Here's something well worth your while: http://meaningoflife.tv/
Posted on this site, which is hosted by Slate.com, are interviews with a large number of deep thinkers. I have only watched four so far, but I'll certainly watch them all.
My favorite so far: Edward O. Wilson.
I'm looking forward to the one with Ursula Goodenough. I've never heard of her, but how great is that name?
The interviews are on video, so it's a bit of a nuisance for those with slower connections. They're tolerable over my cheap DSL connection (download speed: 256 Kbps -- less than 5x faster than dialup). I find that the Flash versions on Google are less prone to stalling than the WMF files on the originating site, and it helps to pause the video at the start for a minute or two, to let the buffer on your home system get a head start.
As the video consists almost exclusively of a headshot of one person or the other, sitting in a chair talking, there's not really much to see. But the audio is highly content-rich. To this end, and out of consideration for my dialup friends, I have appealed to the feedback section of meaningoflife.tv, and given my clout, I'm sure they'll post the audio-only version RSN.
2 comments:
As you may know Ed Wilson is the world's expert on ants. Some people claimed that he was the world's greatest scientist.
One interesting experiment that he describes in his book, was that they bought an island and then completely exterminated all forms of life on the island. Then they monitored it to see which forms of life came back first and how they got there. Trying to figure out if birds dropped seeds or the wind blew seeds or things drifted ashore from the ocean and so on. There was a lot of speculation at the time on how islands got the various forms and varieties of life.
Wilson became notorious when he made the mistake of stating that there was a genetic difference between men and women. Although generally though of as a liberal, as Tom Wolf describes in "Hooking Up", ... "He was not PC or liberal enough. As we have already seen, protestors invaded the meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, where Wilson was appearing, dumped a pitcher of ice water, cubes and all, over his head, and began chanting. "You're all wet, You're all wet." The most prominent feminist in America, Gloria Steinam, went on television and in an interview with John Stossel of ABC, insisted that studies of genetic differences between male and female nervous systems should cease forthwith."
Wolf goes on to applaud Wilson and work his usual caustic attack on his critics.
Wilson talks in his interview about being castigated by the left thirty years ago. He tells a nice story about how, in the time since (during which most of his theories about social animals been validated), the radical completely unseating the radical left as his, and science's, principal attacker.
I just finished reading Civilization and the Limpet, by Martin Wells. He talks about the observation of a sterilized island being recolonized, as well. (Apparently, the island, in Wells's account anyway, was sterilized by volcanic action, not humankind.)
Pretty interesting stuff, as is the rest of the book. If you like Lewis Thomas, you'll like this book. There are differences -- Thomas writes with a slightly more rarified tone, while Wells talks a lot about the down-and-dirty aspects of doing marine zoology aboard a small boat.
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