What is your dangerous idea?: today's leading thinkers on the unthinkable

We have no souls / John Horgan The rejection of soul / Paul Bloom The evolution of evil / David Buss The differences between humans and nonhumans are quantitative, not qualitative / Irene Pepperberg Groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments / Steven Pinker The genetic basis of human behavior / J. Craig Venter Marionettes on genetic strings / Jerry Coyne Francis Crick's dangerous idea / V.S. Ramachandran Being alone in the universe / Rodney Brooks Life as an agent of energy dispersal / Scott D. Sampson We are entirely alone / Keith Devlin Science may be running out of control / Martin Rees Why I hope the standard model is wrong about why there is more matter than antimatter / Frank J. Tipler The idea that we understand plutonium / Jeremy Bernstein The idea that we should all share our most dangerous ideas / W. Daniel Hillis The idea that ideas can be dangerous / Daniel Gilbert The fight against global warming is lost / Paul C.W. Davies Think outside the Kyoto box / Gregory Benford Our planet is not in peril / Oliver Morton The effect of art can't be controlled or anticipated / April Gornik A "grand narrative" / Denis Dutton

Our universal moral grammar's immunity to religion / Marc D. Hauser Bertrand Russell's dangerous idea / Nicholas Humphrey Hodgepodge morality / David Pizarro We will understand the origin of life within the next five years / Robert Shapiro Understanding molecular biology without discovering the origins of life / George Dyson The problem with super mirrors / Marco Iacoboni Cyberdisinhibition / Daniel Goleman Brains cannot become minds without bodies / Alun Anderson What are people well informed about in the information age? / David Gelernter More anonymity is good / Kevin Kelly A new golden age of medicine / Paul W. Ewald Using medications to change personality / Samuel Barondes Drugs may change the patterns of human love / Helen Fisher A marriage option for all / David G. Myers Choosing the sex of one's child / Diane F. Halpern The idea of ideas / Seth Lloyd The human brain will never understand the universe / Karl Sabbagh The world may be fundamentally inexplicable / Lawrence M. Krauss The "landscape' / Leonard Susskind Seeing Darwin in the light of Einstein ; Seeing Einstein in the light of Darwin / Lee Smolin The multiverse / Brian Greene

What twentieth-century physics says about the world might be true / Carlo Rovelli It's a matter of time / Paul Steinhardt A radical re-evaluation of the character of time / Piet Hut It's OK not to know everything / Marcelo Gleiser The end of insight / Steven Strogatz When will the Internet become aware of itself? / Terrence Sejnowski Democratizing access to the means of invention / Neil Gershenfeld Mind is a universally distributed quality / Rudy Rucker The forbidden fruit intuition / Thomas Metzinger The posterior probability of any particular god is pretty small / Philip W. Anderson Science must destroy religion / Sam Harris The self is a conceptual chimera / John Allen Paulos The greatest story every told / Carolyn C. Porco Science as just another religion / Jordan Pollack This is all there is / Robert R. Provine A science of the divine? / Stephen M. Kosslyn Science will never silence god / Jesse Bering Religion is the hope that is missing in science / Scott Atran Myths and fairy tales are not true / Todd E. Feinberg Parental licensure / David Lykken Zero parental influence / Judith Rich Harris The focus on emotional intelligence / John Gottman A cacophony of "controversy" / Alison Gopnik Applied history / Stewart Brand

Tribal peoples often damage their environments and make war / Jared Diamond Nothing / Charles Seife Everything is pointless / Susan Blackmore There aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes / Daniel C. Dennett Unspeakable ideas / Randolph M. Nesse Anty gravity : chaos theory in an all-too-practical sense / Kai Krause Navigating by new scientific principles / Rupert Sheldrake A political system based on empathy / Simon Baron-Cohen Social relativity / Tor Nørrtranders There is something new under the sun, us / Gregory Cochran A spoon is like a headache / Donald D. Hoffman Projection of the longevity curve / Gerald Holton The near-term inevitability of radical life extension and expansion / Ray Kurzweil The domestication of biotechnology / Freeman J. Dyson Public engagement in science and technology / Philip Campbell Suppose Faulkner was right? / Joel Garreau What if the unknown becomes known and is not replaced with a new unknown? / Eric Fischl Where goods cross frontiers, armies won't / Michael Shermer Government is the problem, not the solution / Matt Ridley The free market / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Modern science is a product of biology / Arnold Trehub

No more teacher's dirty looks / Roger C. Schank

We are all virtual / Clifford Pickover

Runaway consumerism explains the Fermi paradox / Geoffrey Miller

Simulation versus authenticity / Sherry Turkle

Culture is natural / Dan Sperber

The human brain is a cultural artifact / Timothy Taylor

Free will is exercised unconsciously / Eric R. Kandel

Free will is going away / Clay Shirky

The limits of introspection / Mahzarin R. Banaji

What we know may not change us / Barry C. Smith

Telling more than we can know / Richard E. Nisbett

The quick-thinking zombies inside us / Andy Clark

The banality of evil, the banality of heroism / Philip G. Zimbardo

Open-source currency / Douglas Rushkoff

Is the West already on a downhill course? / David Bodanis

Technology can untie the United States / Juan Enriquez

Democracy may be on its way out / Haim Harari

Marx was right : the state will evaporate / James O'Donnell

Following Sisyphus / Howard Gardner

How can I trust, in the face of so many unknowables? / Ernst Pöppel

A twenty-four-hour period of absolute solitude / Leo M. Chalupa.