Every year Edge asks a bunch of the world’s brightest people a question. This year they’ve asked them what they’ve changed their minds about over the last 12 months.
Scientists of note feature highly and the list is dangerously involving – this post should have been up hours ago but I got sidetracked finding out why Alan Alda has changed his mind about God (twice!) and why my boss has changed his mind about human spaceflight.
Craig Venter changed his mind about the importance of doing something now about the environment (his italics). “Like many or perhaps most I wanted to believe that our oceans and atmosphere were basically unlimited sinks with an endless capacity to absorb the waste products of human existence,” he says. “…There are those who like to believe that the future of life on Earth will continue as it has in the past, but unfortunately for humanity, the natural world around us does not care what we believe.”
Biologist PZ Myers has cheated to my mind. He says “I always change my mind about everything, and I never change my mind about anything.”
Richard Dawkins now thinks the Handicap Principle might be true. He cites this example of the principle: “The long tail of a cock pheasant is a handicap. It endangers the male’s own survival. Other theories of sexual selection reasoned — plausibly enough — that the long tail is favoured in spite of its being a handicap. Zahavi’s maddeningly contrary suggestion was that females prefer long tailed males, not in spite of the handicap but precisely because of it.”
Neuropsychologist Stanislas Deheane used to believe there “would be never be a single “Schrödinger’s equation for the brain’”. Now though he’s not so sure.
Roger Highfield, science editor of the Daily Telegraph, may be courting controversy with this statement: “I have come to question the key assumption behind this survey: ‘When facts change your mind, that’s science.’ This idea that science is an objective fact-driven pursuit is laudable, seductive and – alas – a mirage.”
You can also find out why Phil Campbell, Nature’s editor in chief, now thinks use of cognitive enhancement drugs by healthy people has “much to be said for it”….