If you have a free hour or ten, check out some of the learned, mind expanding answers to this year’s edge.org question, which is “What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?”

I am going to try and cover some of the more interesting responses over the next few days. I’ll start with John Gottman’s anticipation of earthlike colonies: 

The technological changes were small at first. In 2007 a telescope was developed that could search for planets in the Milky Way within 100 light years of Earth. The next version of the telescope in 2008 did not have to block out the light of the new star to see the planets. It could directly see the reflected light of the planets closest to every star. That made it possible to do spectroscopic analysis of reflected light and search for blue planets like Earth. Within a decade, 100 Earth-like planets had been identified within 100 light years. In the next two centuries that number increased to 50,000 blue planets.

Within the next two centuries the seemingly impossible technical problems of space travel began to be solved. Problems of foil sails were solved. Designs emerged for ships that could get up to 85% of the speed of light within 2 years, using acceleration from starts and from harnessing the creative energy of empty space itself. The Moon, Europa and Mars were colonized. Terra-forming technologies developed. Many designs emerged for the spinning complete 2-mile Earth-habitat ship that produced a 1-g environment. Thousands of people wanted to make the trips.

The Economist has a piece about how the study of evolution can be useful to policymakers. I’m unqualified to opine on that however the article did contain some fascinating bits of research:

That murderers are usually young men is well known, but Dr Daly and Dr Wilson dug a bit deeper. They discovered that although the murder rate varies from place to place, the pattern does not. Plot the rate against the age of the perpetrator and the peak is the same (see chart). Moreover, the pattern of the victims is similar. They, too, are mostly young men. In the original study, 86% of the victims of male killers aged between 15 and 19 were also male. This is the clue as to what is going on. Most violence (and thus most murder, which is simply violence’s most extreme expression) is a consequence of competition between young, unemployed, unmarried men. In the view of Darwinists, these men are either competing for women directly (“You looking at my girl, Jimmy?”) or competing for status (“You dissing me, man?”).

Research also shows why capital punishment may be ineffective as a deterrent against murder. If murder is indeed motivated by reproductive competition, you could conclude that capital punishment is ineffective because it presents the same risk of reproductive failure which motivated the crime in the first place.

Then there’s this, on rape:

For similar reasons, it is no surprise to Darwinists that those who rape strangers are also men of low status. Oddly, considering it is an act that might result in a child, the idea that rape is an evolved behaviour is even more controversial than the Darwinian explanation of murder. Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico, who proposed it on the basis of criminal data and by comparing people with other species, was excoriated by feminists who felt he was somehow excusing the crime.

To a Darwinist, the most common form of forced mating, so-called date rape, which occurs in an already charged sexual environment, looks a lot like an adaptive response. Men who engage in it are likely to have more offspring than those who do not. If a genetic disposition for men to force their attentions on women in this way does exist, it would inevitably spread. 

I don’t think research of this kind “excuses” rape at all. It merely explains why, at the fine toothed biological level, the urge to rape may occur at all. I imagine all of us at one point or another visualize criminal acts (perhaps not those as severe as rape or murder) in the course of our day. The very existence of traffic jams all but guarantees it. A person is still accountable for the urges they choose to act on.

The NYT has a piece on laid off bankers chasing literary/creative dreams:

With Wall Street hemorrhaging jobs, bonuses disappearing and the financial sector going through a seismic shift, some bankers and lawyers are switching lanes to more creative career paths. They are putting down their Wall Street Journals and picking up Variety as they try their hands at comedy, filmmaking and writing. “The economy couldn’t survive on speculation and what really amounted to advanced financial alchemy,” he said. “We are now realizing it is our human creativity that is our real capital. 

“The economic downturn is going to free up top talent to do other things that are going to change the metabolism of cities like New York in a very good way.”

Not so fast:

Still, Jonathan Bowles, director of the Center for an Urban Future, says that while there is no question that creative fields are not faring as badly as Wall Street right now, they are hardly immune to the economic downturn. The advertising, publishing and newspaper industries are all cutting jobs, he noted.

 

 

TreeHugger reports on a new shoebox made from 100% recycled material:

Pretty cool, but, the real question is: How will this affect the  manufacture of gradeschool dioramas?

Also, just in case that story tempted you into indulging in any optimism about the green revolution, there’s this report in the NYT about an artificial beach currently under development in Dubai which will feature air conditioned sand. Yep. Air conditioned sand. That has to be the energy equivalent of burning hundred dollar bills in a fireplace, right?

New research on the state of the earth 2.5 billion years ago:

Just 2% to 3% of the Earth’s surface would have been dry land, compared with 28% today. Back then life consisted of nothing more complex than algae and bacteria. The Australian scientists who produced the new computer simulation believe that billions of years ago the Earth’s deep mantle was 200C hotter than it is today. A hotter mantle would have thickened and buoyed up the Earth’s crust beneath the oceans, creating shallower basins and leading to the flooding of what is now land. The continental crust would also have spread, making it lower and flatter and more vulnerable to floods. New Scientist magazine reported: “As the mantle cooled, land would have gradually appeared as the oceans became deeper and regions of high relief on the continental crust formed.” The transition may help explain why oxygen levels in the atmosphere rose at this time in the Earth’s history, say the researchers led by Dr Nicolas Flament from the University of Sydney.

Leonard David at SPACE on how the economic downturn is expected to affect prospects for commercial spaceflight:

But one big issue looms for NewSpace next year, said Jeff Foust, an aerospace analyst, journalist and publisher, as well as editor and publisher of the respected website, The Space Review. And that topic of trepidation is the state of the economy.

“This is going to affect companies in the industry in two ways.  One, it’s going to make it that much more difficult for companies to raise the money needed to develop their vehicles,” Foust told SPACE.com. ”It won’t directly affect companies that are already self-funded or otherwise fully-funded – like Virgin Galactic, SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, Bigelow Aerospace, etc. – but those  companies trying to raise tens of millions of dollars or more  to carry out their business plans will find that steep path to funding  has become even steeper.

Foust also noted another impact tied to the rocky economy – a potential reduction in customer demand, particularly in space tourism. A whiplash from the continuation of a deep recession in 2009, he said, may well be people reconsidering tossing out $95,000 to $200,000 or more for suborbital jaunts, or putting the trip off a few years – to a time when, presumably, the economy recovers.

The silver lining:

“During 2009, entrepreneurial space companies will continue working on their propulsion systems, airframes, and all the other components necessary for successful access to space,” Greason explained. “So we will see engine tests, other subsystem tests, and progress on vehicle construction and system integration.”

But given all that activity, Greason added: “We’re unlikely to see any new systems enter service in 2009. People should not find this disappointing. This is the hard work that is necessary to make affordable spaceflight a reality, and it will lead to first flights in 2010.”

Spotlighting that next year will likely become the “tipping” point in the emerging personal space flight industry is Stuart Witt, general manager of Mojave Air and Space Port in California. Witt’s end of the year message is straightforward: The industry has an opportunity to expand to many locations across the nation if operators are successful at Mojave.

Here’s a bonus link for the space obsessed.

Ezra Klein acheives a remarkable (and sad) coherence on this week’s misadventures in the Gaza strip:

The point is simple: You can argue, as Israel is arguing, that their air strikes are a response to Hamas’s missiles. But to the Palestinians, Hamas’s missiles were a response to the blockade (under international law, a blockade is indeed an act of war). Israel, of course, would argue that the blockade was a response to Hamas’s past attacks. And Hamas would argue that past attacks were a response to Israel’s unceasing oppression of the Palestinian people. And Israel would argue that…

The provocations and cassus belli travel as far back as anyone might care to trace. And whether you believe Israel, the Palestinians, or the international partitioners originally at fault, starting the clock on December 10th, when the ceasefire expired and Hamas’s missiles crashed into the fields around Sderot, is merely an Israeli press strategy. This is the latest tactic in an ongoing struggle over land and freedom and security and money and politics and religion and elections and oppression. It did not begin with the rockets, and it will not end with this attack.

Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias has a post on some new cognitive  learning research which contains (for me) some counterintuitive results:

In Experiment 1, students received an illustrated booklet, PowerPoint presentation, or narrated animation that explained 6 steps in how a cold virus infects the human body. The material included 6 high-interest details mainly about the role of viruses in sex or death (high group) or 6 low-interest details consisting of facts and health tips about viruses (low group). The low group outperformed the high group across all 3 media on a subsequent test of problem-solving transfer (d = .80) but not retention (d = .05). In Experiment 2, students who studied a PowerPoint lesson explaining the steps in how digestion works performed better on a problem-solving transfer test if the lesson contained 7 low-interest details rather than 7 high-interest details (d = .86), but the groups did not differ on retention (d = .26). In both experiments, as the interestingness of details was increased, student understanding decreased (as measured by transfer). Results are consistent with a cognitive theory of multimedia learning, in which highly interesting details sap processing capacity away from deeper cognitive processing of the core material during learning.

If this is borne out by other research it certainly has some far reaching consequences for how we think about classroom teaching in general. We’ve been raised in a paradigm which values the “interesting” teacher who “brings the material alive” with unexpected or fascinating details. Perhaps at some point in the future we’ll see a renaissance of dry, Ben Stein styled lecturers.

(Let’s hope not)

Matthew Yglesias has a smart post on “walkable urbanism” as distinguished from “living in a city”. The thrust is basically that the benefits of urban living (a walking lifestyle, conveniently located retail and restaurants, etc.) don’t necessarily have to occur within today’s major cities. With tweaks in building patterns citylife can be brought to suburbs and small towns. One example:

I think trying to build housing in shopping malls is a potentially promising idea.

My sense is that housing would change the malls in important, beneficial ways also. There would probably be an increase in restaurants and other small shops which appealed to the everyday needs of residents. Those tenants would likewise help the malls to survive downturns (like one we’re currently in) when spending on purely consumer goods plummets radically. I could see mall housing being particularly attractive to community college students who could work and live in the same structure while also experiencing a taste of the citylife their away-at-school friends are enjoying.

We’re all familiar with the unpleasant consequences of dehumanization (torture and genocide come to mind). Dehumanization is actually surprising given the natural built in mechanisms human beings have for empathy. Harvey Whitehouse at Cognition and Culture highlights some of the new conclusions about what kinds of thinking produce it:

Some researchers have begun to investigate non-empathetic ways of reasoning about other agents. For instance, speciation (the tendency to classify our fellow humans as if they were natural kinds with essentialized heritable qualities) may be necessary for various types of reflective ideas about human types, such as racial categorizing or attribution of charisma or religious specialization (witches, shamans etc. who are thought to be inherently different from other people). Or to take another example, teleological reasoning(the tendency to view our fellow humans as instruments with specialized functions, just like tools and weapons) seems to be entailed in certain types of strategic decision-making (e.g. the idea that foot soldiers can serve as cannon fodder in a strategic advance or that civilians can serve as a human shield).

He then goes on to speculate about the possible historical and environmental causes of speciation and teleological reasoning:

Role specialization. If the division of labour is weak, and everybody undertakes more or less the same repertoire of tasks and roles, we might predict that speciation of person categories (at least within the community) will be correspondingly limited or absent but, with a strengthening of the division of labour, roles and offices can eclipse individuality, leading to increasing speciation of social categories. 

Domestication of animals. The hunting of animals often entails extensive speculation on the mental states of individuated quarry whereas the farming of livestock can encourage a more generic view of the way species as a whole think and behave. In human prehistory the shift from dependence on wild meat to the management and breeding of a range of animal species may have been revolutionary in cognitive as well as economic terms. At an extreme, the more mechanized farming methods of modern times appear to make empathetic reasoning entirely irrelevant in animal management: animals become more like a crop to be harvested than a type of agent.

Scope and effectiveness of conflict-resolution mechanisms. In resolving interpersonal conflict people must draw on empathizing capacities. But such efforts can break down, for instance on the grounds that an adversary cannot be reasoned with. When efforts to empathize fail, an adversary may be de-humanized. Such patterns can emerge when negotiations between warring groups reach an impasse, when estranged lovers divorce, when work colleagues shun each other, when kin groups feud, etc.

Urbanization. Whereas in rural settings it might seem that everybody knows everybody else, in urban environments encounters with strangers are routine. Since it is practically impossible to acquire rich biographical data on every person encountered we are obliged to fall back on simple categorical heuristics for dealing with strangers.

Commoditization. Whereas gifts establish empathetic obligations between exchange partners, commodity transactions may be portrayed as ‘strictly business’ such that once a transaction is completed the parties ideally have no further obligations. Commoditization may foster a de-humanizing view of others, as generic incumbents of roles (clients, investors, customers) rather than as individuals with personal histories. 

It’s interesting, to say the least, that the above factors are mostly associated with a shift towards modernity.