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Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for.

“Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt,

“Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”

The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.

We don’t believe you.

Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate.

we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions

Shtulman’s research indicates that as we become scientifically literate, we repress our naive beliefs but never eliminate them entirely. They lurk in our brains, chirping at us as we try to make sense of the world.

Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics.

We have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning.

we can deceive ourselves.

Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. Like the rest of us, they’re vulnerable to what they call confirmation bias—the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them

other scientists will try to reproduce them

Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.

Many people in the United States—a far greater percentage than in other countries—retain doubts about that consensus or believe that climate activists are using the threat of global warming to attack the free market and industrial society generally.

news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses

science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research.

But industry PR, however misleading, isn’t enough to explain why only 40 percent of Americans, according to the most recent poll from the Pew Research Center, accept that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming.

“science communication problem,”

yielded abundant new research into how people decide what to believe—and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus.

higher literacy was associated with stronger views—at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.

“egalitarian” and “communitarian” mind-set are generally suspicious of industry and apt to think it’s up to something dangerous that calls for government regulation; they’re likely to see the risks of climate change.

“hierarchical” and “individualistic” mind-set respect leaders of industry and don’t like government interfering in their affairs; they’re apt to reject warnings about climate change, because they know what accepting them could lead to—some kind of tax or regulation to limit emissions.

For a hierarchical individualist, Kahan says, it’s not irrational to reject established climate science: Accepting it wouldn’t change the world, but it might get him thrown out of his tribe.

Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers.

organizations funded in part by the fossil fuel industry have deliberately tried to undermine the public’s understanding of the scientific consensus by promoting a few skeptics.

Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts

Internet has democratized information, which is a good thing. But along with cable TV, it has made it possible to live in a “filter bubble” that lets in only the information with which you already agree.

How to convert climate skeptics? Throwing more facts at them doesn’t help.

people need to hear from believers they can trust, who share their fundamental values.

We believe in scientific ideas not because we have truly evaluated all the evidence but because we feel an affinity for the scientific community.

“Believing in evolution is just a description about you. It’s not an account of how you reason.”

evolution actually happened. Biology is incomprehensible without it. There aren’t really two sides to all these issues. Climate change is happening. Vaccines really do save lives. Being right does matter—and the science tribe has a long track record of getting things right in the end. Modern society is built on things it got right.

Doubting science also has consequences.

In the climate debate the consequences of doubt are likely global and enduring. In the U.S., climate change skeptics have achieved their fundamental goal of halting legislative action to combat global warming.

“That line between science communication and advocacy is very hard to step back from,”

It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app.

that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science.

not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it.

for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.

Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method.

Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is.

“Everybody should be questioning,” says McNutt. “That’s a hallmark of a scientist. But then they should use the scientific method, or trust people using the scientific method, to decide which way they fall on those questions.”

science has made us the dominant organisms,

incredibly rapid change, and it’s scary sometimes. It’s not all progress.

even genuine scientists are human and as such susceptible to the allure of offering up new paradigms (as the historian of science Thomas Kuhn put it)

paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould insisted that his conception of “punctuated equilibria” (a kind of Marxist biology that blurred the lines between evolution and revolution), which he developed along with fellow paleontologist Niles Eldredge, upended the traditional Darwinian understanding of how natural selection works.

This notion doesn’t constitute a fundamental departure from plain old evolution by natural selection; it simply italicizes that sometimes the process is comparatively rapid, other times slower.

In addition, they have long had a peculiar perspective on evolution, because of the limitations of the fossil record

Darwin was a pioneering geologist as well as the greatest of all biologists, and his insights were backgrounded by the key concept of uniformitarianism, as advocated by Charles Lyell, his friend and mentor

previously regnant paradigm among geologists had been “catastrophism

fossil record was therefore seen as reflecting the creation and extinction of new species by an array of dramatic and “unnatural” dei ex machina.

Of late, however, uniformitarianism has been on a losing streak. Catastrophism is back, with a bang . . . or a flood, or a burst of extraterrestrial radiation, or an onslaught of unpleasant, previously submerged chemicals

This emphasis on catastrophes is the first of a triad of novelties on which “A New History of Life” is based. The second involves an enhanced role for some common but insufficiently appreciated inorganic molecules, notably carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen sulfide.

Life didn’t so much unfold smoothly over hundreds of millions of years as lurch chaotically in response to diverse crises and opportunities: too much oxygen, too little carbon dioxide, too little oxygen, too much carbon dioxide, too hot, too cold

So far, so good, except that in their eagerness to emphasize what is new and different, the authors teeter on the verge of the same trap as Gould: exaggerating the novelty of their own ideas.

Things begin to unravel when it comes to the third leg of Messrs. Ward and Kirschvink’s purported paradigmatic novelty: a supposed role for ecosystems—rain forests, deserts, rivers, coral reefs, deep-sea vents—as units of evolutionary change

“While the history of life may be populated by species,” they write, “it has been the evolution of ecosystems that has been the most influential factor in arriving at the modern-day assemblage of life. . . . [W]e know that on occasion in the deep past entirely new ecosystems appear, populated by new kinds of life.” True enough, but it is those “new kinds of life,” not whole ecosystems, upon which natural selection acts.

One of the most common popular misconceptions about evolution is that it proceeds “for the good of the species.”

The problem is that smaller, nimbler units are far more likely to reproduce differentially than are larger, clumsier, more heterogeneous ones. Insofar as ecosystems are consequential for evolution—and doubtless they are—it is because, like occasional catastrophes, they provide the immediate environment within which something not-so-new is acted out.

This is natural selection doing its same-old, same-old thing: acting by a statistically potent process of variation combined with selective retention and differential reproduction, a process that necessarily operates within the particular ecosystem that a given lineage occupies.

Large-scale surveys of the genome have led a number of researchers to expect that the human genome will turn out to be even more full of activity than previously thought.

“It was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome — as if we knew enough to say it wasn’t functional.”

If every piece of the genome were essential, then many of those mutations would lead to significant birth defects, with the defects only multiplying over the course of generations; in less than a century, the species would become extinct.

“Much of what has been called ‘junk DNA’ in the human genome is actually a massive control panel with millions of switches regulating the activity of our genes.”

It’s no coincidence, researchers like Gregory argue, that bona fide creationists have used recent changes in the thinking about junk DNA to try to turn back the clock to the days before Darwin. (The recent studies on noncoding DNA “clearly demonstrate we are ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ by our Creator God,” declared the Institute for Creation Research.)

Over millions of years, the human genome has spontaneously gotten bigger, swelling with useless copies of genes and new transposable elements.

9. You run into a higher total number of people than would have ever been true of our pre-agrarian hominid ancestors.

. You have the option of spending 90% of your waking hours sitting at a desk – and you often exercise this option.

3. You were raised in some variant of a nuclear family – with less assistance from aunts, uncles, older cousins, and grandparents, than would have been typical of our nomadic ancestors.2. You spend a great deal of time interacting with “screens” and “devices” – having the evolutionarily unprecedented possibility of almost never having to be bored at all. 1. You can eat an entire diet of processed foods – and you live in a world where processed foods (think McDonald’s …) are cheaper and more accessible than natural foods.

Philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have emphasized that human beings are essentially social creatures, that the idea of an isolated individual is a misleading abstraction. So it is not just ironic but instructive that modern evolutionary research, anthropology, cognitive psychology and neuroscience have come down on the side of the philosophers who have argued that the basic unit of human social life is not and never has been the selfish, self-serving individual.

The irony here is that when it comes to our responsibilities to one another as human beings, religion and evolution nowadays are not necessarily on opposite sides of the fence.

in the eyes of many conservative Americans today, religion and evolution do not mix. You either accept what the Bible tells us or what Charles Darwin wrote, but not both

Contrary to libertarian and Tea Party rhetoric, evolution has made us a powerfully social species, so much so that the essential precondition of human survival is and always has been the individual plus his or her relationships with others.

as Matthew D. Lieberman, a social neuroscience researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written: “we think people are built to maximize their own pleasure and minimize their own pain. In reality, we are actually built to overcome our own pleasure and increase our own pain in the service of following society’s norms.”

Why then did Rousseau and others make up stories about human history if they didn’t really believe them? The simple answer, at least during the Enlightenment, was that they wanted people to accept their claim that civilized life is based on social conventions, or contracts, drawn up at least figuratively speaking by free, sane and equal human beings — contracts that could and should be extended to cover the moral and working relationships that ought to pertain between rulers and the ruled.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously declared in “The Social Contract” (1762) that each of us is born free and yet everywhere we are in chains. He did not mean physical chains. He meant social ones. We now know he was dead wrong. Human evolution has made us obligate social creatures. Even if some of us may choose sooner or later to disappear into the woods or sit on a mountaintop in deep meditation, we humans are able to do so only if before such individualistic anti-social resolve we have first been socially nurtured and socially taught survival arts by others. The distinction Rousseau and others tried to draw between “natural liberty, which is bounded only by the strength of the individual” and “civil liberty, which is limited by the general will” is fanciful, not factual.

In short, their aims were political, not historical, scientific or religious.

what Rousseau and others crafted as arguments in favor of their ideas all had the earmarks of primitive mythology

Bronislaw Malinowski argued almost a century ago: “Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief, it safeguards and enforces morality, it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man.”

not all myths make good charters for faith and wisdom. The sanctification of the rights of individuals and their liberties today by libertarians and Tea Party conservatives is contrary to our evolved human nature as social animals. There was never a time in history before civil society when we were each totally free to do whatever we elected to do. We have always been social and caring creatures. The thought that it is both rational and natural for each of us to care only for ourselves, our own preservation, and our own achievements is a treacherous fabrication. This is not how we got to be the kind of species we are today.

Myths achieve this social function, he observed, by serving as guides, or charters, for moral values, social order and magical belief.

Nor is this what the world’s religions would ask us to believe.

after five years of reading, writing, and thinking about Adams, I’ve concluded that he really wasn’t like us at all. Of course his consciousness was different, but I imagine he was different even in the workings of his subconscious. Living in a moral rather than a psychological world, a world that does not acknowledge a subconscious realm, makes you radically different, especially if, like Adams, you have fashioned your entire life around principle

“I know few things in modern times so grand as that old man … a President’s son, himself a President, standing there the champion of the neediest of the oppressed.”

What, then, does Adams say to us — at least in the moral terms with which he, himself, would have been familiar? He says that a man can inscribe himself in the annals of posterity not only despite, but because of, his indifference to popular opinion. He might even, as Adams did, gain the esteem of his fellow man in his own lifetime, though he could do so only by virtue of not seeking it.

The bones in its hands and feet are curved, “spitting images” of the toes and finger bones that belonged to the ancient Australopithecus, Piper said. These hominids, such as the 3 million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis Lucy, had digits well-suited for climbing.

This species lived at the same time as humans with modern anatomy, who first appeared in the fossil record 200,000 years ago (or perhaps as long as 350,000 years ago). ″We continue to realize that few thousands of years back in time, H. sapiens was definitely not alone on Earth,”

Though these fossils are the oldest in the Philippines, evidence for habitation is even older; 700,000 years ago, ancient butchers on Luzon carved up a rhinoceros with stone tools. Which species did the butchering is unknown.

A few “mammal species you find on Luzon appear to have come from the mainland,” Piper said. The Asian continent is 400 or more miles away through the Luzon strait. But in the Middle Pleistocene, when glacial sheets locked up vast amounts of water, sea levels dropped by as much as 400 feet, Piper said.

“I would just say that when humans could see land or they could smell it or they knew the signs, that birds were coming from it, they sought it out,” he said. “That’s not a Homo sapiens trait. It’s something our ancestors and extinct relatives had.”

The cartoon version of evolution, in which a hunched ape becomes a tall and jaunty biped, suggests a journey with a destination. The reality is messier,

An island’s confines can rapidly spark evolutionary change; Charles Darwin saw this in finches’ beaks.

“Isolation plays games,” Potts said. Homo floresiensis showed anthropologists that an island could be an “odd little laboratory of human evolution,” he said. These bones reinforce that lesson.

“It’s beginning to look like the evolutionary process is really fluid,” Potts said. “And it’s surprising that it is so fluid where each species of Homo may actually be a history or a record.” The result is a fusion of the modern and ancient: molars that could be yours alongside toes with millions-year-old curves.

Fifteen years ago, Hawks said, anthropologists chalked up the worldwide success of Homo sapiens to our modern anatomy. These new discoveries, in far-flung corners, suggest exceptionalism is not built into our brains or skeletons.

“The archaeological record is now showing us that ancient human forms were much more adaptable, and I would say clever, than we imagined,”

“This isn’t ‘Flowers for Algernon,’ where, suddenly, we’re super smart and everyone else in the world is behind us.” Scientists are now plumbing genomes for other clues to Homo sapiens’ survival, looking at our metabolisms or resistance to disease, he said. “I’d say the doors have opened, and we haven’t figured out where they lead.”

Put simply, incompetent people think they know more than they really do, and they tend to be more boastful about it.

To test Darwin’s theory, the researchers quizzed people on several topics, such as grammar, logical reasoning and humor. After each test, they asked the participants how they thought they did. Specifically, participants were asked how many of the other quiz-takers they beat.

Time after time, no matter the subject, the people who did poorly on the tests ranked their competence much higher

On average, test takers who scored as low as the 10th percentile ranked themselves near the 70th percentile. Those least likely to know what they were talking about believed they knew as much as the experts.

Dunning and Kruger’s results have been replicated in at least a dozen different domains: math skills, wine tasting, chess, medical knowledge among surgeons and firearm safety among hunters.

Even though President Trump’s statements are rife with errors, falsehoods or inaccuracies, he expresses great confidence in his aptitude. He says he does not read extensively because he solves problems “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had.” He has said in interviews he doesn’t read lengthy reports because “I already know exactly what it is.”

He has “the best words” and cites his “high levels of intelligence” in rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change. Decades ago, he said he could end the Cold War: “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Trump told The Washington Post’s Lois Romano over dinner in 1984. “I think I know most of it anyway.”

Whether people want to understand “the other side” or they’re just looking for an epithet, the Dunning-Kruger effect works as both, Dunning said, which he believes explains the rise of interest.

Dunning says the effect is particularly dangerous when someone with influence or the means to do harm doesn’t have anyone who can speak honestly about their mistakes.

Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.

the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respectworthy or principled way, either.

Believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over.

What goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality.

to me, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.

The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life."

the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life?

If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus

The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure

What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible.

But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that, in one sense. It's just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal. It would seem perverse, on the face of it, to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous, should be excised if (which is doubtful) we can manage it.

suppose, as the atheist bus goes by, you are povertystricken, or desperate for a job, or a drug addict, or social services have just taken away your child. The bus tells you that there's probably no God so you should stop worrying and enjoy your life, and now the slogan is not just bitterly inappropriate in mood. What it means, if it's true, is that anyone who isn't enjoying themselves is entirely on their own. What the bus says is: there's no help coming.

Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

A consolation you could believe in would be one that wasn't in danger of popping like a soap bubble on contact with the ordinary truths about us. A consolation you could trust would be one that acknowledged the difficult stuff rather than being in flight from it, and then found you grounds for hope in spite of it, or even because of it

The novelist Richard Powers has written that the Clarinet Concerto sounds the way mercy would sound, and that's exactly how I experienced it in 1997. Mercy, though, is one of those words that now requires definition. It does not only mean some tyrant's capacity to suspend a punishment he has himself inflicted. It can mean – and does mean in this case – getting something kind instead of the sensible consequences of an action, or as well as the sensible consequences of an action.

from outside, belief looks like a series of ideas about the nature of the universe for which a truth-claim is being made, a set of propositions that you sign up to; and when actual believers don't talk about their belief in this way, it looks like slipperiness, like a maddening evasion of the issue.

I am a fairly orthodox Christian. Every Sunday I say and do my best to mean the whole of the Creed, which is a series of propositions. But it is still a mistake to suppose that it is assent to the propositions that makes you a believer. It is the feelings that are primary. I assent to the ideas because I have the feelings; I don't have the feelings because I've assented to the ideas.

what I felt listening to Mozart in 1997 is not some wishy-washy metaphor for an idea I believe in, and it's not a front behind which the real business of belief is going on: it's the thing itself. My belief is made of, built up from, sustained by, emotions like that. That's what makes it real.

I think that Mozart, two centuries earlier, had succeeded in creating a beautiful and accurate report of an aspect of reality. I think that the reason reality is that way – that it is in some ultimate sense merciful as well as being a set of physical processes all running along on their own without hope of appeal, all the way up from quantum mechanics to the relative velocity of galaxies by way of "blundering, low and horridly cruel" biology (Darwin) – is that the universe is sustained by a continual and infinitely patient act of love. I think that love keeps it in being.

That's what I think. But it's all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me.

No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.)

let's be clear about the emotional logic of the bus's message. It amounts to a denial of hope or consolation on any but the most chirpy, squeaky, bubble-gummy reading of the human situation

It's got itself established in our culture, relatively recently, that the emotions involved in religious belief must be different from the ones involved in all the other kinds of continuous imagining, hoping, dreaming, and so on, that humans do. These emotions must be alien, freakish, sad, embarrassing, humiliating, immature, pathetic. These emotions must be quite separate from commonsensical us. But they aren't

The emotions that sustain religious belief are all, in fact, deeply ordinary and deeply recognisable to anybody who has ever made their way across the common ground of human experience as an adult.

It's just that the emotions in question are rarely talked about apart from their rationalisation into ideas. This is what I have tried to do in my new book, Unapologetic.

You can easily look up what Christians believe in. You can read any number of defences of Christian ideas. This, however, is a defence of Christian emotions – of their intelligibility, of their grown-up dignity.

Patterns that didn’t change one generation to the next, Dr. Conway called still lifes — such as the four-celled block, the six-celled beehive or the eight-celled pond. Patterns that took a long time to stabilize, he called methuselahs.

The second thing Life shows us is something that Darwin hit upon when he was looking at Life, the organic version. Complexity arises from simplicity!

I first encountered Life at the Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1978. I was hooked immediately by the thing that has always hooked me — watching complexity arise out of simplicity.

Life shows you two things. The first is sensitivity to initial conditions. A tiny change in the rules can produce a huge difference in the output, ranging from complete destruction (no dots) through stasis (a frozen pattern) to patterns that keep changing as they unfold.

Life shows us complex virtual “organisms” arising out of the interaction of a few simple rules — so goodbye “Intelligent Design.”

I’ve wondered for decades what one could learn from all that Life hacking. I recently realized it’s a great place to try to develop “meta-engineering” — to see if there are general principles that govern the advance of engineering and help us predict the overall future trajectory of technology.

Melanie Mitchell— Professor of complexity, Santa Fe Institute

Given that Conway’s proof that the Game of Life can be made to simulate a Universal Computer — that is, it could be “programmed” to carry out any computation that a traditional computer can do — the extremely simple rules can give rise to the most complex and most unpredictable behavior possible. This means that there are certain properties of the Game of Life that can never be predicted, even in principle!

I use the Game of Life to make vivid for my students the ideas of determinism, higher-order patterns and information. One of its great features is that nothing is hidden; there are no black boxes in Life, so you know from the outset that anything that you can get to happen in the Life world is completely unmysterious and explicable in terms of a very large number of simple steps by small items.

In Thomas Pynchon’s novel “Gravity’s Rainbow,” a character says, “But you had taken on a greater and more harmful illusion. The illusion of control. That A could do B. But that was false. Completely. No one can do. Things only happen.”This is compelling but wrong, and Life is a great way of showing this.

In Life, we might say, things only happen at the pixel level; nothing controls anything, nothing does anything. But that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as action, as control; it means that these are higher-level phenomena composed (entirely, with no magic) from things that only happen.

Stephen Wolfram— Scientist and C.E.O., Wolfram Research

Brian Eno— Musician, London

Bert Chan— Artificial-life researcher and creator of the continuous cellular automaton “Lenia,” Hong Kong

it did have a big impact on beginner programmers, like me in the 90s, giving them a sense of wonder and a kind of confidence that some easy-to-code math models can produce complex and beautiful results. It’s like a starter kit for future software engineers and hackers, together with Mandelbrot Set, Lorenz Attractor, et cetera.

if we think about our everyday life, about corporations and governments, the cultural and technical infrastructures humans built for thousands of years, they are not unlike the incredible machines that are engineered in Life.

In normal times, they are stable and we can keep building stuff one component upon another, but in harder times like this pandemic or a new Cold War, we need something that is more resilient and can prepare for the unpreparable. That would need changes in our “rules of life,” which we take for granted.

Rudy Rucker— Mathematician and author of “Ware Tetralogy,” Los Gatos, Calif.

That’s what chaos is about. The Game of Life, or a kinky dynamical system like a pair of pendulums, or a candle flame, or an ocean wave, or the growth of a plant — they aren’t readily predictable. But they are not random. They do obey laws, and there are certain kinds of patterns — chaotic attractors — that they tend to produce. But again, unpredictable is not random. An important and subtle distinction which changed my whole view of the world.

William Poundstone— Author of “The Recursive Universe: Cosmic Complexity and the Limits of Scientific Knowledge,” Los Angeles, Calif.

The Game of Life’s pulsing, pyrotechnic constellations are classic examples of emergent phenomena, introduced decades before that adjective became a buzzword.

Fifty years later, the misfortunes of 2020 are the stuff of memes. The biggest challenges facing us today are emergent: viruses leaping from species to species; the abrupt onset of wildfires and tropical storms as a consequence of a small rise in temperature; economies in which billions of free transactions lead to staggering concentrations of wealth; an internet that becomes more fraught with hazard each year

Looming behind it all is our collective vision of an artificial intelligence-fueled future that is certain to come with surprises, not all of them pleasant.

The name Conway chose — the Game of Life — frames his invention as a metaphor. But I’m not sure that even he anticipated how relevant Life would become, and that in 50 years we’d all be playing an emergent game of life and death.

Imagination is the capacity to make associations among all these bits of information and to synthesize them into patterns and concepts.

When you walk, say, into a coffee shop you don’t see an array of surfaces, lights and angles. Your imagination instantly coalesces all that into an image: “coffee shop.”

Neuroscientists have come to appreciate how fantastically complicated and subjective this process of creating mental images really is. You may think perception is a simple “objective” process of taking in the world and cognition is a complicated process of thinking about it. But that’s wrong.

Perception — the fast process of selecting, putting together, interpreting and experiencing facts, thoughts and emotions — is the essential poetic act that makes you you.

For example, you don’t see the naked concept “coffee shop.” The image you create is coated with personal feelings, memories and evaluations. You see: “slightly upscale suburban coffee shop trying and failing to send off a hipster vibe.” The imagination, Charles Darwin wrote, “unites former images and ideas, independently of the will, and thus creates brilliant and novel results.”

Imagination helps you perceive reality, try on other realities, predict possible futures, experience other viewpoints. And yet how much do schools prioritize the cultivation of this essential ability?

“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” William Blake observed.

Can you improve your imagination? Yes. By creating complex and varied lenses through which to see the world

A person who feeds his or her imagination with a fuller repertoire of thoughts and experiences has the ability not only to see reality more richly but also — even more rare — to imagine the world through the imaginations of others.

This is the skill we see in Shakespeare to such a miraculous degree — his ability to disappear into his characters and inhabit their points of view without ever pretending to explain them.

Different people have different kinds of imagination. Some people mainly focus on the parts of the world that can be quantified.

it often doesn’t see the subjective way people coat the world with values and emotions and aspirations, which is exactly what we want to see if we want to glimpse how they experience their experience.

Furthermore, imagination can get richer over time. When you go to Thanksgiving dinner, your image of Uncle Frank contains the memories of past Thanksgivings, the arguments and the jokes, and the whole sum of your common experiences. The guy you once saw as an insufferable blowhard you now see — as your range of associations has widened and deepened — as a decent soul struggling with his wounds.

What happens to a society that lets so much of its imaginative capacity lie fallow? Perhaps you wind up in a society in which people are strangers to one another and themselves.

Discokeryx xiezhi was an early relative of today’s giraffes, but more like a cousin and not a direct ancestor.

“To the best of our knowledge, D. xiezhi exhibits the most optimized head-butting adaptation in vertebrate evolution,” the researchers write in the paper.

The discovery of Discokeryx xiezhi suggests this fighting style and competition for mates may be a contributing factor in their long-neck evolution.

“In reality, it was likely a combination of natural selection ... for a particular dietary preference and sexual selection in that lineage that drove the evolution of modern giraffe necks and limbs,” Advait Jukar, a paleobiologist at Yale University who was not involved in the study tells Scientific American’s Rachel Nuwer.

The great problem of our shared social existence is not wanting things, it’s wanting things because they are someone else’s.

Desire for what the other person has brings about a situation in which individuals in a community grow more similar to one another over time in a process of competition-cum-emulation. Such dual-natured social encounters, more precisely, are typical of people who are socially more or less equal

In relation to a movie star who does not even know some average schlub exists, that schlub can experience only emulation (this is what Girard calls “external mediation”), but in relation to a fellow schlub down the street (a “neighbor” in the Girardian-Biblical sense), emulation is a much more intimate affair (“internal mediation”, Girard calls it)

This is the moment of what Girard calls “mimetic crisis”, which is resolved by the selection of a scapegoat, whose casting-out from the community has the salvific effect of unifying the opposed but undifferentiated doubles

In a community in which the mimetic mechanism has led to widespread non-differentiation, or in other words to a high degree of conformity, it can however happen that scapegoating approaches something like the horror scenario in Shirley Jackson’s 1948 tale, “The Lottery”

As a modest theory of the anthropology of punishment, these observations have some promise.

he is a practically-minded person’s idea of what a theorist is like. Girard himself appears to share in this idea: a theorist for him is someone who comes up with a simple, elegant account of how everything works, and spends a whole career driving that account home.

Girard is not your typical French intellectual. He is a would-be French civil-servant archivist gone rogue, via Bloomington, Baltimore, Buffalo, and finally at Stanford, where his individual brand of New World self-reinvention would be well-received by some in the Silicon Valley subculture of, let us say, hyper-Whitmanian intellectual invention and reinvention.

Most ritual, in fact, strikes me as characterized by imitation without internal mediation or scapegoating.

I do not see anything more powerfully explanatory of this phenomenon in the work of Girard than in, say, Roland Barthes’s analysis of haute-couture in his ingenious 1967 System of Fashion, or for that matter Thorstein Veblen on conspicuous consumption, or indeed any number of other authors who have noticed that indubitable truth of human existence: that we copy each other

whatever has money behind it will inevitably have intelligent-looking people at least pretending to take it seriously, and with the foundation of the Imitatio Project by the Thiel Foundation (executive director Jimmy Kaltreider, a principal at Thiel Capital), the study and promotion of Girardian mimetic theory is by now a solid edifice in the intellectual landscape of California.

with Girard what frustrates me even more is that he does not seem to detect the non-mimetic varieties of desire

Perhaps even more worrisome for Girard’s mimetic theory is that it appears to leave out all those instances in which imitation serves as a force for social cohesion and cannot plausibly be said to involve any process of “internal mediation” leading to a culmination in scapegoating

the idea that anything Girard has to say might be particularly well-suited to adaptation as a “business philosophy” is entirely without merit.

dancing may be given ritual meaning — a social significance encoded by human bodies doing the same thing simultaneously, and therefore in some sense becoming identical, but without any underlying desire at all to annihilate one another. It is this significance that the Australian poet Les Murray sees as constituting the essence of both poetry and religion: both are performed, as he puts it, “in loving repetition”.

There are different kinds of theorist, of course, and there is plenty of room for all of us. It is however somewhat a shame that the everything-explainers, the hammerers for whom all is nail, should be the ones so consistently to capture the popular imagination

Part of Girard’s appeal in the Silicon Valley setting lies not only in his totalizing urge, but also in his embrace of a certain interpretation of Catholicism that stresses the naturalness of hierarchy, all the way up to the archangels, rather than the radical egalitarianism of other tendencies within this faith

Girard explains that the positive reception in France of his On Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World had to do with the widespread misreading of it as a work of anti-Christian theory. “If they had known that there is no hostility in me towards the Church, they would have dismissed me. I appeared as the heretic, the revolted person that one has to be in order to reassure the media

Peter Thiel, for his part, certainly does not seem to feel oppressed by western phallocracy either — in fact he appears intent on coming out somewhere at the top of the phallocratic order, and in any case has explicitly stated that the aspirations of liberal democracy towards freedom and equality for all should rightly be seen as a thing of the past. In his demotic glosses on Girard, the venture capitalist also seems happy to promote the Girardian version of Catholicism as a clerical institution ideally suited to the newly emerging techno-feudalist order.

In short, a complex and evolving system — whether that’s a flock of gold finches or a nebula or the English language — will produce ever more diverse and intricately detailed states and configurations of itself.

Some of these more diverse and intricate configurations, the scientists write, are shed and forgotten over time. The configurations that persist are ones that find some utility or novel function in a process akin to natural selection, but a selection process driven by the passing-on of information rather than just the sowing of biological genes

Have they finally glimpsed, I wonder, the connectedness and symbiotic co-evolution of their own scientific ideas with those of the world’s writers

Have they learned to describe in their own quantifying language that cradle from which both our disciplines have emerged and the firmament on which they both stand — the hearing and telling of stories in order to exist?

Have they quantified the quality of all existent matter, living and not: that all things inherit a story in data to tell, and that our stories are told by the very forms we take to tell them? 

“Is there a universal basis for selection? Is there a more quantitative formalism underlying this conjectured conceptual equivalence—a formalism rooted in the transfer of information?,” they ask of the world’s disparate phenomena. “The answer to both questions is yes.”

Yes. They’ve glimpsed it, whether they know it or not. Sing to me, O Muse, of functional information and its complex diversity.

The principle of complexity evolving at its own pace when left to its own devices, independent of time but certainly in a dance with it, is nothing new. Not in science, nor in its closest humanities kin, science and nature writing. Give things time and nourishing environs, protect them from your own intrusions and — living organisms or not — they will produce abundant enlacement of forms.

This is how poetry was born from the same larynxes and phalanges that tendered nuclear equations: We featherless bipeds gave language our time and delighted attendance until its forms were so multivariate that they overflowed with inevitable utility.

In her Pulitzer-winning “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” nature writer Annie Dillard explains plainly that evolution is the vehicle of such intricacy in the natural world, as much as it is in our own thoughts and actions. 

“The stability of simple forms is the sturdy base from which more complex, stable forms might arise, forming in turn more complex forms,” she explains, drawing on the undercap frills of mushrooms and filament-fine filtering tubes inside human kidneys to illustrate her point. 

“Utility to the creature is evolution’s only aesthetic consideration. Form follows function in the created world, so far as I know, and the creature that functions, however bizarre, survives to perpetuate its form,” writes Dillard.

“Of the multiplicity of forms, I know nothing. Except that, apparently, anything goes. This holds for forms of behavior as well as design — the mantis munching her mate, the frog wintering in mud.” 

She notes that, of all forms of life we’ve ever known to exist, only about 10% are still alive. What extravagant multiplicity. 

“Intricacy is that which is given from the beginning, the birthright, and in the intricacy is the hardiness of complexity that ensures against the failures of all life,” Dillard writes. “The wonder is — given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning texture of time — the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous.”

“This paper, and the reason why I'm so proud of it, is because it really represents a connection between science and the philosophy of science that perhaps offers a new lens into why we see everything that we see in the universe,” lead scientist Michael Wong told Motherboard in a recent interview. 

Wong is an astrobiologist and planetary scientist at the Carnegie Institute for Science. In his team’s paper, that bridge toward scientific philosophy is not only preceded by a long history of literary creativity but directly theorizes about the creative act itself.  

“The creation of art and music may seem to have very little to do with the maintenance of society, but their origins may stem from the need to transmit information and create bonds among communities, and to this day, they enrich life in innumerable ways,” Wong’s team writes.  

“Perhaps, like eddies swirling off of a primary flow field, selection pressures for ancillary functions can become so distant from the core functions of their host systems that they can effectively be treated as independently evolving systems,” the authors add, pointing toward the elaborate mating dance culture observed in birds of paradise.

“Perhaps it will be humanity’s ability to learn, invent, and adopt new collective modes of being that will lead to its long-term persistence as a planetary phenomenon. In light of these considerations, we suspect that the general principles of selection and function discussed here may also apply to the evolution of symbolic and social systems.”

The Mekhilta teaches that all Ten Commandments were pronounced in a single utterance. Similarly, the Maharsha says the Torah’s 613 mitzvoth are only perceived as a plurality because we’re time-bound humans, even though they together form a singular truth which is indivisible from He who expressed it. 

Or, as the Mishna would have it, “the creations were all made in generic form, and they gradually expanded.” 

Like swirling eddies off of a primary flow field.

“O Lord, how manifold are thy works!,” cried out David in his psalm. “In wisdom hast thou made them all: the earth is full of thy riches. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts.” 

In all things, then — from poetic inventions, to rare biodiverse ecosystems, to the charted history of our interstellar equations — it is best if we conserve our world’s intellectual and physical diversity, for both the study and testimony of its immeasurable multiplicity.

Because, whether wittingly or not, science is singing the tune of the humanities. And whether expressed in algebraic logic or ancient Greek hymn, its chorus is the same throughout the universe: Be fruitful and multiply. 

Both intricate configurations of art and matter arise and fade according to their shared characteristic, long-known by students of the humanities: each have been graced with enough time to attend to the necessary affairs of their most enduring pleasures.