
potential mate's relatives, as well as their own qualities. Recent 
findings in medical genetics and behavior genetics demonstrate the wisdom 
of taking a keen interest in such relatives: one can tell a lot about a 
young person's likely future personality, achievements, beliefs, parenting 
style, and mental and physical health by observing their parents, 
siblings, uncles, and aunts. Yet the current American anti-genetic 
ideology demands that we ignore such cues of genetic quality--God forbid 
anyone should accuse us of eugenics. Consider the possible reactions a 
woman might have to hearing that a potential husband was beaten as a child 
by parents who were alcoholic, aggressive religious fundamentalists. Twin 
and adoption studies show that alcoholism, aggressiveness, and 
religiousity are moderately heritable, so such a man is likely to become a 
rather unpleasant father. Yet our therapy cures-all culture says the woman 
should offer only non-judgmental sympathy to the man, ignoring the inner 
warning bells that may be going off about his family and thus his genes. 
Arguably, our culture alienates women and men from their own genetic 
intuitions, and thereby puts their children at risk.  The question "What 
are their accomplishments?" refers not to career success, but to the 
constellation of hobbies, interests, and skills that would have adorned 
most educated young people in previous centuries. Things like playing 
pianos, painting portraits, singing hymns, riding horses, and planning 
dinner parties. Such accomplishments have been lost through time 
pressures, squeezed out between the hyper-competitive domain of school and 
work, and the narcissistic domain of leisure and entertainment. It is rare 
to find a young person who does anything in the evening that requires 
practice (as opposed to study or work)--anything that builds skills and 
self-esteem, anything that creates a satisfying, productive "flow" state, 
anything that can be displayed with pride in public. Parental hot-housing 
of young children is not the same: after the child's resentment builds 
throughout the French and ballet lessons, the budding skills are abandoned 
with the rebelliousness of puberty--or continued perfunctorily only 
because they will look good on college applications. The result is a 
cohort of young people whose only possible source of self-esteem is the 
school/work domain--an increasingly winner-take-all contest where only the 
brightest and most motivated feel good about themselves. (And we wonder 
why suicidal depression among adolescents has doubled in one generation.) 
This situation is convenient for corporate recruiting--it channels human 
instincts for self-display and status into an extremely narrow range of 
economically productive activities. Yet it denies young people the breadth 
of skills that would make their own lives more fulfilling, and their 
potential lovers more impressed. Their identities grow one-dimensionally, 
shooting straight up towards career success without branching out into the 
variegated skill sets which could soak up the sunlight of respect from 
flirtations and friendships, and which could offer shelter, and 
alternative directions for growth, should the central shoot snap.  The 
question "Was their money and status acquired ethically?" sounds even 
quainter, but its loss is even more insidious. As the maximization of 
share-holder value guides every decision in contemporary business, 
individual moral principles are exiled to the leisure realm. They can be 
manifest only in the Greenpeace membership that reduces one's guilt about 
working for Starbucks or Nike. Just as hip young consumers justify the 
purchase of immorally manufactured products as "ironic" consumption, they 
justify working for immoral businesses as "ironic" careerism. They aren't 
"really" working in an ad agency that handles the Phillip Morris account 
for China; they're just interning for the experience, or they're really an 
aspiring screen-writer or dot-com entrepreneur. The explosion in 
part-time, underpaid, high-turnover service industry jobs encourages this 
sort of amoral, ironic detachment on the lower rungs of the corporate 
ladder. At the upper end, most executives assume that shareholder value 
trumps their own personal values. And in the middle, managers dare not 
raise issues of corporate ethics for fear of being down-sized. The dating 
scene is complicit in this corporate amorality. The idea that Carrie 
Bradshaw or Ally McBeal would stop seeing a guy just because he works for 
an unethical company doesn't even compute. The only relevant morality is 
personal--whether he is kind, honest, and faithful to them. Who cares 
about the effect his company is having on the Phillipino girls working for 
his sub-contractors? "Sisterhood" is so Seventies. Conversely, men who 
question the ethics of a woman's career choice risk sounding sexist: how 
dare he ask her to handicap herself with a conscience, when her gender is 
already enough of a handicap in getting past the glass ceiling?  In place 
of these biologically, psychologically, ethically grounded questions, 
marketers encourage young people to ask questions only about each other's 
branded identities. Armani or J. Crew clothes? Stanford or U.C.L.A. 
degree? Democrat or Republican? Prefer "The Matrix" or "You've Got Mail'? 
Eminem or Sophie B. Hawkins? Been to Ibiza or Cool Britannia? Taking 
Prozac or Wellbutrin for the depression? Any taste that doesn't lead to a 
purchase, any skill that doesn't require equipment, any belief that 
doesn't lead to supporting a non-profit group with an aggressive P.R. 
department, doesn't make any sense in current mating market. We are 
supposed to consume our way into an identity, and into our most intimate 
relationships. But after all the shopping is done, we have to face, for 
the rest of our lives, the answers that the Victorians sought: what 
genetic propensities, fulfilling skills, and moral values do our sexual 
partners have? We might not have bothered to ask, but our children will 
find out sooner or later.  GEOFFREY MILLER is an evolutionary psychologist 
at the London School of Economics and at U.C.L.A. His first book was The 
Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature.

David G. Myers   "Does money buy happiness?"  Three in four entering 
collegians today deem it "very important" or "essential" that they become 
"very well-off financially." Most adults believe "more money" would boost 
their quality of life. And today's "luxury fever" suggests that affluent 
Americans and Europeans are putting their money where their hearts are. 
"Whoever said money can't buy happiness isn't spending it right," 
proclaimed a Lexus ad. But the facts of life have revealed otherwise. 
Although poverty and powerlessness often bode ill for body and spirit, 
wealth fails to elevate well-being. Surveys reveal that even lottery 
winners and the super rich soon adapt to their affluence. Moreover, those 
who strive most for wealth tend, ironically, to live with lower well-being 
than those focused on intimacy and communal bonds. And consider post-1960 
American history: Average real income has doubled, so we own twice the 
cars per person, eat out two and a half times as often, and live and work 
in air conditioned spaces. Yet, paradoxically, we are a bit less likely to 
say we're "very happy." We are more often seriously depressed. And we are 
just now, thankfully, beginning to pull out of a serious social recession 
that was marked by doubled divorce, tripled teen suicide, quadrupled 
juvenile violence, quintupled prison population, and a sextupled 
proportion of babies born to unmarried parents. The bottom line: Economic 
growth has not improved psychological morale or communal health.  DAVID G. 
MYERS is a social psychologist at Hope College (Michigan) and author, most 
recently, of The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty 
and of A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss.

Randolph M. Nesse  "Why is life so full of suffering?"  Questions 
disappear when they seem to be answered or unanswerable. The interesting 
missing questions are the apparently answered ones that are not, and the 
apparently unanswerable ones that are.  One of life's most profound 
questions has been thought to be unanswerable. That question is, "Why is 
life so full of suffering?" Impatience with centuries of theological and 
philosophical speculation has led many to give up on the big question, and 
to ask instead only how brain mechanisms work, and why people differ in 
their experiences of suffering. But the larger question has an answer, an 
evolutionary answer. The capacities for suffering--pain, hunger, cough, 
anxiety, sadness, boredom and all the res--have been shaped by natural 
selection. They seem to be problems because they are so painful and 
because they are aroused only in adverse circumstances, but they are, in 
fact, solutions.  The illusion that they are problems is further fostered 
by the smoke-detector principle--selection has shaped control mechanisms 
that express defensive responses whenever the costs are less than the 
protection they provide. This is often indeed, much more often than is 
absolutely necessary. Thus, while the capacities for suffering are useful 
and generally well-regulated, most individual instances are excessive or 
entirely unnecessary. It has not escaped notice that this principle has 
profound implications for the power and limits of pharmacology to relieve 
human suffering.  RANDOLPH M. NESSE is Professor of Psychiatry and 
Director of the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University 
of Michigan. He is the author, with George Williams, of Why We Get Sick: 
The New Science of Darwinian Medicine.

Tor Norretranders  "Who are we?" In the not so distant future we will have 
to revive the question about who and what we are. We will have to, not 
because we choose to do so, but because the question will be posed to us 
by Others or Otherness: Aliens, robots, mutants, and the like. New 
phenomena like information processing artifacts, computational life forms, 
bioengineered humans, upgraded animals and pen-pals in space will force us 
to consider ourselves and our situation: Why didn't we finish hunger on 
this planet? Are we evil or just idiots? Why do we really want to rebuild 
ourselves? Do we regain our soul when the tv-set is turned off? It’s going 
to happen like this: We build a robot. It turns towards us and says: "If 
technology is the answer then what was the question?" TOR NORRETRANDERS is 
a science writer, consultant, lecturer and organizer based in Copenhagen, 
Denmark. He was recently appointed Chairman of the National Council for 
Competency.

Rafael E. Núñez  "Do computers think?"  This question was at the heart of 
heated debates for decades during the recently past century, and it was at 
the ambitious origins of the Artificial Intelligence adventure. It had 
profound implications not only for science, but also for philosophy, 
technology, business, and even theology. In the 50's and 60's, for 
instance, it made a lot of sense to ask the question whether one day a 
computer could defeat an international chess master, and if it did, it was 
assumed that we would learn a great deal about how human thought works. 
Today we know that building such a machine is possible, but the reach of 
the issue has dramatically changed. Nowadays not many would claim that 
building such a computer actually informs us in an interesting way about 
what human thought is and how it works. Beyond the (indeed impressive) 
engineering achievements involved in building such machines, we got from 
them little (if any) insight into the mysteries, variability, depth, 
plasticity, and richness of human thought. Today, the question "do 
computers think?" has become completely uninteresting and it has 
disappeared from the cutting edge academic circus, remaining mainly in the 
realm of pop science, Hollywood films, and video games.  And why it 
disappeared?  It disappeared because it was finally answered with 
categorical responses that stopped generating fruitful work. The question 
became useless and uninspiring, ... boring. What is interesting, however, 
is that the question disappeared with no single definitive answer! It 
disappeared with categorical "of-course-yes" and "of-course-not" 
responses. Of-course-yes people, in general motivated by a technological 
goal (i.e., "to design and to build something") and implicitly based on 
functionalist views, built their arguments on the amazing ongoing 
improvement in the design and development of hardware and software 
technologies. For them the question became uninteresting because it didn't 
help to design or to build anything anymore. What became relevant for 
of-course-yes people was mainly the engineering challenge, that is, to 
actually design and to build computers capable of processing algorithms in 
a faster, cheaper, and more flexible manner. (And also, for many, what 
became relevant was to build computers for human activities and purposes). 
Now when of-course-yes people are presented with serious problems that 
challenge their view, they provide the usual response: "just wait until we 
get better computers" (once known as the wait-until the-year-2000 
argument). On the other hand there were the of-course not people, who were 
mainly motivated by a scientific task (i.e., "to describe, explain, and 
predict a phenomenon"), which was not necessarily technology-driven. They 
mainly dealt with real-time and real-world biological, psychological, and 
cultural realities. These people understood that most of the arrogant 
predictions made by Artificial Intelligence researchers in the 60's and 
70's hadn't been realized because of fundamental theoretical problems, not 
because of the lack of powerful enough machines. They observed that even 
the simplest everyday aspects of human thought, such as common sense, 
sense of humor, spontaneous metaphorical thought, use of counterfactuals 
in natural language, to mention only a few, were in fact intractable for 
the most sophisticated machines. They also observed that the nature of the 
brain and other bodily mechanisms that make thinking and the mind 
possible, were by several orders of magnitude, way more complex than what 
it was thought during the hey-days of Artificial Intelligence. Thus for of 
course-not people the question whether computers think became 
uninteresting, since it didn't provide insights into a genuine 
understanding of the intricacies of human thinking. Today the question is 
dead. The answer had become a matter of faith.  RAFAEL E. NÚÑEZ, currently 
at the Department of Psychology of the University of Freiburg, is a 
research associate of the University of California, Berkeley. He has 
worked for more than a decade on the foundations of embodied cognition, 
with special research into the nature and origin of mathematical concepts. 
He has published in several languages in a variety of areas, and has 
taught in leading academic institutions in Europe, the United States, and 
South America. He is the author (with George Lakoff) of Where Mathematics 
Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being; and 
co-editor (with Walter Freeman) of Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of 
Action, Intention, and Emotion.

James J. O'Donnell  "the old Platonic questions about the nature of the 
good and the form of beauty" Metaphysical questions.   Metaphysical 
answers haven't disappeared: the new agers are full of them, and so are 
the old religionists.   Cosmological questions haven't disappeared: but 
scientists press them as real questions about the very physical universe. 
But the old Platonic questions about the nature of the good and the form 
of beauty--they went away when we weren't looking. They won't be back. 
JAMES J. O'DONNELL, Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for 
Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania, is 
the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.

Jay Ogilvy "What will life be like after the revolution?"  The 
disappearance of this question isn't only a trace of the deletion of the 
left. It is also a measure of our loss of faith in secular redemption. We 
don't look forward anymore to radical transformation.  Perhaps it's a 
result of a century of disappointments: from the revolution of 1917 to 
Stalin and the fall of communism; from the Spanish Civil War to Franco; 
from Mao's long march to Deng's proclamation that to get rich is glorious. 
Perhaps it's a result of political history. But there was more that had to 
do with psychological transformation. Remember Norman O. Brown's essay, 
"The place of apocalypse in the life of the mind"? Remember R. D. Laing's 
turn on breakdown as breakthrough? Remember the fascination with words 
like 'metamorphosis' and 'metanoia'?  Maybe we're just getting older and 
all too used to being the people we are. But I'd like to think we're 
getting wiser and less naive about the possibility of shedding our pasts 
overnight.  It's important to distinguish between political liberalism on 
the one hand and a faith in discontinuous transformation on the other. If 
we fail to make this distinction, then forgetting about the revolution 
turns (metanoically) into the familiar swing to the right. Old radicals 
turn reactionary. If we're less dramatic about our beliefs, if we're more 
cautious about distinguishing between revolutionary politics and 
evolutionary psychology, then we'll retain our faith in the dream that we 
can do better. Just not overnight.  p.s. Part of the passion for paradigms 
and thier shiftings may derive from displaced revolutionary fervor. If you 
yearn for transfiguration, but can't find it in religion or politics, then 
you'll seek it elsewhere, like the history of science.  p.p.s. There is 
one place where talk of transformation is alive and kicking, if not well: 
The executive suite. The business press is full of books about corporate 
transformation, re-engineering from a blank sheet of paper, reinvention 
from scratch. Yes, corporate America is feeling the influence of the 
sixties as boomers reach thte board room. And this is not a bad thing. 
For, just as the wisdom to distinguish between revolutionary politics and 
evolutionary psychology can help us keep the faith in marginal 
improvements in the human condition, so the tension between greying 
warriors for change and youthful stalwarts of the status quo will keep us 
from lurching left or right.  JAMES OGILVY is co-founder and managing 
director of Global Business Network; taught philosophy at Yale and 
Williams; served as director of research for the Values and Lifestyles 
Program at SRI International; author of Many Dimensional Man, and Living 
without a Goal.

Sylvia Paull  "What do women want?"  People in the Western world assume 
women have it all: education, job opportunities, birth control, love 
control, and financial freedom. But women still lack the essential 
freedom--equality--they lacked a century ago. Women are minorities in 
every sector of our government and economy, and women are still expected 
to raise families while at the same time earning incomes that are 
comparably lower than what males earn. And in our culture, women are still 
depicted as whores, bimbos, or bloodsuckers by advertisers to sell 
everything from computers to cars.  Will it take another century or 
another millenium before the biological differences between men and women 
are taken as a carte blanche justification for the unequal treatment of 
women?  SYLVIA PAULL is Founder, Gracenet (www.gracenet.net) Serving women 
in high-tech and business media.

John Allen Paulos  "Don't reckon that I know."  The question that has 
appeared this year is "What questions (plural) have disappeared and why?" 
Countless questions have disappeared, of course, but for relatively few 
reasons.   The most obvious vanishings are connected to the passing of 
time. No one asks anymore "Who's pitching tomorrow for the Brooklyn 
Dodgers?" or "Who is Princess Diana dating now?"  Other disappearances are 
related to the advance of science and mathematics. People no longer 
seriously inquire whether Jupiter has moons, whether DNA has two or three 
helical strands, or whether there might be integers a, b, and c such that 
a^3 + b^3 = c^3.  Still other vanished queries are the result of changes 
in our ontology, scientific or otherwise. We've stopped wondering, "What 
happened to the phlogiston?" or "How many witches live in this valley?" 
The most interesting lacunae in the erotetic landscape, however, derive 
from lapsed assumptions, untenable distinctions, incommensurable mindsets, 
or superannuated worldviews that in one way or another engender questions 
that are senseless or, at least, much less compelling than formerly. "What 
are the election's exact vote totals" comes to mind.  Now that I've 
clarified to myself the meaning of "What questions have disappeared and 
why?" I have to confess that I don't have any particularly telling 
examples. (Reminds me of the joke about the farmer endlessly elucidating 
the lost tourist's query about the correct road to some hamlet before 
admitting, "Don't reckon that I know.")  JOHN ALLEN PAULOS, bestselling 
author, mathematician, and public speaker is professor of mathematics at 
Temple University in Philadelphia. In addition to being the author of a 
number of scholarly papers on mathematical logic, probability, and the 
philosophy of science, Dr. Paulos books include Innumeracy - Mathematical 
Illiteracy and Its Consequences, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, and 
Once Upon a Number.

Christopher Phillips  "None."  Or at least, certainly not the ones that 
have so far been submitted to this list, since the questions posted are 
proof positive that they have not disappeared at all, or at least, not 
altogether. Sure, some questions have their heyday for a while, and then 
they may disappear for many a moon. But the great question you posed -- 
what questions have disappeared? -- shows that they were just waiting for 
a question like this for someone to be reminded just how much emptier our 
existence would be without certain questions.  But I also think that some 
questions certainly have gone by the wayside for a long time, though not 
necessarily the ones that so far have been posed. We may ask, for 
instance, questions like, Has history ended?, and then go on to offer up a 
response of one sort or another. But when is the last time we asked, what 
*is* history? What different types of history are there? What makes 
history history, regardless of which type it is? Or we may ask: Why have 
certain questions been discarded? But when's the last time anyone has 
asked, What is a question? What does a question do? What does a question 
to do us, and what do we do to it? We may ask: How do people differ in how 
they think and learn? But do we still ask: What is thinking? What is 
learning?  Instead, we seem to take for granted that we know what history 
is, that we know what thinking is, that we know what learning is, when in 
fact if we delved a little more into these questions, we may well find 
that none of us hold the same views on what these rich concepts mean and 
how they function. Which leads me to this perspective: What *has* all but 
disappeared, I think, is a way of answering questions, regardless of which 
one is being posed, regardless of how seemingly profound or off-beat or 
mundane it is. I'm speaking of the kind of rigorous, exhaustive, 
methodical yet highly imaginative scrutiny of a Socrates or a Plato that 
challenged all assumptions embedded in a question, and that revealed 
breathtakingly new vistas and hidden likenesses between seemingly 
disparate entities.  Who these days takes the time and effort, much less 
has the critical and creative acumen, to answer questions as those I've 
already posed, much less such questions as ¨What is human good?¨ or ¨What 
is a good human?¨in the soul-stirringly visionary yet at the same time 
down-to-earth way they did? We need a new generation of questioners in the 
mold of Plato and Sorcrates, people who dare to think a bit outside the 
lines, who take nothing for granted when a question is posed, and who 
subject their scrutiny to continual examination and consideration of 
cogent objections and alternative ways of seeing. CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS is 
the author of ¨Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy¨, and 
founder-executive director of the nonprofit Society for Philosophical 
Inquiry.

Cliff Pickover  "Did Noah Really Collect all Species of Earthly Organism 
on his Ark?"  People who interpret the Bible literally may believe that a 
man named Noah collected all species of Earthly organisms on his ark. 
However, scientists no longer ask this question. Let me put the problem in 
a modern perspective by considering what it means to have animals from 
every species on an ark. Consider that siphonapterologists (experts in 
fleas) recognize 1,830 variety of fleas. Incredible as it may seem, there 
are around 300,000 species of beetles, making beetles one of the most 
diverse groups of organisms on earth. When biologist J.B.S. Haldane was 
asked by a religious person what message the Lord conveyed through His 
creations, he responded, "an inordinate fondness for beetles."  One of my 
favorite books on beetles is Ilkka Hanski's Dung Beetle Ecology, which 
points out that a large number (about 7000 species) of the 300,000 species 
of beetles live off animal dung. Did Noah bring these species on the ark? 
If he did, did he concern himself with the fact that animal dung is often 
fiercely contested. On the African savanna up to 4000 beetles have been 
observed to converge on 500 grams of fresh elephant dung within 15 minutes 
after it is deposited.  Did Noah or his family also take kleptoparastic 
beetles on the ark? These are dung beetles known to steal dung from 
others. Did Noah need to take into consideration that insect dung 
communities involve hundreds of complex ecological interactions between 
coprophagous flies and their parasites, insects, mites, and nematodes (an 
ecology probably difficult to manage on the ark!). In South Africa, more 
than 100 species of dung beetle occur together in a single cow pat. One 
gigantic species, Heliocopris dilloni resides exclusively in elephant 
dung. A few species of beetles are so specialized that they live close to 
the source of dung, in the hairs near an animal's anus.  You get my point! 
It's quite a mystery as to what the Biblical authors meant when they 
called for Noah taking pairs of every animal on the Earth. Incidentally, 
scientists very roughly estimate that the weight of animals in the 
hypothetical ark to be 1000 tons. You can use a value of 10 million for 
the number of species and assume an average mass of 100 grams. (Insects 
decrease this figure for average mass because of the huge number of insect 
species.) There would be some increase in mass if plants were used in the 
computation. (How would this change if extinct species were included?) 
Even if Noah took ten or twenty of each kind of mammal, very few would be 
alive after a thousand years because approximately 50 individuals of a 
single species are needed to sustain genetic health. Any small population 
is subject to extinction from disease, environmental changes, and genetic 
risks--the gradual accumulation of traits with small but harmful effects. 
There is also the additional problem of making sure that there is both 
male and female offspring surviving. Today, species are considered 
endangered well before their numbers drop below fifty. (Interestingly, 
there's a conflicting Biblical description in the story of Noah that 
indicated God wanted Noah to take "seven pairs of clean animals... and a 
pair of the animals that are not clean... and seven pairs of the birds of 
the air also.")  The Biblical flood would probably kill most of the plant 
life on Earth. Even if the waters were to recede, the resultant salt 
deposits would prevent plants from growing for many years. Of additional 
concern is the ecological effect of the numerous dead carcasses caused by 
the initial flood.  Various authors have noted that if, in forty days and 
nights the highest mountains on Earth were covered, the required 
incredible rate of rain fall of fifteen feet per hour would sink the ark. 
All of these cogitations lead me to believe that most scientifically 
trained people no longer ask whether an actual man named Noah collected 
all species of Earthly organism on his ark. By extension, most 
scientifically trained people no longer ask if the Bible is literal truth. 
CLIFF PICKOVER is author of over 20 books, his latest being Wonders of 
Numbers: Adventures in Math, Mind, and Meaning. His web site, 
www.pickover.com, has received over 300,000 visits.

Steven Pinker "What are the implications of human nature for political 
systems? This question was openly discussed in two historical periods."` 
The first was the Enlightenment. Hobbes claimed the brutishishness of man 
in a state of nature called for a governmental Leviathan. Rousseau's 
concept of the noble savage led him to call for the abolition of property 
and the predominance of the "general will." Adam Smith justified market 
capitalism by saying that it is not the generosity but the self-interest 
of the baker that leads him to give us bread. Madison justified 
constitutional government by saying that if people were angels, no 
government would be necessary, and if angels were to govern people, no 
controls on government would be necessary. The young Marx's notion of a 
"species character" for creativity and self-expression led to "From each 
according to his ability"; his later belief that human nature is 
transformed throughout history justified revolutionary social change.  The 
second period was the 1960s and its immediate aftermath, when 
Enlightenment romanticism was revived. Here is an argument the US Attorney 
General, Ramsay Clark, against criminal punishment: "Healthy, rational 
people will not injure others ... they will understand that the individual 
and his society are best served by conduct that does not inflict injury. 
... Rehabilitated, an individual will not have the capacity-cannot bring 
himself-to injure another or take or destroy property." This is, of 
course, an empirical claim about human nature, with significant 
consequences for policy.  The discussion came to an end in the 1970s, when 
even the mildest non romantic statements about human nature were met with 
angry denunciations and accusations of Nazism. At the century's turn we 
have an unprecedented wealth of data from social psychology, ethnography, 
behavioral economics, criminology, behavioral genetics, cognitive 
neuroscience, and so on, that could inform (though of course, not dictate) 
policies in law, political decision-making, welfare, and so on. But they 
are seldom brought to bear on the issues. In part this is a good thing, 
because academics have been known to shoot off their mouths with 
half-baked or crackpot policy proposals. But since all policy decisions 
presuppose some hypothesis about human nature, wouldn't it make sense to 
bring the presuppositions into the open so they can be scrutinized in the 
light of our best data?  STEVEN PINKER is professor in the Department of 
Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center 
for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and 
Language Development, Learnability and Cognition, The Language Instinct , 
How the Mind Works, and Words and Rules.

Jordan Pollack  "Should the right to own property be preserved?"  For all 
of history, humans traded objects, then traded currency for objects, with 
the idea that when you buy some thing, you own it. This most fundamental 
human right--the right to own--is under attack again. Only this time, the 
software industry, not the followers of Karl Marx, are responsible.  In 
the last 15 years of the information age, we discovered that every object 
really has three separable components: the informational content, 
delivered on a physical medium, governed by the license, a social or legal 
contract governing the rights to use the thing. It used to be that the 
tangible media token (the thing) both held the content, and (via 
possession) enforced the common understanding of the "ownership" license. 
Owners have rights to a thing--to trade it, sell it, loan it, rent it, 
destroy it, donate it, paint it, photograph it, or even chop it up to sell 
in pieces.  For a book, the content is the sequence of words themselves, 
which may be rendered as ink scratches on a medium of paper bound inside 
cardboard covers. For song it is a reproduction of the audio pattern 
pressed into vinyl or plastic to be released by a reading device. The 
license - to own all rights but copy rights--was enforced simply by 
possession of the media token, the physical copy of the book or disk 
itself. If you wanted to, you could buy a book, rip it into separate 
pages, and sell each page individually. You can slice a vinyl record into 
individual song rings for trade.   For software, content is the evolving 
bits of program and data arranged to operate on some computer. Software 
can be delivered in paper, magnetic, optical, or silicon form, or can be 
downloaded from the internet, even wirelessly. Software publishers know 
the medium is completely irrelevant, except to give the consumer the 
feeling of a purchase.  Even though you had the feeling of trading money 
for something, your really don't own the software you paid for. The 
license clearly states that you don't. You are merely granted a right to 
use the information, and the real owner can terminate your license at 
will, if you criticize him in public. Moreover, you cannot resell the 
software, you cannot take a "suite" apart into working products to sell 
each one separately. You cannot rent it or loan it to a friend. You cannot 
look under the hood to try to fix it when it breaks. You don't actually 
own anything but exchanged your money for a "right to use", and those 
rights can be arbitrarily dictated, and then rendered worthless by the 
very monopoly you got it from, forcing you to pay again for something you 
felt you had acquired last year.  There is no fundamental difference 
between software, recordings, and books. E-books are not sold, but 
licensed, and Secure Music will be available in a pay-per-download format. 
Inexorably driven by more lucrative profits from rentals, I predict that 
within a couple of decades, you will no longer be able to "buy" a new book 
or record. You will not be able to "own" copies. This may not seem so 
nefarious, as long as you have easy access to the "celestial jukebox" and 
can temporarily download a "read-once" license to any entertainment from 
private satellites. Your children will have more room in their homes and 
offices without the weight of a lifetime collection of books and 
recordings.  What are humans when stripped of our libraries? And it won't 
stop with books.  For an automobile, the content is the blueprint, the 
organization of mechanisms into stylistic and functional patterns which 
move, built out of media such as metals, pipes, hoses, leather, plastic, 
rubber, and fluids. Because of the great expense of cloning a car, Ford 
doesn't have to spell out the licensing agreement: You own it until it is 
lost, sold, or stolen. You can rent it, loan it, sell it, take it apart, 
and sell the radio, tires, engine, carburetor, etc. individually.  But the 
license agreement can be changed! And when Ford discovers the power of 
UCITA, you will have to pay an annual fee for a car you don't own, which 
will blow up if you fail to bring it in or pay your renewal fee. And you 
will find that you cannot resell your car on an open secondary market, but 
can only trade it in to the automobile publisher for an upgrade.  Without 
an effort to protect the right to own, we may wake up to find that there 
is nothing left to buy.  JORDAN POLLACK, a computer science and complex 
systems professor at Brandeis, works on AI, Artificial Life, Neural 
Networks, Evolution, Dynamical Systems, Games, Robotics, Machine Learning, 
and Educational Technology. He is a prolific inventor, advises several 
startup companies and incubators, and in his spare time runs Thinmail, a 
service designed to enhance the usefulness of wireless email.

David G. Post   "... can there really be fossil sea-shells in the 
mountains of Kentucky, hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coast? " This 
question about questions may be a useful way to differentiate "science" 
from "not-science"; questions really do disappear in the former in a way, 
or at least at a rate, that they don't in the latter.  A question that has 
disappeared: can there really be fossil sea-shells in the mountains of 
Kentucky, hundreds of miles from the Atlantic coast?  I came across this 
particular question recently when reading Thomas Jefferson's 'Notes on the 
State of Virginia'; he devotes several pages to speculation about whether 
the finds in Kentucky really were sea-shells, and, if so, how they could 
have ended up there. Geologists could, today, tell him.  "...from what 
source do governments get their legitimate power?"  Perhaps another 
question dear to Jefferson's heart has also disappeared: from what source 
do governments get their legitimate power? In 1780, this was a real 
question, concerning which reasonable people gave different answers: 
'God,' or 'the divine right of Kings,' or 'heredity,' or 'the need to 
protect its citizens.' By declaring as 'self evident' the 'truth' that 
'governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed,' 
Jefferson was trying to declare that this question had, in fact, 
disappeared. I think he may have been right.  DAVID POST is Professor of 
Law at Temple University, and Senior Fellow at The Tech Center at George 
Mason University, with an interest in questions of (and inter-connections 
between) Internet law, complexity theory, and the ideas of Thomas 
Jefferson.

Rick Potts  "How do societies function and change?"  The general question 
of how human societies operate, and how they change, was once a central 
feature of theory-building in anthropology. The question--at least 
significant progress in answering the question--has largely disappeared at 
the emergent, large-scale level ("society" or "culture") originally 
defined by the social sciences.  Over the past three decades, behavioral 
biology and studies of gene-culture coevolution have made some important 
theoretical advances in the study of human social behavior. However, the 
concepts of inclusive fitness, reciprocal altruism, memes, coevolution, 
and related ideas have yet to effectively penetrate the question of how 
large-scale cultural institutions--political, economic, religious, legal, 
and other systems--function, stay the same, or change.  The strong 
inclination toward bottom-up explanations, which account for human social 
phenomena in terms of lower-level individual behaviors and epigenetic 
rules--implies either that social institutions (and thus how they function 
and change) are only epiphenomena, thus less worthy of investigating than 
the genetic bases of behavior and evolutionary psychology; or that 
cultural systems and institutions do exist--they function and change at a 
level of complexity above human psychology, decision-making, and 
epigenetic rules--but have largely been forgotten by certain fields 
purporting to study and to explain human social behavior.  RICHARD POTTS 
is Director of The Human Origins Program, Department of Anthropology, 
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution. He is the 
author of Humanity's Descent : The Consequences of Ecological Instability 
and a presenter, with Stephen Jay Gould, of a videotape, Tales of the 
Human Dawn.

Robert Provine  "Obsolete and Inappropriate Metaphors"  The detection of 
"questions that are no longer asked" is difficult. Old questions, like 
MacArthur's old soldiers, just fade away. Scientists and scholars in hot 
pursuit of new questions neither note nor mourn their passing. I regularly 
face a modest form of the disappearing question challenge when a textbook 
used in one of my classes is revised. Deletions are hard to find; they 
leave no voids and are more stealthy than black holes, not even affecting 
their surrounds. New text content stands out, while missing material must 
be established through careful line-by-line reading. Whether in textbooks 
or in life, we don't think much about what is no longer relevant.  My 
response to the inquiry about questions that are no longer asked is to 
reframe it and suggest instead a common class of missing questions, those 
associated with obsolete and inappropriate metaphors. Metaphor is a 
powerful cognitive tool, which, like all models, clarifies thinking when 
appropriate, but constrains it when inappropriate. Science is full of 
them. My professional specialties of neuroscience and biopsychology has 
mind/brain metaphors ranging from Locke's ancient blank slate (tabula 
rasa), to the more technologically advanced switchboard, and the metaphor 
de jour, the computer. None do justice to the brain as a soggy lump of 
wetware, but linger as cognitive/linguistic models. Natural selection in 
the realm of metaphors is slow and imperfect. Witness the reference to DNA 
as a "blueprint" for an organism, when Dawkins' "recipe" metaphor more 
accurately reflects DNA's incoding of instructions for organismic 
assembly.  ROBERT R. PROVINE is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience 
at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Laughter: A 
Scientific Investigation.

Eduardo Punset  "Looking at the world upside down: what are we enhancing 
or what is vanishing in our brains while flat and dormant views of the 
universe are slowly disappearing?"  Wrapped like hotdogs full of mustard, 
snorting in search of air to breath from beneath the blanket--like 
dendrites looking for the first time for new contacts--, the skull plunged 
in a floppy pillow and the eyes allowed only to stare at the grey sky, 
most of the time too flat and low to enjoy a more diversified life in 
three dimensions. What has been the impact on the newly born brain's 
positioned mummy-like, and tight for generations in the pram, of this 
upside down perception of the Universe?  We do have a point of reference 
to imagine what life was like during the first eight or nine months after 
birth, before the invention of the anatomically shaped infant car seat 
that makes our youngest travel and look around from their earliest age. 
I'll come to that later.  First let me insist for those unaware of radical 
innovations in evolutionary psychology, that no baby has ever been 
found--there are plenty of very reliable tests for that--, who after 
having experienced the glamour of looking at the Universe face to face, 
right and left, backwards and forward, has regretted the odd way of being 
carried around by previous generations. Not only that; no newly born would 
ever accept now to look at the Universe from other vantage points than the 
high-tech pushchair, carriages, and travelling systems for children aged 
birth to four years, developed in the mid-80's , out of the original baby 
car seat invented in America.  Just as monkeys become quickly aware of new 
inventions and adopt them without second thoughts, our youngest do not 
accept any longer to be carried in prams where they lied flat and dormant. 
They have suddenly become aware that they can be taken around in 
efficiently designed traveling engines, from where they can look at the 
world in movement practically as soon as they open their eyes.  If 
somebody thinks that the end of looking upside-down at the Universe during 
the first eight or nine months of life is not important enough to be 
quoted as the end of anything, think of what neuroscientists are 
discovering about what happens during the first five months of the unborn 
just after conception.  Professor Beckman in Wursburg University (Germany) 
has convinced at last his fellow psychiatrists that neuron's mistakes in 
their migration from the limbic to the upper layers of the brain of the 
unborn are responsible, to a very large extent, for the 1% of epileptics 
and schizophrenics in the world's population. By the way, the 1% is fixed, 
no matter how many neuroscientists join the battle against mental illness. 
It is like a sort of cosmic radiation background. The only exception that 
shows up is whenever deep malnutrition or feverish influenza in expectant 
mothers pushes the rate significantly up.  Likewise, very few scientist 
would refuse to acknowledge today, that what happens during the first five 
months of the embryo is not only relevant in the case of malformations and 
mental disorders, but also in the case of levels of intelligence and other 
reasonable behavior patterns. How could anybody discard then the 
tremendous impact on the newly born brain of interacting with the Universe 
face to face during the first eight to nine months?  Surely, if we 
continue searching for the missing link between a single gene and a 
bark--and I deeply hope that we do now that molecular biology and genetics 
have joined forces--, everybody should care about the end of the 
upside-down perception of the Universe, and the silent revolution led by 
babies nurtured in the latest high-tech travelling system's interactive 
culture.  Professor EDUARDO PUNSET teaches Economics at the Sarriá 
Chemichal Institute of Ramon Llull University (Barcelona). He is Chairman 
of Planetary Agency, an audiovisual concern for the public understanding 
of Science. He was IMF Representative in the Caribbean, Professor of 
Innovation & Technology at Madrid University, and Minister for Relations 
with the UE.

Tracy Quan  "Who does your bleeding?"  Recently, I was relaxing in my 
hotel room with a biography of Queen Elizabeth I. Her biographer noted 
that when Elizabeth R wasn't feeling quite herself she would call for a 
good "bleeding." I wondered about this practice which now seems so 
destructive and dangerous, especially given the hygienic possibilities of 
16th-century Britain. Even for the rich and famous. But Elizabeth R 
survived numerous bleedings and, I imagine, lots of other strange 
treatments that were designed to make her look and feel like her very best 
self--by the standards of her time. (Did she have a great immune system? 
Probably.)  As dotty and unclean as "bleedings" now seem to a 21st century 
New Yorker, I realized with a jolt that Elizabeth was pampering, not 
punishing, herself--and I was going to be late for my reflexology 
appointment. I had scheduled a two-hour orgy of relaxation and 
detoxification at a spa.  I imagine that the ladies at court asked each 
other, in the manner of ladies who-lunch, "Who does your 
bleeding?"--trading notes on price, ambiance and service, just as ladies 
today discuss their facials, massages and other personal treatments.  Some 
skeptics assume that the beauty and spa treatments of today are as 
ineffective or dangerous as those of the Renaissance period. In fact, 
there have been inroads. Germ theory helped--as did a host of other 
developments, including a fascination in the West with things Eastern. The 
kind of people who would once have gone in for bleeding now go in for 
things like reflexology and shiatsu. That urge to cleanse and detoxify the 
body has long been around but we've actually figured out how to do it 
because we better understand the body.  The pampered are prettier and 
healthier today than were their 16th century European counterparts. I 
wonder whether, another thousand or so years into the future, we will all 
look prettier and healthier in ways that we can't yet fathom. This kind of 
query might seem irresponsible, shallow, even immoral--given the real 
health crises facing human beings in 2001. But the way we look has 
everything to do with how we live and how we think.  And I'm glad that 
bleedings are no longer the rage.  TRACY QUAN, a writer and working girl 
living in New York, is the author of "Nancy Chan: Diary of a Manhattan 
Call Girl", a serial novel about the life and loves of Nancy Chan, a 
turn-of-the- millennium call girl. Excerpts from the novel--which began 
running in July, 2000 in the online magazine, Salon--have attracted a wide 
readership as well as the attention of the The New York Times and other 
publications.

Martin Rees  "Was Einstein Right?"  Einstein's theory of gravity--general 
relativity--transcended Newton's by offering deeper insights. It accounted 
naturally, in a way that Newton didn't, for why everything falls at the 
same speed, and why the force obeys an inverse square law. The theory 
dates from 1916, and was famously corroborated by the measured deflection 
of starlight during eclipses, and by the anomalies in Mercury's orbit. But 
it took more than 50 years before there were any tests that could measure 
the distinctive effects of the theory with better than 10 percent 
accuracy. In the 1960s and 1970s , there was serious interest in tests 
that could decide between general relativity and alternative theories that 
were still in the running. But now these tests have improved so much, and 
yielded such comprehensive and precise support for Einstein, that it would 
require very compelling evicence indeed to shake our belief that general 
relativity is the correct "classical" theory of gravity,  New and 
different experiments are nonetheless currently being planned. But the 
expectation that they'll corroborate the theory is no so strong that we'd 
demand a high burden of proof before accepting a contrary result, For 
instance, NASA plans to launch an ultra-precise gyroscope ("Gravity Probe 
B") to measure tiny precession effects. If the results confirm Einstein, 
nobody will be surprised nor excited--though they would have been if the 
experiment had flown 30 years ago, when it was first devised. On the other 
hand, if this very technically-challenging experiment revealed seeming 
discrepancies, I suspect that most scientists would suspend judgment until 
it had been corroborated. So the most exciting result of Gravity Probe B 
would be a request to NASA for another vast sum, in order repeat it.  But 
Einstein himself raised other deep questions that are likely to attract 
more interest in the 21st century than they ever did in the 20th. He spent 
his last 30 years in a vain (and, as we now recognize, premature) quest 
for a unified theory. Will such a theory--reconciling gravity with the 
quantum principle, and transforming our conception of space and time--be 
achieved in coming decades? And, if it is, what answer will it offer to an 
another of Einstein's questions: "Did God have any choice in the creation 
of the world?" Is our universe--and the physical laws that govern it--the 
unique outcome of a fundamental theory, or are the underlying laws more 
"permissive", in the sense that they could allow other very different 
universes as well?  MARTIN REES is Royal Society Professor at Cambridge 
University and a leading researcher in astrophysics and cosmology. His 
books include Before the Beginning, Gravity's Fatal Attraction and (most 
recently) Just Six Numbers.

Douglas Rushkoff "Is nothing sacred?" It seems to me we’ve surrendered the 
notion of the sacred to those who only mean to halt the evolution of 
culture. Things we call "sacred" are simply ideologies and truths so 
successfully institutionalized that they seem unquestionable. For example, 
the notion that sexual imagery is bad for young people to see--a fact 
never established by any psychological or anthropological study I’ve come 
across--is accepted as God-ordained fact, and used as a fundamental 
building block to justify censorship. (Meanwhile, countless sitcoms in 
which parents lie to one another are considered wholesome enough to earn 
"G" television ratings.) A politician’s claim to be "God-fearing" is meant 
to signify that he has priorities greater than short-term political gain. 
What most people don’t realize is that, in the Bible anyway, God-fearing 
is a distant second to God-loving. People who were God-fearing only 
behaved ethically because they were afraid of the Hebrew God’s wrath. This 
wasn’t a sacred relationship at all, but the self-interested avoidance of 
retaliation. Today, it seems that no place, and--more importantly--no time 
is truly sacred. Our mediating technologies render us available to our 
business associates at any hour, day or night. Any moment spent thinking 
instead of spending, or laughing instead of working is an opportunity 
missed. And the more time we sacrifice to production and consumption, the 
less any alternative seems available to us. One radical proposal to combat 
the contraction of sacred time was suggested in the book of Exodus, and 
it's called the Sabbath. What if we all decided that for one day each 
week, we would refrain from buying or selling anything? Would it throw 
America into a recession? Maybe the ancients didn't pick the number seven 
out of a hat. Perhaps they understood that human beings can only immerse 
themselves in commerce for six days at a stretch before losing touch with 
anything approaching the civil, social, or sacred.  DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is 
the author of Coercion, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Ecstasy Club. 
Professor of Virtual Culture, New York University.

Howard Rheingold  "Why can't we use technology to solve social problems?" 
Not long after the Apollo landing, a prevalent cliche for a few years was 
"If we can put humans on the moon, why can't we....[insert prominent 
social problem such as starvation, epidemic, radical inequalities, etc.]? 
In 1980, in his book "Critical Path," Buckminster Fuller wrote:  "We are 
blessed with technology that would be indescribable to our forefathers. We 
have the wherewithal, the know-it-all to feed everybody, clothe everybody, 
and give every human on Earth a chance. We know now what we could never 
have known before-that we now have the option for all humanity to "make 
it" successfully on this planet in this lifetime."  In the contemporary 
zeitgeist, Fuller's claims seem naively utopian. The past century saw too 
much misery resulting from the attempts to build utopias. But without the 
belief that human civilization can improve, how could we have arrived at 
the point where we can formulate questions like these and exchange them 
around the world at the speed of light?  There are several obvious choices 
for answers to the question of why this question isn't asked any more:  1. 
We might have been able to put humans on the moon in 1969, but not today. 
Good point. And the reason for this circumstance--lack of political will, 
and the community of know-how it took NASA a decade to assemble, not lack 
of technical capabilities--is instructive.  2. Technology actually has 
solved enormous social problems--antibiotics, hygienic plumbing, 
immunization, the green revolution. I agree with this, and see it as 
evidence that it is possible to relieve twice as much, a thousand times as 
much human misery as previous inventions.  3. Human use of technologies 
have created even greater social problems--antibiotics are misused and 
supergerms evolved; nuclear wastes and weapons are threats, not 
enhancements; the green revolution swelled the slums of the world as 
agricultural productivity rose and global agribiz emerged.  4. There is no 
market for solving social problems, and it isn't the business of 
government to get into the technology or any other kind of business. This 
is the fallacy of the excluded middle. Some technologies such as the 
digital computer and the Internet were jump-started by governments, 
evolved through grassroots enthusiasms, and later become industries and 
"new economies."  5. Throwing technology at problems can be helpful, but 
the fundamental problems are political and economic and rooted in human 
nature. This answer should not be ignored. A tool is not the task, and 
often the invisible, social, non-physical aspects of a technological 
regime make all the difference.  There's some truth to each of these 
answers, yet they all fall short because all assume that we know how to 
think about technology. Just because we know how to make things doesn't 
guarantee that we know what those things will do to us. Or what kind of 
things we ought to make.  What if we don't know how to think about the 
tools we are so skilled at creating? What if we could learn?  Perhaps 
knowing how to think about technology is a skill we will have to teach 
ourselves the way we taught ourselves previous new ways of thinking such 
as mathematics, logic, and science.  A few centuries ago, a few people 
began questioning the assumption that people knew how to think about the 
physical world. Neither philosophy nor religion seemed to be able to stave 
off famine and epidemic. The enlightenment was about a new method for 
thinking.  Part of that new method was the way of asking and testing 
questions known as science, which provided the knowledge needed to create 
new medicines, new tools, new weapons, new economic systems.  We learned 
how to think very well about the physical world, and how to unleash the 
power in that knowledge. But perhaps we have yet to learn how to think 
about what to do with our tools.  HOWARD RHEINGOLD is author of The 
Virtual Community, Virtual Reality, Tools for Thought. Founder of Electric 
Minds, named by Time magazine one of the ten best web sites of 1996. 
Editor of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog.

Karl Sabbagh   "How many angels can dance on the point of a pin?"  This 
question is no longer asked, not because the question has been answered 
(although I happen to believe the answer is e to the i pi) but because the 
search for knowledge about the spiritual world has shifted focus as a 
result of science and maths cornering all the physical and numerical 
answers. Along with "Did Adam have a navel?" and "Did Jesus' mother give 
birth parthenogenetically?", this question is no longer asked by anyone of 
reasonable intelligence. Those who would in the past have searched for 
scientific support for their spiritual ideas have finally been persuaded 
that this is a demeaning use for human brainpower and that by moving 
questions about the reality of spiritual and religious ideas into the same 
category as questions about mind (as opposed to brain) they will retain 
the respect of unbelievers and actually get nearer to an understanding of 
the sources of their preoccupations.  As an addendum, although I wasn't 
asked I would like also to answer the question "What questions should 
disappear and why?"  The one question that should disappear as soon as 
possible ­ and to a certain extent scientists are to blame for the fact 
that it is still asked ­ is: What is the explanation for 
astrology/UFOs/clairvoyance/telepathy/any other 'paranormal' phenomenon 
you care to name?  This question is still asked because scientists and 
science educators have failed to get over to the public the fact that 
there is only one method of explaining phenomena ­ the scientific method. 
Therefore, anything that people are puzzled by that has not been explained 
either doesn't exist or there isn't yet enough evidence to prove that it 
does. But still I get the impression that for believers in these phenomena 
there are two types of explanatory system ­ science and nonscience (you 
can pronounce the latter 'nonsense' if you like). When you try to argue 
with these people by pointing out that there isn't sufficient repeatable 
evidence even to begin to attempt an explanation in scientific terms, they 
just say that this particular phenomenon doesn't require that degree of 
stringency. When the evidence is strong enough to puzzle scientists as 
well as nonscientists, they'll begin to devise explanations ­ scientific 
explanations.  There's a good example of how this works currently with the 
interest taken in St John's wort as a possible treatment for depression. 
Once there was enough consistent evidence to suggest that there might be 
an effect, clinical trials were planned and are now under way. 
Interestingly, an indication that there might be a genuine effect comes 
from a substantial body of information suggesting that there are adverse 
drug interactions between St John's wort and immunosuppressive drugs taken 
by transplant patients. Once an 'alternative' remedy actually causes harm 
as well as having alleged benefits, it's claimed effects are more likely 
to be genuine. One argument against most of the quack remedies around, 
such as homoeopathy, is that they are entirely safe (although this is seen 
as a recommendation, by the gullible.)  The demand that phenomena that are 
not explainable in scientific terms should be accepted on the basis of 
some other explanation similar to the argument you might care to use with 
your bank manager that there is more than one type of arithmetic. Using 
his conventional accounting methods he might think your account is 
overdrawn but you would argue that, although the evidence isn't as strong 
as his method might require, you believe you still have lots of money in 
your account and therefore will continue writing cheques. (As like as not, 
this belief in a positive balance in your account will be based on some 
erroneous assumption ­ for example, that you still have a lot of blank 
cheques left in your chequebook.)  KARL SABBAGH is a television producer 
who has turned to writing. Among his television programs are "Skyscraper" 
­ a four-hour series about the design and construction of a New York 
skyscraper; "Race for the Top" ­ a documentary about the hunt for top 
quark; and "21st Century Jet" ­ a five part series following Boeing's new 
777 airliner from computer design to entry into passenger service.He is 
the author of six books including Skyscraper, 21st Century Jet, and A Rum 
Affair .

Roger Schank  "Why Teach Mathematics?"  Some questions are so rarely asked 
that we are astonished anyone would ask them at all. The entire world 
seems to agree that knowing mathematics is the key to something important, 
they just forget what. Benjamin Franklin asked this question in 1749 while 
thinking about what American schools should be like and concluded that 
only practical mathematics should be taught. The famous mathematician G.H. 
Hardy asked this question (A Mathematicians's Apology) and concluded that 
while he loved the beauty of mathematics there was no real point teaching 
it to children.  Today, we worry about the Koreans and Lithuanians doing 
better than us in math tests and every "education president" asserts that 
we will raise math scores, but no one asks why this matters. Vague 
utterances about how math teaches reasoning belie the fact that 
mathematicicans do everyday reasoning particularly better than anyone 
else. To anyone who reads this and still is skeptical, I ask: what is the 
Quadratic Formula? You learned it in ninth grade, you couldn't graduate 
high school without it. When was the last time you used it? What was the 
point of learning it?  ROGER SCHANK is the Chairman and Chief Technology 
Officer for Cognitive Arts and has been the Director of the Institute for 
the Learning Sciences at Northwestern University since its founding in 
1989. One of the world's leading Artificial Intelligence researchers, he 
is books include: Dynamic Memory: A Theory of Learning in Computers and 
People , Tell Me a Story: A New Look at Real and Artificial Memory, The 
Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind, and Engines for Education.

Stephen H. Schneider  "Will the free market finally triumph?"  Despite 
Seattle and the French farmers, free market advocates of globalization 
have largely won--even CHina is signing up to be a major player in the 
international trading and growth-oriented global political economy. So it 
is rare to hear this question anymore, even from so-called "enterprise 
institutes" dedicated to protecting property rights.  The problem is, what 
has been won?? My concern is not with the question no-longer asked in this 
context, but rather with the companion question not often enough asked: 
"Is there any such thing as a free market"?  To be sure, markets are 
generally efficient ways of allocating resources and accomplishing 
economic goals. However, markets are notorious for leaving out much of 
what people really value. In different words, the market price of doing 
business simply excludes much of the full costs or benefits of doing 
business because many effects aren't measured in traditional monetary 
units. For example, the cost of a ton of coal isn't just the extraction 
costs plus transportation costs plus profit, but also real expenses to 
real people (or real creatures) who happen to be external to the energy 
market. Such "externalities" are very real to coastal dwellers trying to 
cope with sea level rises likely to be induced from the global warming 
driven by massive coal burning.  I recall a discussion at the recent 
international negotiations to limit emissions of greenhouse gasses in 
which a chieftain from the tiny Pacific island of Kiribati was being told 
by an OPEC supporter opposed to international controls on emissions from 
fossil fuels that the summed economies of all the small island states were 
only a trivial fraction of the global GDP, and thus even if sea level rise 
were to drive them out of national existence, this was "not sufficient 
reason to hold back to economic progress of the planet by constricting the 
free use of energy markets".  "We are not ungenerous", he said, so in the 
"unlikely event" that you were a victim of sea level rise, "we'll just pay 
to relocate all of you and your people to even better homes and jobs than 
you have now", and this, he went on, will be much cheaper than to "halt 
industrial growth" (THis isn't the forum to refute the nonsense that 
controls on emissions will halt industrial growth.) After hearing this 
offer, the aging and stately chieftain paused, scratched his flowing hair, 
politely thanked the OPEC man for his thoughtfulness and simply said, "we 
may be able to move, but what do I do with the buried bones of my 
grandfather?"  Economists refer to the units of value in cost-benefit 
analyses as "numeraires"--dollars per ton carbon emitted in the climate 
example, is the numeraire of choice for "free market" advocates. But what 
of lives lost per ton of emissions from intensified hurricanes, or species 
driven off mountain tops to extinction per ton, or heritage sites lost per 
ton?? Or what if global GDP indeed goes up fastest by free markets but 25% 
of the world gets left further behind as globally economically efficient 
markets expand? Is equity a legitimate numeraire too?  Therefore, while 
market systems seem indeed to have triumphed, it is time to phase in a 
new, multi-part question: "How can free markets be adjusted to value what 
is left out of private cost-benefit calculus but represents real value so 
we can get the price signals in markets to reflect all the costs and 
benefits to society across all the numeraires, and not simply have market 
prices rigged to preserve the status quo in which monetary costs to 
private parties are the primary condition?"  I hope the new US president 
soon transcends all that obligatory free market rhetoric of the campaign 
and learns much more about what constitutes a full market price. It is 
very likely he'll get an earful as he jetsets about the planet in Air 
Force 1 catching up on the landscapes--political and physical--of the 
vastly diverse countries in the world that it is time for him to visit. 
Many world leaders are quite worried about just what we will have won as 
currently defined free markets triumph.  STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER is Professor 
in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford University and the 
Former Department Director and Head of Advanced Study Project at the 
National Center for Atmospheric Research Boulder. He is internationally 
recognized as one of the world's leading experts in atmospheric research 
and its implications for environment and society. Dr. Schneider's books 
include The Genesis Strategy: Climate Change and Global Survival; The 
Coevolution Of Climate and Life and Global Warming: Are We Entering The 
Greenhouse Century?; and Laboratory Earth

Al Seckel  "Why is our sense of beauty and elegance such a useful tool for 
discriminating between a good theory and a bad theory?"  During the early 
1980s, I had the wonderful fortune to spend a great deal of time with 
Richard Feynman, and our innumerable conversations extended over a very 
broad range of topics (not always physics!). At that time, I had just 
finished re-reading his wonderful book, The Character of Physical Law, and 
wanted to discuss an interesting question with him, not directly addressed 
by his book:  Why is our sense of beauty and elegance such a useful tool 
for discriminating between a good theory and a bad theory?  And a related 
question:  Why are the fundamental laws of the universe self-similar? 
Over lunch, I put the questions to him.  "It's goddam useless to discuss 
these things. It's a waste of time," was Dick's initial response. Dick 
always had an immediate gut-wrenching approach to philosophical questions. 
Nevertheless, I persisted, because it certainly was to be admitted that he 
had a strong intuitive sense of the elegance of fundamental theories, and 
might be able to provide some insight rather than just philosophizing. It 
was also true that this notion was a successful guiding principle for many 
great physicists of the twentieth century including Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, 
Gell-Mann, etc. Why this was so, was interesting to me.  We spent several 
hours trying to get at the heart of the problem and, indeed, trying to 
determine if it was even a true notion rather than some romantic 
representation of science.  We did agree that it was impossible to explain 
honestly the beauties of the laws of nature in a way that people can feel, 
without their having some deep understanding of mathematics. It wasn't 
that mathematics was just another language for physicists, it was a tool 
for reasoning by which you could connect one statement with another. The 
physicist has meaning to all his phrases. He needs to have a connection of 
words to the real world.  Certainly, a beautiful theory meant being able 
to describe it very simply in terms of fundamental mathematical 
quantities. "Simply" meant compression into a small mathematical 
expression with tremendous explanatory powers, which required only a 
finite amount of interpretation. In other words, a huge number of 
relationships between data are concisely fit into a single statement. 
Later, Murray Gell-Mann expressed this point well, when he wrote, "The 
complexity of what you have to learn in order to be able to read the 
statement of the law is not really very great compared to the apparent 
complexity of the data that are being summarized by that law. That 
apparent complexity is partly removed when the law is formed."  Another 
driving principle was that the laws of the universe are self similar, in 
that there are connections between two sets of phenomena previously 
thought to be distinct. There seemed to be a beauty in the 
inter-relationships fed by perhaps a prejudice that at the bottom of it 
all was a simple unifying law.  It was easy to find numerous examples from 
the history of modern science that fit within this framework (Maxwell's 
equations for electromagnetism, Einstein's general-relativistic equations 
for gravitation, Dirac's relativistic quantum mechanics, etc.,), but Dick 
and I were still working away at the fringes of the problem. So far, all 
we could do was describe the problem, find numerous examples, but we could 
not answer what provided the feeling for great intuitive guesses. 
Perhaps, our love of symmetries and patterns, are an integral part of why 
would embrace certain theories and not others. For example, for every 
conservation law, there was a corresponding symmetry, albeit sometimes 
these symmetries would be broken. But this led us to another question: Is 
symmetry inherent in nature or is it something we create? When we spoke of 
symmetries, we were referring to the symmetry of the mathematical laws of 
physics, not to the symmetry of objects commonly found in nature. We felt 
that symmetry was inherent in nature, because it was not something that we 
expected to find in physics. Another psychological prejudice was our love 
for patterns. The simplicity of the patterns in physics were beautiful. 
This does not mean simple in action ­ the motion of the planets and of 
atoms can be very complex, but the basic patterns underneath are simple. 
This is what is common to all of our fundamental laws.  It should be noted 
that we could also come up with numerous examples where one's sense of 
elegance and beauty led to beautiful theories that were wrong. A perfect 
example of a mathematically elegant theory that turned out to be wrong is 
Francis Crick's 1957 attempt at working out the genetic coding problem 
(Codes without Commas). It was also true that there were many examples of 
physical theories that were pursued on the basis of lovely symmetries and 
patterns, and that these also turned out to be false. Usually, these were 
false because of some logical inconsistency or the crude fact that they 
did not agree with experiment.  The best that Dick and I could come up 
with was an unscientific response, which is, given our fondness for 
patterns and symmetry, we have a prejudice--that nature is simple and 
therefore beautiful.  Since that time, the question has disappeared from 
my mind, and it is fun thinking about it again, but in doing scientific 
research, I now have to concern myself with more pragmatic questions.  AL 
SECKEL is acknowledged as one of the world's leading authorities on 
illusions. He has given invited lectures on illusions at Caltech, Harvard, 
MIT, Berkeley, Oxford University, University of Cambridge, UCLA, UCSD, 
University of Lund, University of Utrecht, and many other fine 
institutions. Seckel is currently under contract with the Brain and 
Cognitive Division of the MIT Press to author a comprehensive treatise on 
illusions, perception, and cognitive science.

Terrence J. Sejnowski  "Is God Dead?"  On April 8, 1966, the cover of Time 
Magazine asked "Is God Dead?" in bold red letters on a jet black 
background. This is an arresting question that no one asks anymore, but 
back in 1996 it was a hot issue that received serious comment. In 1882 
Friedrich Nietzsche in The Gay Science had a character called "the madman" 
running through the marketplace shouting "God is dead!", but in the book, 
no one took the madman seriously.  The Time Magazine article reported that 
a group of young theologians calling themselves Christian atheists, led by 
Thomas J. J. Altizer at Emory University, had claimed God was dead. This 
hit a cultural nerve and in an appearance on "The Merv Griffin Show" 
Altizer was greeted by shouts of "Kill him! Kill him!" Today Altizer 
continues to develop an increasingly apocalyptic theology but has not 
received a grant or much attention since 1966.  The lesson here is that 
the impact of a question very much depends on the cultural moment. 
Questions disappear not because they are answered but because they are no 
longer interesting.  TERRENCE J. SEJNOWSKI, a pioneer in Computational 
Neurobiology, is regarded by many as one of the world's most foremost 
theoretical brain scientists. In 1988, he moved from Johns Hopkins 
University to the Salk Institute, where he is a Howard Hughes Medical 
Investigator and the director of the Computational Neurobiology 
Laboratory. In addition to co-authoring The Computational Brain, he has 
published over 250 scientific articles.

Michael Shermer  "Can science answer moral and ethical questions?"  From 
the time of the Enlightenment philosophers have speculated that the 
remarkable advances of science would one day spill over into the realm of 
moral philosophy, and that scientists would be able to discover answers to 
previously insoluble moral dilemmas and ethical conundrums. One of the 
reasons Ed Wilson's book Consilience was so successful was that he 
attempted to revive this Enlightenment dream. Alas, we seem no closer than 
we were when Voltaire, Diderot, and company first encouraged scientists to 
go after moral and ethical questions. Are such matters truly insoluble and 
thus out of the realm of science (since, as Peter Medewar noted, "science 
is the art of the soluble")? Should we abandon Ed Wilson's Enlightenment 
dream of applying evolutionary biology to the moral realm? Most scientists 
agree that moral questions are scientifically insoluble and they have 
abandoned the Enlightenment dream. But not all. We shall see.  MICHAEL 
SHERMER is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, the host of the 
acclaimed public science lecture series at Caltech, and a monthly 
columnist for Scientific American. His books include Why People Believe 
Weird Things, How We Believe, and Denying History.

Lee Smolin  "What is the next step in the evolution of democracy?"  A 
question no longer being asked is how to make the next step in the 
evolution of a democratic society. Until very recently it was widely 
understood that democracy was a project with many steps, whose goal was 
the eventual construction of a perfectly just and egalitarian society. But 
recently, with the well deserved collapse of Marxism, it has begun to seem 
that the highest stage of civilization we humans can aspire to is global 
capitalism leavened by some version of a bureaucratic welfare state, all 
governed badly by an unwieldy and corrupt representative democracy. This 
is better than many of the alternatives, but it is hardly egalitarian and 
often unjust; those of us who care about these values must hope that human 
ingenuity is up to the task of inventing something still better.   It is 
proper that the nineteenth century idea of utopia has finally been put to 
rest, for that was based on a paradox, which is that any predetermined 
blueprint for an ideal society could only be imposed by force. It is now 
almost universally acknowledged that there is no workable alternative to 
the democratic ideal that governments get their authority by winning the 
consent of the governed. This means that if we are to change society, it 
must be by a process of evolution rather than revolution. But why should 
this mean that big changes are impossible? What is missing are new ideas, 
and a context to debate them.   There are at least four issues facing the 
future of the democratic project. First, while democracy in the worlds 
most powerful country is perceived by many of its citizens as corrupted, 
there is little prospect for serious reform. The result is alienation so 
severe that around half of our citizens do not participate in politics. At 
what point, we may ask, will so few vote that the government of the United 
States may cease to have a valid claim to have won the consent of the 
governed. As the political and journalistic classes have largely lost the 
trust of the population, where will leadership to begin the reform that is 
so obviously needed come from?  A second point of crisis and opportunity 
is in the newly democratized states. In many of these countries 
intellectuals played a major role in the recent establishment of 
democracy. These people are not likely to go to sleep and let the World 
Bank tell them what democracy is.  The third opportunity is in Europe, 
where a rather successful integration of capitalism and democratic 
socialism has been achieved. These societies suffer much less from poverty 
and the other social and economic ills that appear so unsolvable in the US 
context. (And it is not coincidental that the major means of funding 
political campaigns in the US are illegal in most of Europe.) Walking the 
streets in Denmark or Holland it is possible to wonder what a democratic 
society that evolved beyond social democracy might look like. European 
integration may be only the first step towards a new kind of nation state 
which will give much of its sovereignty up to multinational entities, a 
kind of nation-as-local-government.  Another challenge for democracy is 
the spread of the bureaucratic mode of organization, which in most 
countries has taken over the administration of education, science, health 
and other vital areas of public interest. As any one who works for a 
modern university or hospital can attest to, bureaucratic organizations 
are inherently undemocratic. Debate amongst knowledgeable, responsible 
individuals is replaced by the management of perceptions and the 
manipulation of supposedly objective indices. As the politics of the 
academy begins to look more like nineteenth century Russia than 5th 
Century BC Athens we intellectuals need to do some serious work to invent 
more democratic modes of organization for ourselves and for others who 
work in the public interest.   Is it not then time we "third culture 
intellectuals" begin to attack the problem of democracy, in both our 
workplaces and in our societies? Perhaps, with all of our independence, 
creativity, intelligence and edginess, we may find we really have 
something of value to contribute?   LEE SMOLIN is a theoretical physicist; 
professor of physics and member of the Center for Gravitational Physics 
and Geometry at Pennsylvania State University; author of The Life of The 
Cosmos.

Dan Sperber  "Are women and men equal?"  No doubt, there are differences 
between women and men, some obvious and others more contentious. But 
arguments for inequality of worth or rights between the sexes have wholly 
lost intellectual respectability. Why? Because they were grounded in 
biologically evolved dispositions and culturally transmitted prejudices 
that, however strongly entrenched, could not withstand the kind of 
rational scrutiny to which they have been submitted in the past two 
centuries. Also because, more recently, the Feminist movement has given so 
many of us the motivation and the means to look into ourselves and 
recognize and fight lingering biases. Still, the battle against sexism is 
not over--and it may never be.  DAN SPERBER is a social and cognitive 
scientist at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique 
(CNRS) in Paris. His books include Rethinking Symbolism, On 
Anthropological Knowledge, Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach, 
and, with Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition.

Tom Standage   "Are there planets around other stars?" Speculation about 
the possibility of a "plurality of worlds" goes back at least as far as 
Epicurus in the fourth century BC. Admittedly, Epicurus' definition of a 
"world" was closer to what we would currently regard as a solar 
system--but he imagined innumerable such spheres, each containing a system 
of planets, packed together. "There are," he declared, "infinite worlds 
both like and unlike this world [i.e., solar system] of ours."  The same 
question was subsequently considered by astronomers and philosophers over 
the course of many centuries; within the past half century, the idea of 
the existence of other planets has become a science fiction staple, and 
people have started looking for evidence of extraterrestrial 
civilizations. Like Epicurus, many people have concluded that there must 
be other solar systems out there, consisting of planets orbiting other 
stars. But they didn't know for sure. Today, we do.  The first 
"extrasolar" planet (ie, beyond the solar system) was found in 1995 by two 
Swiss astronomers, and since then another 48 planets have been found 
orbiting dozens of nearby sun-like stars. This figure is subject to 
change, because planets are now being found at an average rate of more 
than one per month; more planets are now known to exist outside the solar 
system than within it. Furthermore, one star is known to have at least two 
planets, and another has at least three. We can, in other words, now draw 
maps of alien solar systems--maps that were previously restricted to the 
realm of science fiction.  The discovery that there are other planets out 
there has not, however, caused as much of a fuss as might have been 
expected, for two reasons. First, decades of Star Trek and its ilk meant 
that the existence of other worlds was assumed; the discovery has merely 
confirmed what has lately become a widely-held belief. And second, none of 
these new planets has actually been seen. Instead, their existence has 
been inferred through the tiny wobbles that they cause in the motion of 
their parent stars. The first picture of an extrasolar planet is, however, 
probably just a few years away. Like the first picture of Earth from 
space, it is likely to become an iconic image that once again redefines 
the way we as humans think about our place in the universe.  Incidentally, 
none of these new planets has a name yet, because the International 
Astronomical Union, the body which handles astronomical naming, has yet to 
rule on the matter. But the two astronomers who found the first extrasolar 
planet have proposed a name for it anyway, and one that seems highly 
appropriate: they think it should be called Epicurus.  TOM STANDAGE is 
technology correspondent at The Economist in London and author of the 
books The Victorian Internet and The Neptune File, both of which draw 
parallels between episodes in the history of science and modern events. He 
has also written for the Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Prospect, and 
Wired. He is married and lives in Greenwich, England, just down the hill 
from the Old Royal Observatory.

Timothy Taylor "How can I stop the soul of the deceased reanimating the 
body?"  At a particular point (yet to be clearly defined) in human 
cultural evolution, a specific idea took hold that there were two, 
partially separable, elements present in a living creature: the material 
body and the force that animated it. On the death of the body the 
animating force would, naturally, desire the continuation of this-worldly 
action and struggle to reassert itself (just as one might strive to 
retrieve a flint axe one had accidentally dropped). If the soul (or 
spirit) succeeded, it would also seek to repossess its property, including 
its spouse, and reassert its material appetites.   The desire of the 
disembodied soul was viewed as dangerous by the living, who had by all 
means to enchant, cajole, fight off, sedate, or otherwise distract and 
disable it. This requirement to keep the soul from the body after death 
did not last forever, only so long as the flesh lay on the bones. For the 
progress of the body's decomposition was seen as analogous to the slow 
progress the soul made toward the threshold of the Otherworld. When the 
bones where white (or were sent up in smoke or whatever the rite in that 
community was), then it was deemed that the person had finally left this 
life and was no longer a danger to the living. Thus it was, that for most 
of recent human history (roughly the last 35,000 years) funerary rites 
were twofold: the primary rites zoned off the freshly dead and 
instantiated the delicate ritual powers designed to keep the unquiet soul 
at bay; the secondary rites, occurring after weeks or months (or, 
sometimes--in the case of people who had wielded tremendous worldly 
power--years), firmly and finally incorporated the deceased into the realm 
of the ancestors.  Since the rise of science and scepticism, the idea of 
the danger of the disembodied soul has, for an increasing number of 
communities, simply evaporated. But there is a law of conservation of 
questions. "How can I stop the soul of the deceased reanimating the body?" 
is now being replaced with "How can I live so long that my life becomes 
indefinite?," a question previously only asked by the most arrogant 
pharaohs and emperors.  TIMOTHY TAYLOR lecturers in the Department of 
Archaeological Sciences, University of Bradford, UK. He is the author of 
The Prehistory of Sex.

Joseph Traub   "Have We Seen the End of Science?" "Will the Internet Stock 
Bubble Burst?"  I am taking the liberty of sending two questions. (After 
all, the people on the list like to push the boundaries.)  "Have We Seen 
the End of Science?"  John Horgan announced the end of science in his book 
of the same title. Almost weekly the most spectacular advances are being 
announced and intriguing questions being asked in fields such as biology 
and physics. The answer was always a resounding no; now nobody asks the 
question.  "Will the Internet Stock Bubble Burst?"  We certainly know the 
answer to that one now.  On February 22, 2000 I gave a talk at the Century 
Association in NYC titled "Modern Finance and Computers". One of the 
topics that i covered was "will the internet stock bubble burst?" I said 
it was a classic bubble and would end in the usual way. I cited the 
example of an Fall, 1999 IPO for VA Linux. This was a company that had a 
market capitalization of 10 billion dollars at the end of the first day 
even though it had never shown a profit and was up against competitors 
such as Dell and IBM.  The NASDAQ reached its high on March 10, 2000, and 
the internet sector collapsed a couple of weeks later. The high for VA 
Linux in 2000 was $247;yesterday it closed below $10.  JOSEPH F. TRAUB is 
the Edwin Howard Armstrong Professor of Computer Science at Columbia 
University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He was 
founding Chairman of the Computer Science Department at Columbia 
University from 1979 to 1989, and founding chair of the Computer Science 
and Telecommunications Board of the National Academy of Sciences from 1986 
to 1992. From 1971 to 1979 he was Head of the Computer Science Department 
at Carnegie-Mellon University. Traub is the founding editor of the Journal 
of Complexity and an associate editor of Complexity. A Festschrift in 
celebration of his sixtieth birthday was recently published. He is the 
author of nine books including the recently published Complexity and 
Information.

Colin Tudge   "The Great Idea That's Disappeared" The greatest idea that's 
disappeared from mainstream science this past 400 years is surely that of 
God. The greats who laid the foundations of modern science in the 17th 
century (Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Descartes) and the 
significant-but-not-quite-so-greats (Robert Boyle, John Ray, etc.) were 
theologians as much as they were scientists and philosophers. They wanted 
to know how things are, of course--but also what God had in mind when he 
made them this way. They took it for granted, or contrived to prove to 
their own satisfaction, that unless there is a God, omniscient and 
mindful, then there could be no Universe at all.  Although David Hume did 
much to erode such argument, it persisted well into the 19th century. 
Recently I have been intrigued to find James Hutton--who, as one of the 
founders of modern geology, is one of the boldest and most imaginative of 
all scientists--earnestly wondering in a late 18th century essay what God 
could possibly have intended when he made volcanoes. The notion that there 
could be no complex and adapted beings at all without a God to create 
them, was effectively the default position in orthodox biology until (as 
Dan Dennett has so succinctly explained) Charles Darwin showed how natural 
selection could produce complexity out of simplicity, and adaptation out 
of mere juxtaposition. Today, very obviously, no Hutton-style musing would 
find its way into a refereed journal. In Nature, God features only as the 
subject of (generally rather feeble) sociological and sometimes 
evolutionary speculation.  Religion obviously flourishes still, but are 
religion and science now condemned to mortal conflict? 
Fundamentalist-atheists would have it so, but I think not. The greatest 
ideas in philosophy and science never really go away, even if they do 
change their form or go out of fashion, but they do take a very long time 
to unfold. For at least 300 years--from the 16th to the 19th 
centuries--emergent science and post- medieval theology were deliberately 
intertwined, in many ingenious ways. Through the past 150, they have been 
just as assiduously disentangled. But the game is far from over. 
Cosmologists and metaphysicians continue to eye and circle each other. 
Epistemology--how we know what's true--is of equal interest to scientists 
and theologians, and each would be foolish to suppose that the other has 
nothing to offer. How distant is the religious notion of revelation from 
Dirac's--or Keats's?--perception of truth as beauty? Most intriguingly of 
all, serious theologians are now discussing the role of religion in 
shaping emotional response while modern aficionados of artificial 
intelligence acknowledge (as Hume did) that emotion is an essential 
component of thought itself. Lastly, the ethics of science and 
technology--how we should use our new-found power--are the key discussions 
of our age and it is destructive to write religion out of the act, even if 
the priests, rabbis and mullahs who so far have been invited to take part 
have often proved disappointing.  I don't share the modern enthusiasm for 
over-extended life but I would like to see how the dialogue unfolds in the 
centuries to come.  COLIN TUDGE is a Research Fellow at the Centre for 
Philosophy, London School of Economics. His two latest books are The 
Variety of Life and In Mendel's Footnotes.

Sherry Turkle  "Can you have an artificial intelligence?"  Progress in the 
domain that Marvin Minsky once characterized as "making machines do things 
that would be considered intelligent if done by people" has not been as 
dramatic as its founders might once have hoped, but the penetration of 
machine cognition into everyday life (from the computer that plays chess 
to the computer that determines if your toast is done) has been broad and 
deep. We now the term "intelligent" to refer to the kind of helpful 
smartness embedded in such objects. So the language has shifted and the 
question has disappeared. But until recently, there was a tendency to 
limit appreciation of machine mental prowess to the realm of the 
cognitive. In other words, acceptance of artificial intelligence came with 
a certain "romantic reaction." People were willing to accept that 
simulated thinking might well be deemed thinking, but simulated feeling 
was not feeling. Simulated love could never be love.  These days, however, 
the realm of machine emotion has become a contested terrain. There is 
research in "affective computing" and in robotics which produces virtual 
pets and digital dolls--objects that present themselves as experiencing 
subjects. In artificial intelligence's "essentialist" past, researchers 
tried to argue that the machines they had built were "really" intelligent. 
In the current business of building machines that self-present as 
"creatures," the work of inferring emotion is left in large part to the 
user. The new artificial creatures are designed to push our evolutionary 
buttons to respond to their speech, their gestures, and their demands for 
nurturance by experiencing them as sentient, even emotional. And people 
are indeed inclined to respond to creatures they teach and nurture by 
caring about them, often in spite of themselves. People tell themselves 
that the robot dog is a program embodied in plastic, but they become fond 
of it all the same. They want to care for it and they want it to care for 
them.  In cultural terms, old questions about machine intelligence has 
given way to a question not about the machines but about us: What kind of 
relationships is it appropriate to have with a machine? It is significant 
that this question has become relevant in a day-to-day sense during a 
period of unprecedented human redefinition through genomics and 
psychopharmacology, fields that along with robotics, encourage us to ask 
not only whether machines will be able to think like people, but whether 
people have always thought like machines  SHERRY TURKLE is a professor of 
the sociology of science at MIT. She is the author of Life on the Screen: 
Identity in the Age of the Internet; The Second Self: Computers and the 
Human Spirit; and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's 
French Revolution.

Henry Warwick "None." Why: 1. If Barbour's theory of Platonia is even 
roughly correct, then everything exists in a timless universe, and 
therefore doesn't actually "disappear". Therefore, all questions are 
always asked, as everything is actually happening at once. I know that 
doesn't help much, and it dodges the main thrust of the question, but it's 
one support for my answer, if oblique. 2. Other than forgotten questions 
that disappear of their own accord, or are in some dead language, or are 
too personal/particular/atomised (i.e., What did you think of the latest 
excretion from Hollywood? Is it snowing now? Why is that weirdo across the 
library reading room looking at me?!?! When will I lose these 35 "friends" 
who are perched on my belt buckle? etc.) questions don't really disappear. 
They are asked again and again and are answered again and again, and this 
is a very good thing. Three Year Olds will always ask "Daddy, where do the 
stars come fwum?" And daddys will always answer as best they can. 
Eventually, some little three year old will grow into an adult astronomer 
and might find even better answers than their daddy supplied them on a 
cold Christmas night. And they will answer the same simple question with a 
long involved answer, or possibly, a better and simpler answer. In this 
way, questions come up again and again, but over time they spin out in new 
directions with new answers. 3. It's important to not let questions 
disappear. By doubting the obvious, examining the the same ground with 
fresh ideas, and questioning recieved ideas, great strides in the 
collected knowledge of this human project can be (and historically, have 
been) gained. When we consign a question to the scrap heap of history we 
run many risks--risks of blind arrogance, deaf self righteousness, and 
finally choking on the bland pablum of unquestioned dogma. 4. It's 
important to question the questions. It keeps the question alive, as it 
refines the question. Question the questions, and then reverse the process 
- question the questioning of questions. Permit the mind everything, even 
if it seems repetitive. If you spin your wheels long enough you'll blow a 
bearing or snap a spring, and the question is re-invented, re-asked, and 
re-known, but in a way not previously understood. In this way, questions 
don't disappear, they evolve into other questions. For a while they might 
bloat up in the sun and smell really weird, but it's all part of the 
process... HENRY WARWICK sometimes works as a scientist in the computer 
industry. He always works as an artist, composer, and writer. He lives in 
San Francisco, California.

Margaret Wertheim  "...the old question of whether our categories of 
reality are discovered or constructed."  One question that has almost 
disappeared, but which I think should not is the old question about 
whether our categories of reality are discovered or constructed. In 
medieval times this was the debate about realism versus nominalism. 
Earlier this century the question flared up again in the debates about the 
relativistic nature of knowledge and has more recently given rise to the 
whole "science wars" debacle, but reading the science press today one 
would think the question had been finally resolved--on the side of 
realism. Reading the science press now one gets a strong impression that 
for most scientists our categories of reality are Platonic, almost 
God-given entities just waiting for the right mind to uncover them. This 
hard-nosed realist trend is evident across the spectrum of the sciences, 
but is particularly strong in physics, where the search is currently on 
for the supposed "ultimate" category of reality--strings being a favored 
candidate. What gets lost in all this is any analysis of the role that 
language plays in our pictures of reality. We literally cannot see things 
that we have no words for. As Einstein once said "we can only see what our 
theories allow us to see." I would argue that the question of what role 
language plays in shaping our picture of reality is one of the most 
critical questions in science today--and one that should be back on the 
agenda of every thoughtful scientiist.  Just one example should suffice to 
illustrate what is at stake here: MIT philosopher of science Evelyn Fox 
Keller has shown in her book Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death (and 
elsewhere) the primary role played by language in shaping theories of 
genetics. Earlier this century physicists like Max Delbruck and Erwin 
Schrodinger started to have a philosophical impact on the biological 
sciences, which henceforth became increasingly "physicized." Just as atoms 
were seen as the ultimate constituents of matter so genes came to be seen 
as the ultimate constituents of life--the entities in which all power and 
control over living organisms resided. What this metaphor of the "master 
molecule" obscured was th role played by the cytoplasm in regulating the 
function and activation of genes. For half a century study of the 
cytoplasm was virtually ignored because genetics were so fixed on the idea 
of the gene as the "master colecule." Sure much good work on genetics was 
done, but important areas of biological function were also ignored. And 
are still being ignored by the current "master molecule" camp--the 
evolutionary psychologists, who cannot seem to see anything but through 
the prism of genes.  Scientists (like all other humans) can only see 
reality as their language and their metaphors allow them to see it. This 
is not to say that scientists "make up" their discoveries, only to point 
out that language plays a critical role in shaping the way we categorize, 
and hence theorize, the world around us. Revolutions in science are not 
just the result of revolutions in the laboratory or at theorists 
blackboards, they are also linguistic revoluttions. Think of words like 
inertia, energy, momentum--words which did not have any scientific meaning 
before the seventeenth century. Or words like quantum, spin, charm and 
strange, which have only had scientific meaning science the quantum 
revolution of the early twentieth century. Categories of reality are not 
merely discovered--they are also constructed by the words we use. 
Understanding more deeply the interplay between the physical world and 
human language is, I believe, one of the major tasks for the future of 
science.  MARGARET WERTHEIM is the author of Pythagoras Trousers, a 
history of the relationship between physics and religion; and The Pearly 
Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. She is 
a research associate to the American Museum of Natural History in NY and a 
fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She is currently 
working on a documentary about "outsider physics."

Dave Winer  "What's your business model?"  Until this summer this was the 
most common question at Silicon Valley parties, at bus stops, conferences 
and grocery stores. Everyone had a business model, none planned to make 
money, all focused on the exit strategy.   The euphoria attracted a 
despicable kind carpetbagger, one who wanted nothing more than money, and 
had a disdain for technology. All of a sudden technology was out of 
fashion in Silicon Valley.  Now that the dotcom crash seems permanent, 
entrepreneurs are looking for real ways to make money. No more vacuous 
"business models." VCs are hunkering down for a long haul. The average IQ 
of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is zooming to its former stratospheric 
levels. There's a genuine excitement here now, but if you ask what the 
business model is you're going to get a boring answer.  Silicon Valley 
goes in cycles. Downturns are a perfect time to dig in, listen to users, 
learn what they want, and create the technology that scratches the itch, 
and plan on selling it for money.   DAVE WINER, CEO UserLand Software, 
Inc. http://www.userland.com/

New Naomi Wolf  "...the narrative shifted and ...the female sense of 
identity in the West, for the first time ever, no longer hinges on the 
identity of her mate ..."  The question disappeared in most of Europe and 
North America, of course, because of the great movement toward women's 
employment and career advancement even after marrying and bearing 
children. Feminist historians have long documented how the "story" of the 
female heroine used to end with marriage; indeed, this story was so set in 
stone as late as the 1950's and early 60's in this country that Sylvia 
Plath's heroine in The Bell Jar had to flirt with suicide in order to try 
to find a way out of it. Betty Friedan noted in The Feminine Mystique that 
women (meaning middle class white women; the narrative was always 
different for women of color and working class women) couldn't "think 
their way past" marriage and family in terms of imagining a future that 
had greater dimension. But the narrative shifted and it's safe to say that 
the female sense of identity in the West, for the first time ever, no 
longer hinges on the identity of her mate--which is a truly new story in 
terms of our larger history.  NAOMI WOLF, author, feminist, and social 
critic, is s an outspoken and influential voice for women's rights and 
empowerment. she is the author of The Beauty Myth, Fire with Fire, and 
Promiscuities.

Milford H. Wolpoff  "Where has Darwin gone?"  Darwinism is alive and well 
in academic discussions and in pop thinking. Natural selection is a key 
element in explaining just about everything we encounter today, from the 
origin and spread of AIDS to the realization that our parents didn't "make 
us do it," our ancestors did. Ironically, though, Darwinism has 
disappeared from the area where it was first and most firmly seated the 
evolution of life, and especially the evolution of humanity. Human 
evolution was once pictured as a series of responses to changing 
environments coordinated by differences in reproduction and survivorship, 
as opportunistic changes taking advantage of the new possibilities opened 
up by the cultural inheritance of social information, as the triumph of 
technology over brute force, as the organization of intelligence by 
language. Evolutionary psychologists and other behavioralists still view 
it this way, but this is no longer presented as the mainstream view of 
human paleontologists and geneticists who address paleodemographic 
problems.  Human evolution is now commonly depicted as the consequence of 
species replacements, where there are a series of species emanating from 
different, but usually African homelands, each sooner or later replacing 
the earlier ones. It is not the selection process that provides the source 
of human superiority in each successive replacement, but the random 
accidents that take place when new species are formed from small 
populations of old ones. The process is seen as being driven by random 
extinctions, opening up unexpected oFpportunities for those fortunate new 
species lucky to be at the right time and place.  The origin and evolution 
of human species are now also addressed by geneticists studying the 
variation and distribution of human genes today (and in a few cases 
ancient genes from Neandertals). They use this information to estimate the 
history of human population size and the related questions of when the 
human population might have been small, where it might have originated, 
and when it might have been expanding. It is possible to do this if one 
can assume that mutation and genetic drift are the only driving forces of 
genetic change, because the effect of drift depends on population size. 
But this assumption means that Darwinian selection did not play any 
significant role in genetic evolution. Similarly, interpreting the 
distribution of ancient DNA as reflecting population history (rather than 
the history of the genes studied the histories are not necessarily the 
same) also assumes that selection on the DNA studied did not play a role 
in its evolution. In fact, the absence of Darwinian selection is the 
underlying assumption for these types of genetic studies.  Human 
paleontology has taken a giant step away from Darwin will it have the 
courage to follow the lead of evolutionary behavior and step back? 
MILFORD H. WOLPOFF is Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Associate 
Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. 
His work and theories on a "multiregional" model of human development 
challenge the popular "Eve" theory. His work has been covered in The New 
York Times, New Scientist, Discover, and Newsweek, among other 
publications. He is the author (with Rachel Caspari) of Race and Human 
Evolution: A Fatal Attraction

Eberhard Zangger  "Where Was Lost Atlantis?"  Two journalists once ranked 
the discovery of lost Atlantis as potentially the most spectacular 
sensation of all times. Now, the question what or where Atlantis might 
have been has disappeared. Why?  The Greek philosopher Plato, the only 
source for Atlantis, incorporated an extensive description of this 
legendary city into a mundane summary of contemporary (4th century BC) 
scientific achievements and knowledge of prehistory. Nobody attributed 
much attention to the account during subsequent centuries. In Medieval 
times, scholarly interest focussed on Aristotle, while Plato was 
neglected. When archaeology and history finally assumed the shape of 
scientific disciplines--after the middle of the 18th century AD--science 
still was under the influence of Christian theology, its Medieval mother 
discipline. The first art historians, who were brought up in a creationist 
world, consequently interpreted western culture as an almost divine 
concept which first materialized in ancient Greece, without having had any 
noticeable predecessors. Accordingly, any ancient texts referring to high 
civilizations, much older than Classical Greece, had to be fictitious by 
definition.  During the 20th century, dozens of palaces dating to a golden 
age a thousand years older than Plato's Athens have been excavated around 
the eastern Mediterranean. Atlantis can now be placed in a historical 
context. It is an Egyptian recollection of Bronze Age Troy and its 
awe-inspiring war against the Greek kingdoms. Plato's account and the end 
of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC can now be seen in a new light. Why was 
this connection not made earlier? Four Egyptian words, describing location 
and size, were mistranslated, because at the time Egypt and Greece used 
different calendars and scales. And, in contrast to biology, where, after 
Darwin, the idea of creationism was dropped in favor of evolutionism, 
Aegean prehistory has never questioned its basic premises. 
Geoarchaeologist EBERHARD ZANGGER is Director of Corporate Communications 
at KPNQwest (Switzerland) and the author of The Flood from Heaven : 
Deciphering the Atlantis Legend and Geoarchaeology of the Argolid. Zangger 
has written a monograph, published by the German Archaeological Institute, 
as well as more than seventy scholarly articles, which have appeared in 
the American Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, the Oxford Journal of 
Archaeology, and the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Carl Zimmer   "When will disease be eradicated?"  By the middle of the 
twentieth century, scientists and doctors were sure that it was just a 
matter of time, and not much time at that, before most diseases would be 
wiped from the face of the Earth. Antibiotics would get rid of bacterial 
infections; vaccines would get rid of viruses; DDT would get rid of 
malaria. Now one drug after the next are becoming useless against 
resistant parasites, and new plagues such as AIDS are sweeping through our 
species. Except for a handful of diseases like smallpox and Guinea worms, 
eradication now looks like a fantasy. There are three primary reasons that 
this question is no longer asked. First, parasites evolution is far faster 
and more sophisticated than anyone previously appreciated. Second, 
scientists don't understand the complexities of the immune system well 
enough to design effective vaccines for many diseases yet. For another, 
the cures that have been discovered are often useless because the global 
public health system is a mess. The arrogant dream of eradication has been 
replaced by much more modest goals of trying to keep diseases in check. 
CARL ZIMMER is the author of Parasite Rex and writes a column about 
evolution for Natural History.