TED Saturday

This was an extraordinarily good day. The only weaknesses of the day are weaknesses of TED’s format itself: the presentations are non-interactive with the audience and with one another so it is very difficult to develop ideas. For example, if a Nobel prize winner raises a provocative issue in his allotted 15-20 minutes, there’s no Q&A, no panel, and no further discussion by later speakers who, by and large, have labored for months polishing a presentation from which they dare not swerve.

This weakness was quite apparent in the first presentation of the day. Daniel Dennett, a philosopher of amazing clarity and originality of focus, compared the ideas humans are willing to die for to an actual virus whose propagation requires causing its hosts — ants in this case — to commit suicide. As he led us to believe he was talking about militant Islam, he pulled the rug and said that our Western memes are a virus that threatens to do to the non-Western world what real viruses did to the native Americans when the Europeans arrived. Just as he was about to tell us what he thinks can and should be done to protect the world from these mental viruses, his time was up. As a result, he left us at the weakest part of his argument, it seemed to me. Yes, ideas are like viruses in that some multiply at the cost of their hosts’ lives. But, unlike viruses, they do not necessarily act in a mechanistic, deterministic way (unless one believes that all thought is deterministic). There is something profoundly anti-intellectual and demeaning about the “ideas are viruses” meme. After all, this view has to say that all ideas are viruses, doesn’t it? Rationality is a virus as much as extremist religious views. Otherwise, we’re just picking the ideas we don’t like and labeling them viruses, smuggling the negative sense of “virus” under the coat of the genetic sense of virus. But Dennett would have revealed all … if only Ted slots were wider and the speakers fewer.

Here are some more highlights:

Steve Jurveston had 7 minutes to talk about the nanotech revolution. Fascinating but way too abbreviated. He expects revolutions in computing, medicine, materials and manufacturing in 5-10 years. He also pointed out in passing that the human genome is smaller than MS Office.

Nobelist Kary Mullis gave a country-boy reminiscence of his discovery that the scientific method is a human invention. After giving a vivid sense of what “doing science” means to him, he attacked politicized science, taking global warming as his example. He cited two recent studies that found no warming in the past 50 years, throwing into doubt the “More CO2 = More Warming” hypothesis first formulated 100 years ago.

Next came Richard Dawkins who pissed me off mightily. He’s obviously one of our great minds but … he’s got an impressively blinkered view of religion. I wholeheartedly agree with his main point: American culture needs to accept atheism as a mainstream belief, and I liked his proposal that atheists come out of the closet in order to legitimize the atheist position. But he wrapped this in a virulent and, frankly, ignorant attack on religion. I wanted to go up to him afterwards and say: “I hate science. Scientists experiment on animals.” He would reply (I imagine): “First of all, you twit, astronomy, physics, etc. don’t experiment on animals.” Then I would pounce, it being my fantasy and all: “Exactly. And a critique of religion-in-general is just as twitty.” It genuinely irks me that he recklessly conflates all religions as if they all reject science, all insist on blind faith, and all appeal only to the weak-minded. (The fact that my wife, who has a doctorate in philosophy and is one of the clearest-headed people I know, is an orthodox Jew certainly doesn’t affect my attitude :)

Josef Penninger gave a fascinating presentation on his genetic research that may result in treatments for osteoporosis, arthritis, and pain management. More interesting, however, was his explanation of discoveries about how particular genes work. For example, the gene that controls the death of cells is also used by the body to “sculpt” fingers out of fetus’s webbed mass. I spoke with him afterwards and found him to be shy and friendly. (Yes, you can be both.) When he talked about his new institute, he talked mainly in terms of human values. Emotionally, he felt like Dawkin’s mirror image.

By the way, I also had a chance to talk briefly with Dean Kamen. “Since Segway challenges so many of our habits and many of our institutions,” I asked, “how do you see it getting accepted? Who’s going to adopt it first? Where will the breakthrough be?” “I wish I knew,” Kamen said while standing, as always, on his Segway. But, he said, things are looking up since the Segway’s introduction: Automobile companies don’t hate it the way he thought they would and two states have passed laws allowing Segways on sidewalks.

Steven Pinker, whose work on language and the brain is brilliant and too hard for me, gave a highly understandable preview of his new book that argues that there is indeed such a thing as human nature. He pointed to four reasons we fear that idea: We don’t like the inequality of capability it implies, we think it means that we are not perfectable, it seems to imply determinism and it seems to suck all the meaning out of life. He gave brief, effective counters for each fear.

Next up was Deepak Chopra, a popular spiritualist. He opened up by saying that Dawkins “seems to be a bit of a fundamentalist [laughs from the audience] and even perhaps a bit of a bigot [gasps from the audience]. He then spent his twenty minutes trying to erase science’s distinction between observed and observer, using indeterminacy and quantum leaps as his proof points. He spoke the language of physics fluently, but even I, whose lack of understanding of quantum mechanics is truly deep, spotted some misunderstandings. I think. Besides, his approach can’t possibly convince scientists because he’s not telling them anything they don’t already know.

Quincy Jones talked about his life. Frank Gehry chatted about his life as an architect. Chris Bangle, BMW’s chief designer, told an amusing story to show that love and trust are at the heart of the collaborative process.

Overall, it was an amazing line up of intellect, squeezed, alas, into slots as small as veal pens — with just as much room to move around.

This is Richard Saul Wurman’s last year as the head of TED. Next year, Chris Anderson, founder of Business 2.0, will host it. Chris is promising to maintain TED as it is, but it remains to be seen if it can weather the departure of its leader and icon.

By the way, I managed to leave out one extraordinary presentation yesterday. David Macauley cycled through about 100 drawings in 20 minutes to show the process by which he created his upcoming book about Rome. (What’s the graphical equivalent of thinking out loud?) He is such a magnificent artist.

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