Dr. Dobb's Journal March 1997
In 1995, Touchstone Books published John Brockman's The Third Culture. In it, Brockman posits a new synthesis of the literary intellectual and the scientist, the Two Cultures identified in C.P. Snow's 1959 book of that name, and makes his case with the words and thoughts of third-culture thinkers.
On the last day of 1996 in an alternate reality, I threw a New Year's Eve party and invited all the people featured in Brockman's book. I squeezed past the group at the refrigerator: George Williams, legendary evolutionist; Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, who dreamed up punctuated evolution; Richard Dawkins, popular ultraDarwinist; Brian Goodwin, less popular antiDarwinist; and Lynn Margulis, brilliant biologist, weak Gaiaist, and strong challenger of orthodoxy. Gould had just made a point about the importance in evolution of chance events like genetic drift, to which Williams responded, "But you still have to explain why drift was stronger than selection in that particular case." Dawkins told Eldredge, "But I'm not a zealot! I just have a passionate revulsion against fatuous religious prejudices." Eldredge answered, "Then I guess it wasn't you who called punctuated evolution 'evolution by jerks.'" I heard Margulis mumble, "I think they all suffer from physics envy," as Goodman announced to one and all, "It's not a matter of 'better than.' Evolution is simply a matter of finding a place where you can just be yourself."
Searching through the fridge, I pushed aside a jelly jar that had found a place to be a spontaneous Kombucha culture, to retrieve a can of Jolt. I walked down the hall, where an eclectic bunch were passing around a bottle of Big House Red. AI gurus Marvin Minsky and Roger Schank and that favorite philosopher of all AI gurus, Daniel Dennett, were slumped against one wall, while opposite them lolled psychologist Steven Pinker and biologist/philosopher Francisco Varela. They were deep in an empirical and theoretical exploration of the nature of unconsciousness, and by the empty bottles in the corner I could tell they were making great progress. I walked into the living room, where the physicists were huddled around the wood stove. I paused long enough to hear Martin Rees ask Lee Smolin, "But how do you test whether the physics of the daughter universe born in the center of a black hole resembles that of the parent universe enough to provide the mechanism for Darwinian evolution of universes?" I nearly bumped into Roger Penrose as he ambled toward the unconsciousness session in the hall.
I walked through the double doors, past the complexity theorists: Murray Gell-Mann, Nobel laureate, inventor of the quark model, and master of the put-down; and Christopher Langton, the leading light of the a-life folks and a model of chaos in action. They were trying to get some investment advice from Doyne Farmer, who left the Santa Fe Institute to get rich on chaos in the stock market.
I stepped out into the solarium, where Danny Hillis, whose lifelong dream it is to create a true thinking machine, was sitting alone in the dark at my computer. From the blinking of the modem I could tell he was online, but I couldn't make out what he was doing. I paused to look up through the glass ceiling at the night stars before setting down the can of Jolt I had brought him.
"So what do you think, Danny?" I asked, trying to pick out the faint haze of the Milky Way. "Are we alone? Or are there other intelligent beings in the universe?"
"There will be," he snapped, "if you stop interrupting me."
A good book. Recommended. Well worth the $14.
--Michael Swaine