What Is Your Dangerous Idea? Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable.WHAT IS YOUR DANGEROUS IDEA? Today's Leading Thinkers on the Unthinkable JOHN BROCKMAN Biographical pages for John Brockman:
Modern science includes many concepts that were once considered socially or morally unacceptable, or even dangerous. The ideas that human beings evolved from ancestral species and that Earth revolves around the sun are two notable examples. Dangerous ideas can be critical to understanding how the world works, this book posits. Brockman, publisher and editor of the Edge Web site for "third-culture" thinkers, presents dozens of authors and their edgy ideas. The thought-provoking essays--some shorter than a page and others five to six pages long--are by Irene Pepperberg Irene Pepperberg (born April 1, 1949, Brooklyn, New York) is a scientist noted for her studies in animal cognition, particularly in relation to parrots. She is an adjunct professor of psychology at Brandeis University and a lecturer at Harvard University. , Steven Pinker Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18 1954) is a prominent Canadian-American experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, and popular science writer known for his spirited and wide-ranging advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. , David BUSS David Buss (born April 14, 1953) is a professor of psychology at The University of Texas at Austin, known for his evolutionary psychology research on human sex differences in mate selection. , Freeman Dyson Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, nuclear weapons design and policy, and for his serious theorizing in futurism and science fiction , and other scientists. Included are essays that reject the concept of a soul, propose that the most dangerous idea stemming from modern genetics is that races differ in their talents and temperaments, and despair that the fight against global warming has already been lost. Harper Perennial, 2007, 301 p., paperback, $13.95. |
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