Adam Gopnik, author of Angels & Ages, A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln and Modern Life and Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate and many other works, will discuss a fundamental question: How far can Darwin take us as a guide to why we are the way we are?
Both outspoken appreciators of Darwin, Adam Gopnik and Steven Pinker will compare their visions—perhaps complementary, perhaps contrasting—of what Darwin’s legacy is on the two hundredth anniversary of his birth.
Keith Stanovich talks about the implications of universal Darwinism. Can natural selection explain just about anything? Pretty much.
Many of us feel that the Web is ushering in a new era of global consciousness. But Howard Bloom thinks life has been a collective mind from the very beginning. He made the case in his book "Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To the 21st Century." Host Jon Udell speaks with Bloom who reviews the themes of that book — group selectionism, complex adaptive systems, collective learning — and considers what has, and hasn’t, changed since the book was published in 2000.