Scientists imagine there’s no religion

Going over the answers to Edge 2007 question to world’s leading scientists, ‘What are you optimistic about and why?’, a lot of them felt that religion and violence will die out. I tend to agree with Russell Roberts that this is highly unlikely. Some of their optimism below;

DANIEL C. DENNETT Philosopher; University Professor, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon- The Evaporation of the Powerful Mystique of Religion

CHRIS ANDERSON, Curator, TED Conference- Systemic Flaws In the Reported World View

“So for example, the publication last year of a carefully researched Human Security Report received little attention. Despite the fact that it had concluded that the numbers of armed conflicts in the world had fallen 40% in little over a decade. And that the number of fatalities per conflict had also fallen. Think about that. The entire news agenda for a decade, received as endless tales of wars, massacres and bombings, actually missed the key point. Things are getting better. If you believe Robert Wright and his NonZero hypothesis, this is part of a very long-term and admittedly volatile trend in which cooperation eventually trumps conflict. Percentage of males estimated to have died in violence in hunter gatherer societies? Approximately 30%. Percentage of males who died in violence in the 20th century complete with two world wars and a couple of nukes? Approximately 1%. Trends for violent deaths so far in the 21st century? Falling. Sharply.”

GEOFFREY CARR, Science Editor, The Economist- Malthus was wrong

JUDITH RICH HARRIS , Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - The Survival of Friendship

STEVEN PINKER, - The Decline of Violence

“Most people, sickened by the headlines and the bloody history of the twentieth century, find this claim incredible. Yet as far as I know, every systematic attempt to document the prevalence of violence over centuries and millennia (and, for that matter, the past fifty years), particularly in the West, has shown that the overall trend is downward (though of course with many zigzags). The most thorough is James Payne’s The History of Force; other studies include Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization, Martin Daly & Margo Wilson’s Homicide, Donald Horowitz’s The Deadly Ethnic Riot, Robert Wright’s Nonzero, Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle, Stephen Leblanc’s Constant Battles, and surveys of the ethnographic and archeological record by Bruce Knauft and Philip Walker.”

HELEN FISHER, Research Professor, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University; Author, Why We Love- "Free Love"

“And along with the rise of romantic love within marriage has come what sociologists hail as the 21st century marital form, known as peer marriages, symmetrical marriages or companionate marriages: weddings between equals. "Marriage," Voltaire wrote, "is the only adventure open to the cowardly." Today more and more men and women have the opportunity to enjoy this adventure—life with someone they passionately love. In this way humanity is regaining a tradition that is highly compatible with our ancient human spirit.”

RANDOLPH M. NESSE , Psychiatrist, University of Michigan; Coauthor, Why We Get Sick- We Will Find New Ways To Block Pessimism

CHRIS ANDERSON, Editor in Chief, Wired Magazine; Author, The Long Tail
- Metcalfe's Law of Minds

NANCY ETCOFF, Psychologist, Harvard Medical School & Harvard University’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative; Author, Survival of the Prettiest: The Science of Beauty- The Hedonic Set Point Can Be Raised

JARED DIAMOND, Biologist; Geographer, UCLA; Author, Collapse
- Good Choices Sometimes Prevail

NASSIM NICHOLAS TALEB, Epistemologist of Randomness and Applied Statistician; Author, Fooled By Randomness- The Birth of Stochastic Science

“All the while institutional science is largely driven by causal certainties, or the illusion of the ability to grasp these certainties; stochastic tinkering does not have easy acceptance. Yet we are increasingly learning to practice it without knowing — thanks to overconfident entrepreneurs, naive investors, greedy investment bankers, and aggressive venture capitalists brought together by the free-market system. I am also optimistic that the academy is losing its power and ability to put knowledge in straightjackets and more out-of-the-box knowledge will be generated Wiki-style. But what I am saying is not totally new. Accepting that technological improvement is an undirected (and unpredictable) stochastic process was the agenda of an almost unknown branch of Hellenic medicine in the second century Mediterranean Near East called the "empirics". Its best known practitioners were Menodotus of Nicomedia and my hero of heroes Sextus Empiricus. They advocated theory-free opinion-free trial-and-error, literally stochastic medicine. Their voices were drowned by the theoretically driven Galenic, and later Arab-Aristotelian medicine that prevailed until recently.”

Related;
Across the blogs; On the edge/ The dangerous question/ What are you optimistic about?/ Ain't gonna study war no more

The World in 2007- podasts from The Economist

2007 Big Thinkers: Yahoo! Distinguished Speaker Series

Can Questions Change the World?

The drop