2001 : WHAT QUESTIONS HAVE DISAPPEARED?

Metaphysical questions. 

Metaphysical answers haven't disappeared: the new agers are full of them, and so are the old religionists. 

Cosmological questions haven't disappeared: but scientists press them as real questions about the very physical universe. 

But the old Platonic questions about the nature of the good and the form of beauty — they went away when we weren't looking. They won't be back.

JAMES J. O'DONNELL, Professor of Classical Studies and Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Avatars of the Word: From Papyrus to Cyberspace.

In the 1960's and 70's it seemed just a matter of time before antiquated notions of god, heaven, and divine intervention would disappear from the intellectual spectrum, at least in the US. Instead, we find ourselves in an era when God appears to be on the lips of all politicians, creationism is rampant in our schools, and the separation of church and state seems more fragile than ever. What is the cause of this regression, and what can we do to combat it? Surely, one of the legacies of science is to learn to accept the Universe for what it is, rather than imposing our own belief systems on it. We should be prepared to offend any sensibilities, even religious ones, when they disagree with the evidence of experiment. Should scientists be more vocal in order to combat the born-again evangelists who are propagating ill-founded notions about the cosmos?

LAWRENCE M. KRAUSS is Ambrose Swasey Professor of Physics, Professor of Astronomy, and Chair of the Physics Department at Case Western Reserve University. He is the recipient of the AAAS Award for Public Understanding of Science, and this year's Lilienfeld Prize from the American Physical Society. He is the author of numerous books, including The Physics of Star Trek.

A hundred years ago, one of the most fundamental questions in physical science was: How fast is the Earth moving? Many experiments had been performed to measure the speed of the Earth through space as it orbits the sun, and as the solar system orbits the galaxy. The most famous was conducted in 1887 by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley using an optical interferometer. The result they obtained was... zero. Today, scientists regard the question of the Earth's speed through space as meaningless and misconceived, although many non-scientists still refer to the concept.

Why has the question disappeared? Einstein's theory of relativity, published in 1905, denied any absolute frame of rest in the universe; speed is meaningful only relative to other bodies or physical systems. Ironically, some decades later, it was discovered there is a special frame of reference in the universe defined by the cosmic microwave background radiation, the fading afterglow of the big bang. The Earth sweeps through this radiation at roughly 600 km per second (over a million miles per hour) in the direction of the constellation Leo. This is the closest that modern astronomy gets to the notion of an absolute cosmic velocity.

PAUL DAVIES is an internationally acclaimed physicist, writer and broadcaster, now based in South Australia. Professor Davies is the author of some twenty books, including Other Worlds, God and the New Physics, The Edge of Infinity, The Mind of God, The Cosmic Blueprint, Are We Alone? and About Time. He is the recipient of a Glaxo Science Writers' Fellowship, an Advance Australia Award and a Eureka prize for his contributions to Australian science, and in 1995 he won the prestigious Templeton Prize for his work on the deeper meaning of science.

It seems to me we’ve surrendered the notion of the sacred to those who only mean to halt the evolution of culture. Things we call "sacred" are simply ideologies and truths so successfully institutionalized that they seem unquestionable. For example, the notion that sexual imagery is bad for young people to see — a fact never established by any psychological or anthropological study I’ve come across — is accepted as God-ordained fact, and used as a fundamental building block to justify censorship. (Meanwhile, countless sitcoms in which parents lie to one another are considered wholesome enough to earn "G" television ratings.)

A politician’s claim to be "God-fearing" is meant to signify that he has priorities greater than short-term political gain. What most people don’t realize is that, in the Bible anyway, God-fearing is a distant second to God-loving. People who were God-fearing only behaved ethically because they were afraid of the Hebrew God’s wrath. This wasn’t a sacred relationship at all, but the self-interested avoidance of retaliation.

Today, it seems that no place, and — more importantly — no time is truly sacred. Our mediating technologies render us available to our business associates at any hour, day or night. Any moment spent thinking instead of spending, or laughing instead of working is an opportunity missed. And the more time we sacrifice to production and consumption, the less any alternative seems available to us.

One radical proposal to combat the contraction of sacred time was suggested in the book of Exodus, and it's called the Sabbath. What if we all decided that for one day each week, we would refrain from buying or selling anything? Would it throw America into a recession? Maybe the ancients didn't pick the number seven out of a hat. Perhaps they understood that human beings can only immerse themselves in commerce for six days at a stretch before losing touch with anything approaching the civil, social, or sacred.

DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF is the author of Coercion, Media Virus, Playing the Future, Ecstasy Club. Professor of Virtual Culture, New York University.

Some scientific questions cannot be resolved, but rather are dissolved, and vanish once we begin to better understand their terms.

This is often the case for "definitional questions". For instance, what is the definition of life? Can we trace a sharp boundary between what is living and what is not living? Is a virus living? Is the entire earth a living organism? It seems that our brain predisposes us to ask questions that require a yes or no answer. Moreover, as scientists, we'd like to keep our mental categories straight and, therefore, we would like to have neat and tidy definitions of the terms we use. However, especially in the biological sciences, the objects of reality do not conform nicely to our categorical expectations. As we delve into research, we begin to realize that what we naively conceived of as a essential category is, in fact, a cluster of loosely bound properties that each need to be considered in turn (in the case of life: metabolism, reproduction, autonomy, homeostasy, etc..). Thus, what was initially considered as a simple question, requiring a straightforward answer, becomes a complex issue or even a whole domain of research. We begin to realize that there is no single answer, but many different answers depending on how one frames the terms of the question. And eventually, the question is simply dropped. It is not longer relevant.

I strongly suspect that one of today's hottest scientific question,s the definition of consciousness, is of this kind. Some scientists seem to believe that what we call consciousness is an essence of reality, a single coherent phenomenon that can be reduced to a single level such as a quantum property of microtubules. Another possibility, however, that consciousness is a cluster of properties that, most of the time, cohere together in awake adult humans. A minimal list probably includes the ability to attend to sensory inputs or internal thoughts, to make them available broadly to multiple cerebral systems, to store them in working memory and in episodic memory, to manipulate them mentally, to act intentionally based on them, and in particular to report them verbally. As we explore the issue empirically, we begin to find many situations (such as visual masking or specific brain lesions) in which those properties break down. The neat question "what is consciousness" dissolves into a myriad of more precise and more fruitful research avenues.

Any biological theory of consciousness, which assumes that consciousness has evolved, implies that "having consciousness" is not an all-or-none property. The biological substrates of consciousness in human adults are probably also present, but only in partial form, in other species, in young children or brain-lesioned patients. It is therefore a partially arbitrary question whether we want to extend the use of the term "consciousness" to them. For instance, several mammals, and even very young human children, show intentional behavior, partially reportable mental states, some working memory ability — but perhaps no theory of mind, and more "encapsulated" mental processes that cannot be reported verbally or even non-verbally. Do they have consciousness, then? My bet is that once a detailed cognitive and neural theory of the various aspects of consciousness is available, the vacuity of this question will become obvious.

STANISLAS DEHAENE, researcher at the Institut National de la Santé, studies cognitive neuropsychology of language and number processing in the human brain; author of The Number Sense: How Mathematical Knowledge Is Embedded In Our Brains.

Questions disappear when they seem to be answered or unanswerable. The interesting missing questions are the apparently answered ones that are not, and the apparently unanswerable ones that are.

One of life's most profound questions has been thought to be unanswerable. That question is, "Why is life so full of suffering?" Impatience with centuries of theological and philosophical speculation has led many to give up on the big question, and to ask instead only how brain mechanisms work, and why people differ in their experiences of suffering. But the larger question has an answer, an evolutionary answer. The capacities for suffering — pain, hunger, cough, anxiety, sadness, boredom and all the res — have been shaped by natural selection. They seem to be problems because they are so painful and because they are aroused only in adverse circumstances, but they are, in fact, solutions.

The illusion that they are problems is further fostered by the smoke-detector principle — selection has shaped control mechanisms that express defensive responses whenever the costs are less than the protection they provide. This is often indeed, much more often than is absolutely necessary. Thus, while the capacities for suffering are useful and generally well-regulated, most individual instances are excessive or entirely unnecessary. It has not escaped notice that this principle has profound implications for the power and limits of pharmacology to relieve human suffering.

RANDOLPH M. NESSE is Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Evolution and Human Adaptation Program at the University of Michigan. He is the author, with George Williams, of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine.

The moral, intellectual, physical and social improvement of the human race was a hot topic of the Enlightenment. It helped shape the American and French revolutions. Creating the "New Soviet Man" was at the heart of the Russian revolution — that's what justified the violence.

A central theme of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was not just that human misery could be alleviated. It was that core human problems like crime could be fixed by the government eliminating root causes like want.

That's all gone.

We now barely trust government to teach kids to read.

JOEL GARREAU, the cultural revolution correspondent of The Washington Post, is a student of global culture, values, and change whose current interests range from human networks and the transmission of ideas to the hypothesis that the '90s — like the '50s — set the stage for a social revolution to come. He is the author of the best-selling books Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and The Nine Nations of North America, and a principal of The Edge City Group, which is dedicated to the creation of more liveable and profitable urban areas worldwide.

Darwinism is alive and well in academic discussions and in pop thinking. Natural selection is a key element in explaining just about everything we encounter today, from the origin and spread of AIDS to the realization that our parents didn't "make us do it," our ancestors did. Ironically, though, Darwinism has disappeared from the area where it was first and most firmly seated the evolution of life, and especially the evolution of humanity. Human evolution was once pictured as a series of responses to changing environments coordinated by differences in reproduction and survivorship, as opportunistic changes taking advantage of the new possibilities opened up by the cultural inheritance of social information, as the triumph of technology over brute force, as the organization of intelligence by language. Evolutionary psychologists and other behavioralists still view it this way, but this is no longer presented as the mainstream view of human paleontologists and geneticists who address paleodemographic problems.

Human evolution is now commonly depicted as the consequence of species replacements, where there are a series of species emanating from different, but usually African homelands, each sooner or later replacing the earlier ones. It is not the selection process that provides the source of human superiority in each successive replacement, but the random accidents that take place when new species are formed from small populations of old ones. The process is seen as being driven by random extinctions, opening up unexpected opportunities for those fortunate new species lucky to be at the right time and place.

The origin and evolution of human species are now also addressed by geneticists studying the variation and distribution of human genes today (and in a few cases ancient genes from Neandertals). They use this information to estimate the history of human population size and the related questions of when the human population might have been small, where it might have originated, and when it might have been expanding. It is possible to do this if one can assume that mutation and genetic drift are the only driving forces of genetic change, because the effect of drift depends on population size. But this assumption means that Darwinian selection did not play any significant role in genetic evolution. Similarly, interpreting the distribution of ancient DNA as reflecting population history (rather than the history of the genes studied the histories are not necessarily the same) also assumes that selection on the DNA studied did not play a role in its evolution. In fact, the absence of Darwinian selection is the underlying assumption for these types of genetic studies.

Human paleontology has taken a giant step away from Darwin will it have the courage to follow the lead of evolutionary behavior and step back?

MILFORD H. WOLPOFF is Professor of Anthropology and Adjunct Associate Research Scientist, Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. His work and theories on a "multiregional" model of human development challenge the popular "Eve" theory. His work has been covered in The New York Times,New Scientist, Discover, and Newsweek, among other publications. He is the author (with Rachel Caspari) of Race and Human Evolution: A Fatal Attraction

The first was the Enlightenment. Hobbes claimed the brutishishness of man in a state of nature called for a governmental Leviathan. Rousseau's concept of the noble savage led him to call for the abolition of property and the predominance of the "general will." Adam Smith justified market capitalism by saying that it is not the generosity but the self-interest of the baker that leads him to give us bread. Madison justified constitutional government by saying that if people were angels, no government would be necessary, and if angels were to govern people, no controls on government would be necessary. The young Marx's notion of a "species character" for creativity and self-expression led to "From each according to his ability"; his later belief that human nature is transformed throughout history justified revolutionary social change.

The second period was the 1960s and its immediate aftermath, when Enlightenment romanticism was revived. Here is an argument the US Attorney General, Ramsay Clark, against criminal punishment: "Healthy, rational people will not injure others ... they will understand that the individual and his society are best served by conduct that does not inflict injury. ... Rehabilitated, an individual will not have the capacity-cannot bring himself-to injure another or take or destroy property." This is, of course, an empirical claim about human nature, with significant consequences for policy.

The discussion came to an end in the 1970s, when even the mildest non romantic statements about human nature were met with angry denunciations and accusations of Nazism. At the century's turn we have an unprecedented wealth of data from social psychology, ethnography, behavioral economics, criminology, behavioral genetics, cognitive neuroscience, and so on, that could inform (though of course, not dictate) policies in law, political decision-making, welfare, and so on. But they are seldom brought to bear on the issues. In part this is a good thing, because academics have been known to shoot off their mouths with half-baked or crackpot policy proposals. But since all policy decisions presuppose some hypothesis about human nature, wouldn't it make sense to bring the presuppositions into the open so they can be scrutinized in the light of our best data?

STEVEN PINKER is professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT; director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT; author of Language Learnability and Language Development, Learnability and Cognition, The Language Instinct , How the Mind Works, and Words and Rules.

The reason this question is dead is because traditional Skinnerianism, which viewed rats and pigeons as furry and feathered black boxes, guided by simple principles of reinforcement and punishment, is theoretically caput. It can no longer account for the extraordinary things that animals do, spontaneously.

Thus, we now know that animals form cognitive maps of their environment, compute numerosities, represent the relationships among individuals in their social group, and most recently, have some understanding of what others know.

The questions for the future, then, are not "Do animals think?", but "What precisely do they think about, and to what extent do their thoughts differ from our own?"

MARC D. HAUSER is an evolutionary psychologist, and a professor at Harvard University where he is a fellow of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. He is a professor in the departments of Anthropology and Psychology, as well as the Program in Neurosciences. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, and Wild Minds: What AnimalsThink.

For all of history, humans traded objects, then traded currency for objects, with the idea that when you buy some thing, you own it. This most fundamental human right — the right to own — is under attack again. Only this time, the software industry, not the followers of Karl Marx, are responsible.

In the last 15 years of the information age, we discovered that every object really has three separable components: the informational content, delivered on a physical medium, governed by the license, a social or legal contract governing the rights to use the thing. It used to be that the tangible media token (the thing) both held the content, and (via possession) enforced the common understanding of the "ownership" license. Owners have rights to a thing — to trade it, sell it, loan it, rent it, destroy it, donate it, paint it, photograph it, or even chop it up to sell in pieces.

For a book, the content is the sequence of words themselves, which may be rendered as ink scratches on a medium of paper bound inside cardboard covers. For song it is a reproduction of the audio pattern pressed into vinyl or plastic to be released by a reading device. The license - to own all rights but copy rights — was enforced simply by possession of the media token, the physical copy of the book or disk itself. If you wanted to, you could buy a book, rip it into separate pages, and sell each page individually. You can slice a vinyl record into individual song rings for trade. 

For software, content is the evolving bits of program and data arranged to operate on some computer. Software can be delivered in paper, magnetic, optical, or silicon form, or can be downloaded from the internet, even wirelessly. Software publishers know the medium is completely irrelevant, except to give the consumer the feeling of a purchase.

Even though you had the feeling of trading money for something, your really don't own the software you paid for. The license clearly states that you don't. You are merely granted a right to use the information, and the real owner can terminate your license at will, if you criticize him in public. Moreover, you cannot resell the software, you cannot take a "suite" apart into working products to sell each one separately. You cannot rent it or loan it to a friend. You cannot look under the hood to try to fix it when it breaks. You don't actually own anything but exchanged your money for a "right to use", and those rights can be arbitrarily dictated, and then rendered worthless by the very monopoly you got it from, forcing you to pay again for something you felt you had acquired last year.

There is no fundamental difference between software, recordings, and books. E-books are not sold, but licensed, and Secure Music will be available in a pay-per-download format. Inexorably driven by more lucrative profits from rentals, I predict that within a couple of decades, you will no longer be able to "buy" a new book or record. You will not be able to "own" copies. This may not seem so nefarious, as long as you have easy access to the "celestial jukebox" and can temporarily download a "read-once" license to any entertainment from private satellites. Your children will have more room in their homes and offices without the weight of a lifetime collection of books and recordings.

What are humans when stripped of our libraries? And it won't stop with books.

For an automobile, the content is the blueprint, the organization of mechanisms into stylistic and functional patterns which move, built out of media such as metals, pipes, hoses, leather, plastic, rubber, and fluids. Because of the great expense of cloning a car, Ford doesn't have to spell out the licensing agreement: You own it until it is lost, sold, or stolen. You can rent it, loan it, sell it, take it apart, and sell the radio, tires, engine, carburetor, etc. individually.

But the license agreement can be changed! And when Ford discovers the power of UCITA, you will have to pay an annual fee for a car you don't own, which will blow up if you fail to bring it in or pay your renewal fee. And you will find that you cannot resell your car on an open secondary market, but can only trade it in to the automobile publisher for an upgrade.

Without an effort to protect the right to own, we may wake up to find that there is nothing left to buy.

JORDAN POLLACK, a computer science and complex systems professor at Brandeis, works on AI, Artificial Life, Neural Networks, Evolution, Dynamical Systems, Games, Robotics, Machine Learning, and Educational Technology. He is a prolific inventor, advises several startup companies and incubators, and in his spare time runs Thinmail, a service designed to enhance the usefulness of wireless email.

Psychology for much of the 20th century was dominated by the view that men and women were psychologically identical. So pervasive was this assumption that research articles in psychology journals prior to the 1970's rarely bothered to report the sex of their study participants. Women and men were understood to be interchangeable. Findings for one sex were presumed to be applicable to the other. Once the American Psychological Association required sex of participants to be reported in published experiments, controversy erupted over whether men and women were psychologically different. The past three decades of empirical research has resolved this issue, at least in delimited domains. Although women and men show great psychological similarity, they also differ in profound ways. They diverge in the sexual desires they express and mating strategies they pursue. They differ in the time they allocate to friends and relentlessness with which they pursue status. They display distinct abilities in reading other's minds, feeling other's feelings, and responding emotionally to specific traumas in their lives. Men opt for a wider range of risky activities, are more prone to violence against others, make sharper in-group versus out-group distinctions, and commit the vast majority of homicides worldwide. The question 'Do men and women differ psychologically?' has been replaced with more interesting questions. In what ways do these sex differences create conflict between men and women? Have the selection pressures that created these differences vanished in the modern world? How can societies premised on equality grapple with the profound psychological divergences of the sexes?

DAVID M. BUSS is Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of several books, most recently The Dangerous Passion:  Why Jealousy is as Necessary as Love and Evolutionary Psychology:  The New Science of the Mind , and The Evolution of Desire:  Strategies of Human Mating. 

This is a question that the ancients asked, and one that crops up a few times in 20th century philosophical discussions. When it is mentioned, it is usually as an example of a problem that looks to be both deep and in principle insoluble. Unsurprisingly, then, it seems to have fallen by the scientific, cosmological and philosophical waysides. But sometimes I wonder whether it really is insoluble (or senseless), or whether science may one day surprise us by finding an answer.

ANDY CLARK is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex, UK. He was previously Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Microcognition: Philosophy, Cognitive Science and Parallel Distributed Processing, Associative Engines, and Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again.

Until this summer this was the most common question at Silicon Valley parties, at bus stops, conferences and grocery stores. Everyone had a business model, none planned to make money, all focused on the exit strategy. 

The euphoria attracted a despicable kind carpetbagger, one who wanted nothing more than money, and had a disdain for technology. All of a sudden technology was out of fashion in Silicon Valley.

Now that the dotcom crash seems permanent, entrepreneurs are looking for real ways to make money. No more vacuous "business models." VCs are hunkering down for a long haul. The average IQ of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is zooming to its former stratospheric levels. There's a genuine excitement here now, but if you ask what the business model is you're going to get a boring answer.

Silicon Valley goes in cycles. Downturns are a perfect time to dig in, listen to users, learn what they want, and create the technology that scratches the itch, and plan on selling it for money. 

DAVE WINER, CEO UserLand Software, Inc.
http://www.userland.com/

My colleagues in the fashionable fields of string theory and quantum gravity advertise themselves as searching desperately for the 'Theory of Everything", while their experimental colleagues are gravid with the "God Particle", the marvelous Higgson which is the somewhat misattributed source of all mass. (They are also after an understanding of the earliest few microseconds of the Big Bang.) As Bill Clinton might remark, it depends on what the meaning of "everything" is. To these savants, "everything" means a list of some two dozen numbers which are the parameters of the Standard Model. This is a set of equations which already exists and does describe very well what you and I would be willing to settle for as "everything". This is why, following Bob Laughlin, I make the distinction between "everything" and "every thing". Every thing that you and I have encountered in our real lives, or are likely to interact with in the future, is no longer outside of the realm of a physics which is transparent to us: relativity, special and general; electromagnetism; the quantum theory of ordinary, usually condensed, matter; and, for a few remote phenomena, hopefully rare here on earth, our almost equally cut-and-dried understanding of nuclear physics. [Two parenthetic remarks: 1) I don't mention statistical mechanics only because it is a powerful technique, not a body of facts; 2) our colleagues have done only a sloppy job so far of deriving nuclear physics from the Standard Model, but no one really doubts that they can.]

I am not arguing that the search for the meaning of those two dozen parameters isn't exciting, interesting, and worthwhile: yes, it's not boring to wonder why the electron is so much lighter than the proton, or why the proton is stable at least for another 35 powers of ten years, or whether quintessence exists. But learning why can have no real effect on our lives, spiritually inspiring as it would indeed be, even to a hardened old atheist like myself.

When I was learning physics, half a century ago, the motivation for much of what was being done was still "is quantum theory really right?" Not just QED, though the solution of that was important, but there were still great mysteries in the behavior of ordinary matter--like superconductivity, for instance. It was only some twenty years later that I woke up to the fact that the battle had been won, probably long before, and that my motivation was no longer to test the underlying equations and ideas, but to understand what is going on. Within the same few years , the molecular biology pioneers convinced us we needed no mysterious "life force" to bring all of life under the same umbrella. Revolutions in geology, in astrophysics, and the remarkable success of the Standard Model in sorting out the fundamental forces and fields, leave us in the enviable position I described above: given any problematic phenomenon, we know where to start, at least. And nothing uncovered in string theory or quantum gravity will make any difference to that starting point.

Is this Horgan's End of Science? Absolutely not. It's just that the most exciting frontier of science no longer lies at the somewhat sophomoric — or quasi-religious — level of the most "fundamental" questions of "what are we made of?" and the like; what needs to be asked is "how did all this delightful complexity arise from the stark simplicity of the fundamental theory?" We have the theory of every thing in any field of science you care to name, and that's about as far as it gets us. If you like, science is now almost universally at the "software" level; the fundamental physicists have given us all the hardware we need, but that doesn't solve the problem, in physics as in every other field. It's a different game, probably a much harder one in fact, as it has often been in the past; but the game is only begun. 

PHILIP W. ANDERSON is a Nobel laureate physicist at Princeton and one of the leading theorists on superconductivity. He is the author of A Career in Theoretical Physics, and Economy as a Complex Evolving System.

The disappearance of this question isn't only a trace of the deletion of the left. It is also a measure of our loss of faith in secular redemption. We don't look forward anymore to radical transformation.

Perhaps it's a result of a century of disappointments: from the revolution of 1917 to Stalin and the fall of communism; from the Spanish Civil War to Franco; from Mao's long march to Deng's proclamation that to get rich is glorious. Perhaps it's a result of political history. But there was more that had to do with psychological transformation. Remember Norman O. Brown's essay, "The place of apocalypse in the life of the mind"? Remember R. D. Laing's turn on breakdown as breakthrough? Remember the fascination with words like 'metamorphosis' and 'metanoia'?

Maybe we're just getting older and all too used to being the people we are. But I'd like to think we're getting wiser and less naive about the possibility of shedding our pasts overnight.

It's important to distinguish between political liberalism on the one hand and a faith in discontinuous transformation on the other. If we fail to make this distinction, then forgetting about the revolution turns (metanoically) into the familiar swing to the right. Old radicals turn reactionary. If we're less dramatic about our beliefs, if we're more cautious about distinguishing between revolutionary politics and evolutionary psychology, then we'll retain our faith in the dream that we can do better. Just not overnight.

p.s. Part of the passion for paradigms and thier shiftings may derive from displaced revolutionary fervor. If you yearn for transfiguration, but can't find it in religion or politics, then you'll seek it elsewhere, like the history of science.

p.p.s. There is one place where talk of transformation is alive and kicking, if not well: The executive suite. The business press is full of books about corporate transformation, re-engineering from a blank sheet of paper, reinvention from scratch. Yes, corporate America is feeling the influence of the sixties as boomers reach thte board room. And this is not a bad thing. For, just as the wisdom to distinguish between revolutionary politics and evolutionary psychology can help us keep the faith in marginal improvements in the human condition, so the tension between greying warriors for change and youthful stalwarts of the status quo will keep us from lurching left or right.

JAMES OGILVY is co-founder and managing director of Global Business Network; taught philosophy at Yale and Williams; served as director of research for the Values and Lifestyles Program at SRI International; author of Many Dimensional Man, and Living without a Goal.

Three in four entering collegians today deem it "very important" or "essential" that they become "very well-off financially." Most adults believe "more money" would boost their quality of life. And today's "luxury fever" suggests that affluent Americans and Europeans are putting their money where their hearts are. "Whoever said money can't buy happiness isn't spending it right," proclaimed a Lexus ad. But the facts of life have revealed otherwise.

Although poverty and powerlessness often bode ill for body and spirit, wealth fails to elevate well-being. Surveys reveal that even lottery winners and the super rich soon adapt to their affluence. Moreover, those who strive most for wealth tend, ironically, to live with lower well-being than those focused on intimacy and communal bonds. And consider post-1960 American history: Average real income has doubled, so we own twice the cars per person, eat out two and a half times as often, and live and work in air conditioned spaces. Yet, paradoxically, we are a bit less likely to say we're "very happy." We are more often seriously depressed. And we are just now, thankfully, beginning to pull out of a serious social recession that was marked by doubled divorce, tripled teen suicide, quadrupled juvenile violence, quintupled prison population, and a sextupled proportion of babies born to unmarried parents. The bottom line: Economic growth has not improved psychological morale or communal health.

DAVID G. MYERS is a social psychologist at Hope College (Michigan) and author, most recently, of The American Paradox: Spiritual Hunger in an Age of Plenty and of A Quiet World: Living with Hearing Loss.

Two journalists once ranked the discovery of lost Atlantis as potentially the most spectacular sensation of all times. Now, the question what or where Atlantis might have been has disappeared. Why?

The Greek philosopher Plato, the only source for Atlantis, incorporated an extensive description of this legendary city into a mundane summary of contemporary (4th century BC) scientific achievements and knowledge of prehistory. Nobody attributed much attention to the account during subsequent centuries. In Medieval times, scholarly interest focussed on Aristotle, while Plato was neglected. When archaeology and history finally assumed the shape of scientific disciplines ‹ after the middle of the 18th century AD ‹ science still was under the influence of Christian theology, its Medieval mother discipline. The first art historians, who were brought up in a creationist world, consequently interpreted western culture as an almost divine concept which first materialized in ancient Greece, without having had any noticeable predecessors. Accordingly, any ancient texts referring to high civilizations, much older than Classical Greece, had to be fictitious by definition.

During the 20th century, dozens of palaces dating to a golden age a thousand years older than Plato's Athens have been excavated around the eastern Mediterranean. Atlantis can now be placed in a historical context. It is an Egyptian recollection of Bronze Age Troy and its awe-inspiring war against the Greek kingdoms. Plato's account and the end of the Bronze Age around 1200 BC can now be seen in a new light. Why was this connection not made earlier? Four Egyptian words, describing location and size, were mistranslated, because at the time Egypt and Greece used different calendars and scales. And, in contrast to biology, where, after Darwin, the idea of creationism was dropped in favor of evolutionism, Aegean prehistory has never questioned its basic premises.

Geoarchaeologist EBERHARD ZANGGER is Director of Corporate Communications at KPNQwest (Switzerland) and the author of The Flood from Heaven : Deciphering the Atlantis Legend and Geoarchaeology of the Argolid. Zangger has written a monograph, published by the German Archaeological Institute, as well as more than seventy scholarly articles, which have appeared in theAmerican Journal of Archaeology, Hesperia, the Oxford Journal of Archaeology,and the Journal of Field Archaeology.

Or at least, certainly not the ones that have so far been submitted to this list, since the questions posted are proof positive that they have not disappeared at all, or at least, not altogether. Sure, some questions have their heyday for a while, and then they may disappear for many a moon. But the great question you posed -- what questions have disappeared? -- shows that they were just waiting for a question like this for someone to be reminded just how much emptier our existence would be without certain questions.

But I also think that some questions certainly have gone by the wayside for a long time, though not necessarily the ones that so far have been posed. We may ask, for instance, questions like, Has history ended?, and then go on to offer up a response of one sort or another. But when is the last time we asked, what *is* history? What different types of history are there? What makes history history, regardless of which type it is?

Or we may ask: Why have certain questions been discarded? But when's the last time anyone has asked, What is a question? What does a question do? What does a question to do us, and what do we do to it?

We may ask: How do people differ in how they think and learn? But do we still ask: What is thinking? What is learning?

Instead, we seem to take for granted that we know what history is, that we know what thinking is, that we know what learning is, when in fact if we delved a little more into these questions, we may well find that none of us hold the same views on what these rich concepts mean and how they function. Which leads me to this perspective: What *has* all but disappeared, I think, is a way of answering questions, regardless of which one is being posed, regardless of how seemingly profound or off-beat or mundane it is. I'm speaking of the kind of rigorous, exhaustive, methodical yet highly imaginative scrutiny of a Socrates or a Plato that challenged all assumptions embedded in a question, and that revealed breathtakingly new vistas and hidden likenesses between seemingly disparate entities.

Who these days takes the time and effort, much less has the critical and creative acumen, to answer questions as those I've already posed, much less such questions as ¨What is human good?¨ or ¨What is a good human?¨in the soul-stirringly visionary yet at the same time down-to-earth way they did? We need a new generation of questioners in the mold of Plato and Sorcrates, people who dare to think a bit outside the lines, who take nothing for granted when a question is posed, and who subject their scrutiny to continual examination and consideration of cogent objections and alternative ways of seeing.

CHRISTOPHER PHILLIPS is the author of ¨Socrates Cafe: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy¨, and founder-executive director of the nonprofit Society for Philosophical Inquiry.

This question was once entertained by the educated and non-educated alike, but is now out of fashion among the learned, except in two small corners of intellectual life. One corner is religious theology, which many scientists would hardly consider a legitimate form of inquiry at this time. In fact it would not be an exaggeration to say that modern thinking considers this question as fit only for the religious, and that it has no part in the realm of science at all. But even among the religious this question has lost favor because, to be honest, theology hasn't provided very many satisfactory answers for modern sensibilities, and almost no new answers in recent times. It feels like a dead end. A question that cannot be asked merely by musing in a book-lined room.

The other corner where this question is asked — but only indirectly — is in particle physics and cosmology. We get hints of answers here and there mainly as by-products of other more scientifically specific questions, but very few scientists set out to answer this question primarily. The problem here is that because the question of the nature of our creator is dismissed as a religious question, and both of these sciences require some of the most expensive equipment in the world paid by democracies committed to separation of church and state, it won't do to address the question directly.

But there is a third way of thinking emerging that may provide a better way to ask this question. This is the third culture of technology. Instead of asking this question starting from the human mind contemplating the mysteries of God, as humanists and theologists do, or starting from experiment, observation, and testing as scientists do, the third way investigates the nature of our creator by creating creations. This is the approach of nerds and technologists. Technologists are busy creating artificial worlds, virtual realities, artificial life, and eventually perhaps, parallel universes, and in this process they explore the nature of godhood. When we make worlds, what are the various styles of being god? What is the relation to the creator and the created? How does one make laws that unfold creatively? How much of what is created can be created without a god? Where is god essential? Sometimes there are theories (theology) but more often this inquiry is driven by pure pragmatic engineering: "We are as gods and may as well get good at it," to quote Stewart Brand.

While the third way offers a potential for new answers, more than the ways of the humanities or science, the truth is that even here this question — of the nature of our creator — is not asked directly very much. This really is a question that has disappeared from public discourse, although of course, it is asked every day by billions of people silently. 

KEVIN KELLY is a founding editor of Wired magazine. In 1993 and 1996, under his co-authorship, Wired won it's industry's Oscar — The National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Prior to the launch of Wired , Kelly was editor/publisher of the Whole Earth Review, a journal of unorthodox technical and cultural news. He is the author of New Rules for the New Economy; andOut of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World.

I am going to take slight liberty with your question. With the publication a decade ago of Francis Fukuyama's justly acclaimed article The End Of History, many pundits and non-pundits assumed that historical forces and trends had been spent. The era of the "isms" was at an end; liberal democracy, market forces, and globalization had triumphed; the heavy weight of the past was attenuating around the globe.

At the start of 2001, we are no longer asking "Has History Ended?" History seems all too alive. The events of Seattle challenged the globalization behemoth; the world is no longer beating a path to internet startups; Communist and fascist revivals have emerged in several countries; the historical legacies in areas like the Balkans and the Middle East are as vivid as ever; and, as I noted in response to last year's question, much of Africa is at war. As if to remind us of our naivete, Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein have been in "office" as long as most Americans can remember. If George II is ignorant of this history, he is likely to see it repeated.

HOWARD GARDNER, the major proponent of the theory of multiple intelligences, is Professor of Education at Harvard University and author of numerous books including The Mind's New Science and Extraordinary Minds: Portraits of Four Exceptional Individuals.

What does science have to say about the origins of love in the scheme of things? Not a lot. In fact, it is still virtually a taboo subject, just as consciousness was until very recently. However, since feelings are a major component of consciousness, it seems likely that the ontology of love is now likely to emerge as a significant question in science.

Within Christian culture, as in many other religious traditions, love has its origin as a primal quality of God and so is co-eternal with Him. His creation is an outpouring of this love in shared relationship with beings that participate in the essential creativity of the cosmos. As in the world of Shakespeare and the Renaissance Magi, it is love that makes the world go round and animates all relationships.

This magical view of the world did not satisfy the emerging perspective of Galilean science, which saw relationships in nature as law-like, obeying self-consistent logical principles of order. God may well have created the world, but he did so according to intelligible principles. It is the job of the scientist to identify these and describe them in mathematical form. And so with Newton, love turned into gravity. The rotation of the earth around the sun, and the moon around the earth, was a result of the inverse square law of gravitational attraction. It was not a manifestation of love as an attractive principle between animated beings, however much humanity remained attached to romantic feelings about the full moon. Love was henceforth banished from scientific discourse and the mechanical world-view took over.

Now science itself is changing and mechanical principles are being replaced by more subtle notions of interaction and relationships. Quantum mechanics was the first harbinger of a new holistic world of non-local connectedness in which causality operates in a much more intricate way than conventional mechanism. We now have complexity theory as well, which seeks to understand how emergent properties arise in complex systems such as developing organisms, colonies of social insects, and human brains. Often these properties are not reducible to the behavior of their component parts and their interactions, though there is always consistency between levels: that is, there are no contradictions between the properties of the parts of a complex system and the order that emerges from them. Consciousness appears to be one of these emergent properties. With this recognition, science enters a new realm.

Consciousness involves feelings, or more generally what are called qualia, the experience of qualities such as pain, pleasure, beauty, and ŠŠ. love. This presents us with a major challenge. The scientific principle of consistency between levels in systems requires that feelings emerge from some property of the component parts (e.g., neurones) that is consistent with feeling, experience. But if matter is 'dead', without any feeling, and neurones are just made of this dead matter, even though organized in a complex way, then where do feelings come from ? This is the crunch question which presents us with a hard choice. We can either say that feelings are epiphenomena, illusions that evolution has invented because they are useful for survival. Or we can change our view of matter and ascribe to the basic stuff of reality some elementary component of feeling, sentience, however rudimentary. Of course, we could also take the view that nature is not self-consistent and that miracles are possible; that something can come from nothing, such as feeling from dead, insentient matter, thus returning to the magical world-view of the early renaissance. But if we are to remain scientific, then the choice is between the other two alternatives.

The notion that evolution has invented feelings because they are useful for survival is not a scientific explanation, because it gives no account of how feelings are possible as properties that emerge in the complex systems we call organisms (i.e., consistent emergent properties of life). So we are left with the other hard choice: matter must have some rudimentary property of sentience. This is the conclusion that the mathematician/philosopher A.N. Whitehead came to in his classic, Process and Reality, and it is being proposed as a solution to the Cartesian separation of mind and matter by some contemporary philosophers and scientists. It involves a radical reappraisal of what we call 'reality'. But it does suggest a world in which love exists as something real, in accord with most peoples' experience. And goodness knows, we could do with a little more of it in our fragmented world.

BRIAN GOODWIN is a professor of biology at the Schumacher College, Milton Keynes, and the author of Temporal Organization in Cells and Analytical Physiology, How The Leopard Changed Its Spots: The Evolution of Complexity, and (with Gerry Webster) Form and Transformation: Generative and Relational Principles in Biology. Dr. Goodwin is a member of the Board of Directors of the Sante Fe Institute.

This question (or pair of questions) was on everyone's lips in the 1970s, following the oil shortage and lines at gas stations. It stimulated a lot of good thinking and good work on alternative energy sources, renewable energy sources, and energy efficiency. Although this question is still asked by many knowledgeable and concerned people, it has disappeared from the public's radar screen (or, better, television screen). Even the recent escalation of fuel prices and the electricity shortage in California have not lent urgency to thinking ahead about energy.

But we should be asking, we should be worrying, and we should be planning. A real energy crisis is closer now than it was when the question had high currency. The energy-crisis question is only part of a larger question: How is humankind going to deal in the long term with its impact on the physical world we inhabit (of which the exhaustion of fossil fuels is only a part)? Another way to phrase the larger question: Are we going to manage more or less gracefully a transition to a sustainable world, or will eventual sustainability be what's left, willy nilly, after the chaos of unplanned, unanticipated change?

Science will provide no miracles (as the Wall Street Journal, in its justification of inaction, would have us believe), but science can do a lot to ameliorate the dislocations that this century will bring. We need to encourage our public figures to lift their eyes beyond the two-, four-, and six-year time horizons of their jobs.

KENNETH FORD is a retired physicist who teaches at Germantown Friends School in Philadelphia. He is the co-author, with John Wheeler, of Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics.

How should adult education work? How do we educate the masses? (That's right, The Masses.) How do we widen the circle of people who love and support great art, great music, great literature? How do we widen the circle of adults who understand the science and engineering that our modern world is built on? How do we rear good American citizens? Or for that matter good German citizens, or Israeli or Danish or Chilean? And if this is the information age, why does the population at large grow worse-informed every year? (Sorry — that last one isn't a question people have stopped asking; they never started.)

These questions have disappeared because in 2001, the "educated elite" never goes anywhere without its quote-marks. Here in America's fancy universities, we used to believe that everyone deserved and ought to have the blessings of education. Today we believe our children should have them — and to make up for that fact, to even the score, we have abolished the phrase. No more "blessings of education." That makes us feel better. Many of us can't say "truth and beauty" without snickering like 10-year-old boys.

But the situation will change, as soon as we regain the presence of mind to start asking these questions again. We have the raw materials on hand for the greatest cultural rebirth in history. We have the money and the technical means. We tend to tell our children nowadays (implicitly) that their goal in life is to get rich, get famous and lord it over the world. We are ashamed to tell them that what they really ought to be is good, brave and true. (In fact I am almost ashamed to type it.) This terrible crisis of confidence we're going through was probably inevitable; at any rate it's temporary, and if we can't summon the courage to tell our children what's right, my guess is that they will figure it out for themselves, and tell us. I'm optimistic.

DAVID GELERNTER, Professor of Computer Science at Yale University and author of Mirror Worlds, The Muse in the Machine, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair, and Drawiing a Life: Surviving the Unabomber.

I do not, of course, mean any particular Great Central Theory. I am referring to the once-pervasive habit of relating everything that had human scale — Chinese history, the Odyssey, your mother's fear of heights — to an all-explaining principle. This principle was set forth in a short shelf of classic works and then worked to a fine filigree by close-minded people masquerading as open-minded people. The precise Great Central Theory might be, as it was in my childhood milieu, the theories of Freud. It might be Marx. It might be Levi-Strauss or, more recently, Foucault. At the turn of the last century, there was a Darwinist version going, promulgated by Francis Galton, Herbert Spencer and their ilk.

These monolithic growths had begun, I suppose, as the answers to specific questions, but then they metastasized; their adherents would expect the great central theory to answer any question. Commitment to a Great Central Theory thus became more a religious act than an intellectual one. And, as with all religions, the worldview of the devout crept into popular culture. (When I was in high school we'd say So-and-So was really anal about his locker or that What's-his-name's parents were really bourgeois.) For decades, this was what intellectual life appeared to be: Commit to an overarching explanation, relate it to everything you experienced, defend it against infidels. Die disillusioned, or, worse, die smug.

So why has this sort of question vanished? My guess is that, broadly speaking, it was a product of the Manichean worldview of the last century. Depression, dictators, war, genocide, nuclear terror — all of these lend themselves to a Yes-or-No, With-Us-or-With-Them, Federation vs. Klingons mindset. We were, to put it simply, all a little paranoid. And paranoids love a Great Key: Use this and see the single underlying cause for what seems to be unrelated and random!

Nowadays the world, though no less dangerous, seems to demand attention to the seperateness of things, the distinctiveness of questions. ''Theories of everything'' are terms physicists use to explain their near-theological concerns, but at the human scale most people care about, where we ask questions like ''why can't we dump the Electoral College?'' or ''How come Mom likes my sister better?'', the Great Central Theory question has vanished with the black-or-white arrangement of the human world.

What's next?

Three possibilities.

One, some new Great Central Theory slouches in; some of the Darwinians think they've got the candidate, and they certainly evince signs of quasi-religious commitment. (For example, as a Freudian would say you doubted Freud because of your neuroses, I have heard Darwinians say I doubted their theories because of an evolved predisposition not to believe the truth. I call this quasi-religious because this move makes the theory impregnable to evidence or new ideas.)

Two, the notion that overarching theory is impossible becomes, itself, a new dogma. I lean toward this prejudice myself but I recognize its dangers. An intellectual life that was all boutiques could be, in its way, as stultifying as a giant one-product factory.

Three, we learn from the mistakes of the last two centuries and insist that our answers always match our questions, and that the distinction between theory and religious belief be maintained.

DAVID BERREBY'S writing about science and culture has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, The Sciences and many other publications.

The detection of "questions that are no longer asked" is difficult. Old questions, like MacArthur's old soldiers, just fade away. Scientists and scholars in hot pursuit of new questions neither note nor mourn their passing. I regularly face a modest form of the disappearing question challenge when a textbook used in one of my classes is revised. Deletions are hard to find; they leave no voids and are more stealthy than black holes, not even affecting their surrounds. New text content stands out, while missing material must be established through careful line-by-line reading. Whether in textbooks or in life, we don't think much about what is no longer relevant.

My response to the inquiry about questions that are no longer asked is to reframe it and suggest instead a common class of missing questions, those associated with obsolete and inappropriate metaphors. Metaphor is a powerful cognitive tool, which, like all models, clarifies thinking when appropriate, but constrains it when inappropriate. Science is full of them. My professional specialties of neuroscience and biopsychology has mind/brain metaphors ranging from Locke's ancient blank slate (tabula rasa), to the more technologically advanced switchboard, and the metaphor de jour, the computer. None do justice to the brain as a soggy lump of wetware, but linger as cognitive/linguistic models. Natural selection in the realm of metaphors is slow and imperfect. Witness the reference to DNA as a "blueprint" for an organism, when Dawkins' "recipe" metaphor more accurately reflects DNA's incoding of instructions for organismic assembly.

ROBERT R. PROVINE is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation.

Despite Seattle and the French farmers, free market advocates of globalization have largely won — even CHina is signing up to be a major player in the international trading and growth-oriented global political economy. So it is rare to hear this question anymore, even from so-called "enterprise institutes" dedicated to protecting property rights.

The problem is, what has been won?? My concern is not with the question no-longer asked in this context, but rather with the companion question not often enough asked: "Is there any such thing as a free market"?

To be sure, markets are generally efficient ways of allocating resources and accomplishing economic goals. However, markets are notorious for leaving out much of what people really value. In different words, the market price of doing business simply excludes much of the full costs or benefits of doing business because many effects aren't measured in traditional monetary units. For example, the cost of a ton of coal isn't just the extraction costs plus transportation costs plus profit, but also real expenses to real people (or real creatures) who happen to be external to the energy market. Such "externalities" are very real to coastal dwellers trying to cope with sea level rises likely to be induced from the global warming driven by massive coal burning.

I recall a discussion at the recent international negotiations to limit emissions of greenhouse gasses in which a chieftain from the tiny Pacific island of Kiribati was being told by an OPEC supporter opposed to international controls on emissions from fossil fuels that the summed economies of all the small island states were only a trivial fraction of the global GDP, and thus even if sea level rise were to drive them out of national existence, this was "not sufficient reason to hold back to economic progress of the planet by constricting the free use of energy markets".

"We are not ungenerous", he said, so in the "unlikely event" that you were a victim of sea level rise, "we'll just pay to relocate all of you and your people to even better homes and jobs than you have now", and this, he went on, will be much cheaper than to "halt industrial growth" (THis isn't the forum to refute the nonsense that controls on emissions will halt industrial growth.) After hearing this offer, the aging and stately chieftain paused, scratched his flowing hair, politely thanked the OPEC man for his thoughtfulness and simply said, "we may be able to move, but what do I do with the buried bones of my grandfather?"

Economists refer to the units of value in cost-benefit analyses as "numeraires" — dollars per ton carbon emitted in the climate example, is the numeraire of choice for "free market" advocates. But what of lives lost per ton of emissions from intensified hurricanes, or species driven off mountain tops to extinction per ton, or heritage sites lost per ton?? Or what if global GDP indeed goes up fastest by free markets but 25% of the world gets left further behind as globally economically efficient markets expand? Is equity a legitimate numeraire too?

Therefore, while market systems seem indeed to have triumphed, it is time to phase in a new, multi-part question: "How can free markets be adjusted to value what is left out of private cost-benefit calculus but represents real value so we can get the price signals in markets to reflect all the costs and benefits to society across all the numeraires, and not simply have market prices rigged to preserve the status quo in which monetary costs to private parties are the primary condition?"

I hope the new US president soon transcends all that obligatory free market rhetoric of the campaign and learns much more about what constitutes a full market price. It is very likely he'll get an earful as he jetsets about the planet in Air Force 1 catching up on the landscapes — political and physical — of the vastly diverse countries in the world that it is time for him to visit. Many world leaders are quite worried about just what we will have won as currently defined free markets triumph.

STEPHEN H. SCHNEIDER is Professor in the Biological Sciences Department at Stanford University and the Former Department Director and Head of Advanced Study Project at the National Center for Atmospheric Research Boulder. He is internationally recognized as one of the world's leading experts in atmospheric research and its implications for environment and society. Dr. Schneider's books include The Genesis Strategy: Climate Change and Global Survival; The Coevolution Of Climate and Life and Global Warming: Are We Entering The Greenhouse Century?; and Laboratory Earth

"How will Americans handle a surplus of leisure?"

That was a brow-furrower in the late '50s and early '60s for social observers and forecasters. Whole books addressed the problem, most of them opining that Americans would have to become very interested in the arts. Turned out the problem never got around to existing, and the same kind of people are worrying now about how Americans will survive the stress of endless multi-tasking.

"Can the threat of recombinant DNA possibly be contained?"

That was the brand new bogey of the mid-'70s. At a famous self regulating conference at Asilomar conference center in California, genetic researchers debated the question and imposed rules (but not "relinquishment") on the lab work. The question was answered: the threat was handily contained, and it was not as much of a threat as feared anyway. Most people retrospectively applaud the original caution. Similar fears and debate now accompany the introduction of Genetically Modified foods and organisms. Maybe it's the same question rephrased, and it will keep being rephrased as long as biotech is making news. Can the threat of frankenfoods possibly be contained? Can the threat of gene-modified children possibly be contained? Can the threat of bioweapons possibly be contained? Can the threat of human life extension possibly be contained?

It won't be a new question until it reaches reflexivity: "Are GM humans really human?"

STEWART BRAND is founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, cofounder of The Well, cofounder of Global Business Network, cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation. He is the original editor of The Whole Earth Catalog, author ofThe Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT , How Buildings Learn, and The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility (MasterMinds Series).

Different people on the Edge list seem to have chosen to understand 'questions that have disappeared' in three very different senses:

1. Questions that were once popular but have now been answered 
2. Questions that should never have been asked in the first place 
3. Questions that have disappeared although they never received a satisfactory answer.

This third meaning is, I suspect, the one intended by the organizer of the forum.  It is the most interesting of the three since it suggests real science that we should now be doing, rather than just raking over the historical coals.

The three meanings are too disparate to bring together easily, but I'll try. The popular question 'Has there been enough time for evolution to take place?'  can now confidently be answered in the affirmative.  It should never have been put in the first place since, self-evidently, we are here. But what is more interesting is that the real question that faces us is almost the exact opposite.  Why is evolution so slow, given that natural selection is so powerful?   Far from there being too little time for evolution to play with, there seems to be too much.

Ledyard Stebbins did a theoretical calculation about an extremely weak selection pressure, acting on a population of mouse-sized animals to favor the largest individuals.  His hypothetical selection pressure was so weak as to be below the threshold of detectability in field sampling studies.  Yet the calculated time to evolve elephant-sized descendants from mouse-sized ancestors was only a few tens of thousands of generations: too short to be detected under most circumstances in the fossil record.  To exaggerate somewhat, evolution could be yo-yo-ing from mouse to elephant, and back again, so fast that the changes could seem instantaneous in the fossil record.

Worse, Stebbins's calculation assumed an exceedingly weak selection pressure.  The real selection pressures measured in the field by Ford and his colleagues on lepidoptera and snails, by Endler and his colleagues on guppies, and by the Grants and their colleagues on the Galapagos finches, are orders of magnitude stronger.  If we fed into the Stebbins calculation a selection pressure as strong as the Grants have measured in the field, it is positively worrying to contemplate how fast evolution could go.  The same conclusion is indirectly suggested by domestic breeding.  We have gone from wolf to Yorkshire terrier in a few centuries, and could presumably go back to something like a wolf in as short a time.

It is indeed the case that evolution on the Galapagos archipelago has been pretty fast, though still nothing like as fast as the measured selection pressures might project.  The islands have been in existence for five million years at the outside, and the whole of their famous endemic fauna has evolved during that time.  But even the Galapagos islands are old compared to Lake Victoria.  In the less than one million years of the lake's brief lifetime, more than 170 species of the genus Haplochromis alone have evolved.

Yet the Coelacanth Latimeria, and the three genera of lungfish, have scarcely changed in hundreds of millions of years.  Surviving Lingula ('lamp shells') are classified in the same genus as their ancestors of 400 million years ago, and could conceivably interbreed with them if introduced through a time machine.  The question that still faces us is this.  How can evolution be both so fast and so leadenly slow?  How can there be so much variance in rates of evolution?  Is stasis just due to stabilizing selection and lack of directional selection?  Or is there something remarkably special going on in the (non) evolution of living fossils?  As William Blake might have written to a coelacanth: Did he who made the haplochromids make thee?

RICHARD DAWKINS is an evolutionary biologist and the Charles Simonyi Professor For The Understanding Of Science at Oxford University; Fellow of New College; author of The Selfish Gene, The Extended Phenotype , The Blind Watchmaker, River out of Eden (ScienceMasters Series), Climbing Mount Improbable, and Unweaving the Rainbow.

Einstein's theory of gravity — general relativity — transcended Newton's by offering deeper insights. It accounted naturally, in a way that Newton didn't, for why everything falls at the same speed, and why the force obeys an inverse square law. The theory dates from 1916, and was famously corroborated by the measured deflection of starlight during eclipses, and by the anomalies in Mercury's orbit. But it took more than 50 years before there were any tests that could measure the distinctive effects of the theory with better than 10 percent accuracy. In the 1960s and 1970s , there was serious interest in tests that could decide between general relativity and alternative theories that were still in the running. But now these tests have improved so much, and yielded such comprehensive and precise support for Einstein, that it would require very compelling evicence indeed to shake our belief that general relativity is the correct "classical" theory of gravity,

New and different experiments are nonetheless currently being planned. But the expectation that they'll corroborate the theory is no so strong that we'd demand a high burden of proof before accepting a contrary result, For instance, NASA plans to launch an ultra-precise gyroscope ("Gravity Probe B") to measure tiny precession effects. If the results confirm Einstein, nobody will be surprised nor excited — though they would have been if the experiment had flown 30 years ago, when it was first devised. On the other hand, if this very technically-challenging experiment revealed seeming discrepancies, I suspect that most scientists would suspend judgment until it had been corroborated. So the most exciting result of Gravity Probe B would be a request to NASA for another vast sum, in order repeat it.

But Einstein himself raised other deep questions that are likely to attract more interest in the 21st century than they ever did in the 20th. He spent his last 30 years in a vain (and, as we now recognize, premature) quest for a unified theory. Will such a theory — reconciling gravity with the quantum principle, and transforming our conception of space and time — be achieved in coming decades? And, if it is, what answer will it offer to an another of Einstein's questions: "Did God have any choice in the creation of the world?" Is our universe — and the physical laws that govern it — the unique outcome of a fundamental theory, or are the underlying laws more "permissive", in the sense that they could allow other very different universes as well?

MARTIN REES is Royal Society Professor at Cambridge University and a leading researcher in astrophysics and cosmology. His books include Before the Beginning, Gravity's Fatal Attraction and (most recently) Just Six Numbers.

Contemporary linguists tend to assume in their work that subordinate clauses, such as "The boy that I saw yesterday" or "I knew what happened when she came down the steps", are an integral part of the innate linguistic endowment, and/or central features of "human speech" writ large. Most laymen would assume the same thing. However, the fact is that when we analyze a great many strictly spoken languages with no written tradition, subordinate clauses are rare to nonexistent. In many Native American languages, for example, the only way to express something like the men who were members is a clause which parses approximately as "The 'membering' men"; the facts are similar in thousands of other languages largely used orally.

In fact, even in earlier documents in today's "tall building" literary languages, one generally finds a preference for stringing simple main clauses together —she came down the steps, and I knew what happened rather than embedding them in one another along the lines of when she came down the steps, I knew what happened. The guilty sense we often have when reading English of the first half of the last millennium that the writing is stylistically somewhat "clunky" is due largely to the marginality of the subordinate clause: here is Thomas Malory in the late fifteenth century:

And thenne they putte on their helmes and departed 
and recommaunded them all wholly unto the Quene
and there was wepynge and grete sorowe
Thenne the Quene departed in to her chamber
and helde her
that no man shold perceyue here grete sorowes

Early Russian parses similarly, and crucially, so do the Hebrew Bible and the Greek of Homer.

At the time that these documents were written, writing conventions had yet to develop, and thus written language hewed closer to the way language is actually spoken on the ground. Over time, subordinate clauses, a sometime thing in speech, were developed as central features in written speech, their economy being aesthetically pleasing, and more easily manipulated via the conscious activity of writing than the spontaneous "on-line" activity of speaking. Educated people, exposed richly to written speech via education, tended to incorporate the subordinate clause mania into their spoken varieties. Hence today we think of subordinate clauses as "English", as the French do "French", and so on — even though if we listen to a tape recording of ourselves speaking casually, even we tend to embrace main clauses strung together in favor of the layered sentential constructions of Cicero.

But the "natural" state of language persists in the many which have had no written tradition. In the 1800s, various linguists casually speculated as to whether subordinate clauses were largely artifactual rather than integral to human language, with one (Karl Brugmann) even going as far as to assert that originally, humans spoke only with main clauses.

Today, however, linguistics operates under the sway of our enlightened valuation of "undeveloped" cultures, which has, healthily, included an acknowledgment of the fact that the languages of "primitive" peoples are as richly complex as written Western languages. (In fact, the more National Geographic the culture, the more fearsomely complex the language tends to be overall.) However, this sense has discouraged most linguists from treading into the realm of noting that one aspect of "complexity", subordinate clauses, is in fact not central to expression in unwritten languages and is most copiously represented in languages with a long written tradition. In general, the idea that First World written languages might exhibit certain complexities atypical of languages spoken by preliterate cultures has largely been tacitly taboo for decades in linguistics, generally only treated in passing in obscure venues.

The problem is that this could be argued to bode ill for investigations of the precise nature of Universal Grammar, which will certainly require a rigorous separation of the cultural and contingent from the encoded.

JOHN H. MCWHORTER is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. He taught at Cornell University before entering his current position at Berkeley. He specializes in pidgin and creole languages, particularly of the Caribbean, and is the author of Toward a New Model of Creole Genesisand The Word on the Street : Fact and Fable About American English. He also teaches black musical theater history at Berkeley and is currently writing a musical biography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr.

In the not so distant future we will have to revive the question about who and what we are.

We will have to, not because we choose to do so, but because the question will be posed to us by Others or Otherness: Aliens, robots, mutants, and the like.

New phenomena like information processing artifacts, computational life forms, bioengineered humans, upgraded animals and pen-pals in space will force us to consider ourselves and our situation: Why didn't we finish hunger on this planet? Are we evil or just idiots? Why do we really want to rebuild ourselves? Do we regain our soul when the tv-set is turned off?

It's going to happen like this: We build a robot. It turns towards us and says: "If technology is the answer then what was the question?"

TOR NORRETRANDERS is a science writer, consultant, lecturer and organizer based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He was recently appointed Chairman of the National Council for Competency.

The road of knowledge is littered with old questions, but by their very nature, none of them stands out above all others. The diversity of thoughtful responses given on the Edge forum, which just begin to scratch the surface, illustrates how progress happens. The evolution of knowledge is a Schumpterian process of creative destruction, in which weeding out the questions that no longer merit attention is an integral part of formulating better questions that should. Forgetting is a vital part of creation.

Maxwell once worried that the second law of thermodynamics could be violated by a demon who could measure the velocity of individual particles and separate the fast ones from the slow ones, and use this to do work. Charlie Bennet showed that that this is impossible, because to make a measurement the demon has to first put her instruments in a known state.

This involves erasing information. The energy needed to do this is more than can be gained. Thus, the fact that forgetting takes work is essential to the second law of thermodynamics. Why is this relevant? As Gregory Bateson once said, the second law of thermodynamics is the reason that it is easier to mess up a room than it is to clean it. Forgetting is an essential part of the process of creating order. Asking the right questions is the most important part of the creative process. There are lots of people who are good at solving problems, fewer who are good at asking questions.

Around the time I took my qualifying examination in physics, someone showed me the test that Lord Rayleigh took when he graduated as senior wrangler from Cambridge in 1865. I would have failed it. There were no questions on thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, nuclear physics, particle physics, condensed matter, or relativity, i.e. no questions covering most of what I had learned.

However, the classical mechanics questions, which comprised most of the bets, were diabolically hard. Their solution involved techniques that are no longer taught, and that a modern physicist would have to work hard to recreate. Of course, in a field like philosophy this would not have surprised me — it just hadn't occurred to me that this was as true for physics as well. The physicists in Rayleigh's generation presumably worked just as hard, and knew just as many things. They just knew different things. After overcoming the shock of how much had seemingly been lost, I rationalized my ignorance with the belief that what I was taught was more useful than what Rayleigh was taught. Whether as a culture or as individuals, to learn new things, we have to forget old things. The notion of what is useful is constantly evolving.

The most important questions evolve through time as people understand little bits and pieces, and view them from different angles in the attempt to solve them. Each question is replaced by a new one that is (hopefully) better framed than its antecedant. Reflecting on those that have been cast aside is like sifting through flotsam on a beach, and asking what it tells us. Is there a common thread that might give us a clue to posing better questions in the future?

When we examine questions such as "What is a vital force?", "How fast is the earth moving?", "Does God exist?", "Have we seen the end of science?", "Has history ended?", "Can machines think?", there are some common threads. One is that we never really understood what these questions meant in the first place. But these questions (to varying degrees) have been useful in helping us to formulate better, more focused questions. We just have to turn loose of our pet ideas, and make a careful distinction between what we know and what we only think we know, and try to be more precise about what we are really asking.

I would be curious to hear more discussion about the common patterns and the conclusions to be drawn from the questions that have disappeared.

J. DOYNE FARMER, one of the pioneers of what has come to be called chaos theory, is McKinsey Professor, Sante Fe, Institute, and the co founder and former co-president of Prediction Company in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This question bit the dust after a brief but busy life; it is entirely a second-half-of the-20th-century question. Had it been asked before the 20th century, it would have been phrased differently: "heredity" instead of "genes." But it wasn't asked back then, because the answer was obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, the answer everyone gave — yes! — was based on erroneous reasoning about ambiguous evidence: the difference in behavior between the pauper and the prince was attributed entirely to heredity. The fact that the two had been reared in very different circumstances, and hence had had very different experiences, was overlooked. 

Around the middle of the 20th century, it became politically incorrect and academically unpopular to use the word "heredity"; if the topic came up at all, a euphemism, "nature," was used in its place. The fact that the pauper and the prince had been reared in very different circumstances now came to the fore, and the behavioral differences between them was now attributed entirely to the differences in their experiences. The observation that the prince had many of the same quirks as the king was now blamed entirely on his upbringing. Unfortunately, this answer, too, was based on erroneous reasoning about ambiguous evidence. 

That children tend to resemble their biological parents is ambiguous evidence; the fact that such evidence is plentiful — agreeable parents tend to have agreeable kids, aggressive parents tend to have aggressive kids, and so on — does not make it any less ambiguous. The problem is that most kids are reared by their biological parents. The parents have provided both the genes and the home environment, so the kids' heredity and environment are correlated. The prince has inherited not only his father's genes but also his father's palace, his father's footmen, and his father's Lord High Executioner (no reference to living political figures is intended). 

To disambiguate the evidence, special techniques are required — ways of teasing apart heredity and environment by controlling the one and varying the other. Such techniques didn't begin to be widely used until the 1970s; their results didn't become widely known and widely accepted until the 1990s. By then so much evidence had piled up that the conclusion (which should have been obvious all along) was incontrovertible: yes, genes do influence human behavior, and so do the experiences children have while growing up. 

(I should point out, in response to David Deutsch's contribution to the World Question Center, that no one study, and no one method, can provide an answer to a question of this sort. In the case of genetic influences on behavior, we have converging evidence — studies using a variety of methods all led to the same conclusion and even agreed pretty well on the quantitative details.)

Though the question has been answered, it has left behind a cloud of confusion that might not disappear for some time. The biases of the second half of the 20th century persist: when "dysfunctional" parents are found to have dysfunctional kids, the tendency is still to blame the environment provided by the parents and to overlook the fact that the parents also provided the genes. 

Some would argue that this bias makes sense. After all, they say, we knowhow the environment influences behavior. How the genes influence behavior is still a mystery — a question for the 21st century to solve. But they are wrong. They know much less than they think they know about how the environment influences behavior. 

The 21st century has two important questions to answer. How do genes influence human behavior? How is human behavior influenced by the experiences a child has while growing up?

JUDITH RICH HARRIS is a writer and developmental psychologist; co-author ofThe Child: A Contemporary View Of Development; winner of the 1997 George A. Miller Award for an outstanding article in general psychology, and author ofThe Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out The Way They Do.

Progress in the domain that Marvin Minsky once characterized as "making machines do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people" has not been as dramatic as its founders might once have hoped, but the penetration of machine cognition into everyday life (from the computer that plays chess to the computer that determines if your toast is done) has been broad and deep. We now the term "intelligent" to refer to the kind of helpful smartness embedded in such objects. So the language has shifted and the question has disappeared. But until recently, there was a tendency to limit appreciation of machine mental prowess to the realm of the cognitive. In other words, acceptance of artificial intelligence came with a certain "romantic reaction." People were willing to accept that simulated thinking might well be deemed thinking, but simulated feeling was not feeling. Simulated love could never be love.

These days, however, the realm of machine emotion has become a contested terrain. There is research in "affective computing" and in robotics which produces virtual pets and digital dolls — objects that present themselves as experiencing subjects. In artificial intelligence's "essentialist" past, researchers tried to argue that the machines they had built were "really" intelligent. In the current business of building machines that self-present as "creatures," the work of inferring emotion is left in large part to the user. The new artificial creatures are designed to push our evolutionary buttons to respond to their speech, their gestures, and their demands for nurturance by experiencing them as sentient, even emotional. And people are indeed inclined to respond to creatures they teach and nurture by caring about them, often in spite of themselves. People tell themselves that the robot dog is a program embodied in plastic, but they become fond of it all the same. They want to care for it and they want it to care for them.

In cultural terms, old questions about machine intelligence has given way to a question not about the machines but about us: What kind of relationships is it appropriate to have with a machine? It is significant that this question has become relevant in a day-to-day sense during a period of unprecedented human redefinition through genomics and psychopharmacology, fields that along with robotics, encourage us to ask not only whether machines will be able to think like people, but whether people have always thought like machines

SHERRY TURKLE is a professor of the sociology of science at MIT. She is the author of Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet; The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit; and Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution.

It may have been uttered as often in caricature as in anger, but the voice from the crowd asked a question that was accepted as reasonable even by those who winced at the jeering tone. Until fifteen or twenty years ago, the interest-earning and brain-working classes generally felt that they owed something to the workers, for doing the drudgery needed to keep an industrialised society going. And it was taken for granted that the workers were a class, with collective interests of their own. In some instances — British miners, for example — they enjoyed considerable respect and a romantic aura. Even in the United States, where perhaps the question was not put quite the same way, the sentiments were there.

Now there is an underclass of dangerous and hopeless folk, an elite of the fabulous and beautiful, and everybody in between is middle class. Meritocracy is taken for granted, bringing with it a perspective that sees only individuals, not groups. There are no working classes, only low-grade employees. In a meritocracy, respect is due according to the rank that an individual has attained. And since achievement is an individual matter, those at the upper levels see no reason to feel they owe anything to those at lower ones. This state of affairs will probably endure until such time that people cease to think of their society as a meritocracy, with its upbeat tone of progress and fairness, and start to feel that they are living in a Red Queen world, where they have to run ever faster just to stay in the same place.

MAREK KOHN'S most recent book, published last year, is As We Know It: Coming to Terms with an Evolved Mind. His other books include The Race Gallery: The Return of Racial Science and Dope Girls: The Birth of the British Drug Underground. He writes a weekly column on digital culture, Second Site, for theLondon Independent on Sunday.

Most Americans, even (or, perhaps, especially) educated Americans, seem to believe that all people are basically the same ‹ we have the same innate abilities and capacities, and only hard work and luck separates those who are highly skilled from those who are not. But this idea is highly implausible. People differ along every other dimension, from the size of their stomachs and shoes to the length of their toes and tibias. They even differ in the sizes of their brains. So, why shouldn't they also differ in their abilities and capacities? Of course, the answer is that they do. It's time to acknowledge this fact and take advantage of it.

In my view, the 21st century is going to be the "Century of Personalization." No more off-the-rack drugs: Gene and proteonomic chips will give readouts for each person, allowing drugs to be tailored to their individual physiologies. No more off-the-rack clothes: For example, you'll stick your feet in a box, lasers will measure every aspect of them, and shoes will be custom-made according to your preferred style. Similarly, no more off-the-rack teaching.

Specifically, the first step is to diagnose individual differences in cognitive abilities and capacities, so we can play to a given person's strengths and avoid falling prey to his or her weaknesses. But in order to characterize these differences, we first need to understand at least the broad outlines of general mechanisms that are common to the species.

All of us have biceps and triceps, but these muscles differ in their strength. So too with our mental muscles. All of us have a short-term memory, for example (in spite of how it may sometimes feel at the end of the day), and all of us are capable storing information in long-term memory. Differences among people in part reflect differences in the efficacy of such mechanisms. For example, there are at least four distinct ways that visual/spatial information can be processed (which I'm not going to go into here), and people differ in their relative abilities on each one. Presenting the same content in different ways will invite different sorts of processing, which will be more or less congenial for a given person.

But there's more to it than specifying mechanisms and figuring out how well people can use them (as daunting as that is). Many of the differences in cognitive abilities and capacities probably reflect how mechanisms work together and when they are recruited. Understanding such differences will tell us how to organize material so that it goes down smoothly. For example, how--for a given person-should examples and general principles be intermixed?

And, yet more. We aren't bloodless brains floating in vats, soaking up information pumped into us. Rather, it's up to us to decide what to pay attention to, and what to think about. Thus, it's no surprise that people learn better when they are motivated. We need to know how a particular student should be led to use the information during learning. For example, some people may "get" physics only when it's taught in the context of auto mechanics.

All of this implies that methods of teaching in the 21st Century will be tightly tied to research in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. At present, the study of individual differences is almost entirely divorced from research on general mechanisms. Even if this is remedied, it's going to be a challenge to penetrate the educational establishment and have this information put to use. So, the smart move will probably be to do an end-run around this establishment, using computers to tutor children individually outside of school. This in turn raises the specter of another kind of Digital Divide. Some of us may in fact still get off-the-rack education.

Finally, I'll leave aside another set of questions no one seems to be seriously asking: What should be taught? And should the same material be taught to everyone? You can imagine why this second question isn't being asked, but it's high time we seriously considered making the curriculum relevant for the 21st Century.

STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN, a full professor of psychology at Harvard at age 34, is a researcher focusing primarily on the nature of visual mental imagery. His books include Image and Mind, Ghosts in the Mind's Machine, Wet Mind: The New Cognitive Neuroscience, Image and Brain: The Resolution of the Imagery Debate, and Psychology: The Brain, the Person, the World.

This can be elaborated by the following anecdote, from an interview (2.99) with Herbert York:

"Donald Hornig, who was head of PSAC [President's Science Advisory Committee, during the Johnson Administration] was not imaginative. I can give you an example of this. I was very enthusiastic about getting a picture of the other side of the moon. And there were various ways of doing it, sooner or later. And I argued with Hornig about it and he said, 'Why? It looks just like this side.' And it turned out it didn't. But nevertheless, that was it, and that's the real Hornig. 'Why are you so enthused about the other side of the moon? The other side of the moon looks just like this side, why would you be so interested to see it?'"

GEORGE DYSON, a historian among futurists, has been excavating the history and prehistory of the digital revolution going back 300 years. His most recent book is Darwin Among the Machines.

Nobody asks what "vital force" is anymore. Organisms still have just as much vital force as they had before, but as understanding of biological mechanisms increased, the idea of a single essence evaporated. Hopefully the same will happen with "consciousness".

GEOFFREY HINTON, is an AI researcher at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, where he does research on ways of using neural networks for learning, memory, perception and symbol processing and has over 100 publications in these areas. He was one of the researchers who introduced the back-propagation algorithm that is now widely used for practical applications. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, and Helmholtz machines. His current main interest is in unsupervised learning procedures for neural networks with rich sensory input.

Is enlightenment a myth or a reality? I mean the enlightenment of the east, not west, the state of supreme mystical awareness also known as nirvana, satori, cosmic consciousnesss, awakening. Enlightenment is the telos of the great Eastern religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, and it crops up occasionally in western religions, too, although in a more marginal fashion. Enlightenment once preoccupied such prominent western intellectuals as William James, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell, and there was a surge of scientific interest in mysticism in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Then mysticism became tainted by its association with the human potential and New Age movements and the psychedelic counterculture, and for the last few decades it has for the most part been banished from serious scientific and intellectual discourse. Recently a few scholars have written excellent books that examine mysticism in the light of modern psychology and neuroscience — Zen and the Brain by the neurologist James Austin; Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness by the philosopher Robert Forman; The Mystical Mind by the late psychiatrist Eugene d'Aquili and the radiologist Andrew Newberg — but their work has received scant attention in the scientific mainstream. My impression is that many scientists are privately fascinated by mysticism but fear being branded as fuzzy-headed by disclosing their interest. If more scientists revealed their interest in mystical consciousness, perhaps it could become a legitimate subject for investigation once again.

JOHN HORGAN is a freelance writer and author of The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind. A senior writer at Scientific American from 1986 to 1997, he has also written for the New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Slate, London Times, Times Literary Supplement and other publications.

The distinctive Amnesty International arched sticker, with a burning candle surrounded by a swoosh of barbed wire, seemed to adorn every college dorm-room door, beat up Honda Accord, and office bulletin board when I started college in the late '80s at Fordham University. Human rights was the "in" cause. So, we all joined Amnesty and watched our heroes including Bruce Springsteen, Sting, and Peter Gabriel sing on the "Human Rights Now" tour (brought to you, of course, by Reebok).

As quickly as it took center stage, however, human rights seemed to fall off the map. Somewhere in the mid-90s, something stole our fire and free time, perhaps it was the gold rush years of the Internet or the end of the Cold War. The wild spread of entrepreneurship and capitalism may have carried some democracy along with it. Yet just because people are starting companies and economic markets are opening up doesn't mean that there are fewer tortures, rapes, and murders for political beliefs. (These kinds of false perceptions may stem from giving places like China "Most Favored Nation" status).

Youth inspired by artists created the foundation of Amnesty's success in the '80s, so maybe a vacuum of activist artists is to blame for human rights disappearing from the collective consciousness. Would a homophobic, misogynistic, and violent artist like Eminem ever take a stand for anyone other than himself? Could anyone take him seriously if he did? Britney Spears' fans might not have a problem with her dressing in a thong at the MTV Music Awards but how comfortable would they be if she addressed the issue of the rape, kidnapping, and torture of young women in Sierra Leone?

Of course, you don't have to look around the world to find human-rights abuses. Rodney King and Abner Louima taught us that human rights is an important and pressing issue right in our backyard. (Because of these examples, some narrow-minded individuals may see is as only a race specific issue.) One bright spot in all of this, however, is that the technology that was supposed to create a Big Brother state, like video cameras, is now being used to police Big Brother himself. (Check out witness.org and send them a check — or a video camera — if you have the means.)

Eleanor Roosevelt considered her fight to create the Universal Declaration of Human Rights her greatest accomplishment. How ashamed would she be that 50 years has elapsed since her battle, and now, no one seems to care.

JASON McCABE CALACANIS is Editor and Publisher of Silicon Alley Daily; The Digital Coast Weekly, Silicon Alley Reporter and Chairman CEO, Rising Tide Studios.

The question that has appeared this year is "What questions (plural) have disappeared and why?" Countless questions have disappeared, of course, but for relatively few reasons.

The most obvious vanishings are connected to the passing of time. No one asks anymore "Who's pitching tomorrow for the Brooklyn Dodgers?" or "Who is Princess Diana dating now?"

Other disappearances are related to the advance of science and mathematics. People no longer seriously inquire whether Jupiter has moons, whether DNA has two or three helical strands, or whether there might be integers a, b, and c such that a^3 + b^3 = c^3.

Still other vanished queries are the result of changes in our ontology, scientific or otherwise. We've stopped wondering, "What happened to the phlogiston?" or "How many witches live in this valley?"

The most interesting lacunae in the erotetic landscape, however, derive from lapsed assumptions, untenable distinctions, incommensurable mindsets, or superannuated worldviews that in one way or another engender questions that are senseless or, at least, much less compelling than formerly. "What are the election's exact vote totals" comes to mind.

Now that I've clarified to myself the meaning of "What questions have disappeared and why?" I have to confess that I don't have any particularly telling examples. (Reminds me of the joke about the farmer endlessly elucidating the lost tourist's query about the correct road to some hamlet before admitting, "Don't reckon that I know.")

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS, bestselling author, mathematician, and public speaker is professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia. In addition to being the author of a number of scholarly papers on mathematical logic, probability, and the philosophy of science, Dr. Paulos books include Innumeracy - Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, and Once Upon a Number.

There is a set of questions that ought to have disappeared, but — given human psychology — probably never will do: questions that seek reasons for patterns that in reality are due to chance.

Why is "one plus twelve" an anagram of "two plus eleven"? Why do the moon and the sun take up exactly the same areas in the sky as seen from Earth? Why did my friend telephone me just as I was going to telephone her? Whose face is it in the clouds?

The truth is that not everything has a reason behind it. We should not assume there is someone or something to be blamed for every pattern that strikes us as significant.

But we have evolved to have what the psychologist Bartlett called an "effort after meaning". We have always done better to find meaning where there was none than to miss meaning where there was.

We're human. When we win the lottery by betting on the numbers of our birthday, the question Why? will spring up, no matter what.

NICHOLAS HUMPHREY is a theoretical psychologist at the Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, and the author ofConsciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, and Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation.

This question was at the heart of heated debates for decades during the recently past century, and it was at the ambitious origins of the Artificial Intelligence adventure. It had profound implications not only for science, but also for philosophy, technology, business, and even theology. In the 50's and 60's, for instance, it made a lot of sense to ask the question whether one day a computer could defeat an international chess master, and if it did, it was assumed that we would learn a great deal about how human thought works. Today we know that building such a machine is possible, but the reach of the issue has dramatically changed. Nowadays not many would claim that building such a computer actually informs us in an interesting way about what human thought is and how it works. Beyond the (indeed impressive) engineering achievements involved in building such machines, we got from them little (if any) insight into the mysteries, variability, depth, plasticity, and richness of human thought. Today, the question "do computers think?" has become completely uninteresting and it has disappeared from the cutting edge academic circus, remaining mainly in the realm of pop science, Hollywood films, and video games.

And why it disappeared?

It disappeared because it was finally answered with categorical responses that stopped generating fruitful work. The question became useless and uninspiring, ... boring. What is interesting, however, is that the question disappeared with no single definitive answer! It disappeared with categorical "of-course-yes" and "of-course-not" responses. Of-course-yes people, in general motivated by a technological goal (i.e., "to design and to build something") and implicitly based on functionalist views, built their arguments on the amazing ongoing improvement in the design and development of hardware and software technologies. For them the question became uninteresting because it didn't help to design or to build anything anymore. What became relevant for of-course-yes people was mainly the engineering challenge, that is, to actually design and to build computers capable of processing algorithms in a faster, cheaper, and more flexible manner. (And also, for many, what became relevant was to build computers for human activities and purposes). Now when of-course-yes people are presented with serious problems that challenge their view, they provide the usual response: "just wait until we get better computers" (once known as the wait-until the-year-2000 argument). On the other hand there were the of-course not people, who were mainly motivated by a scientific task (i.e., "to describe, explain, and predict a phenomenon"), which was not necessarily technology-driven. They mainly dealt with real-time and real-world biological, psychological, and cultural realities. These people understood that most of the arrogant predictions made by Artificial Intelligence researchers in the 60's and 70's hadn't been realized because of fundamental theoretical problems, not because of the lack of powerful enough machines. They observed that even the simplest everyday aspects of human thought, such as common sense, sense of humor, spontaneous metaphorical thought, use of counterfactuals in natural language, to mention only a few, were in fact intractable for the most sophisticated machines. They also observed that the nature of the brain and other bodily mechanisms that make thinking and the mind possible, were by several orders of magnitude, way more complex than what it was thought during the hey-days of Artificial Intelligence. Thus for of course-not people the question whether computers think became uninteresting, since it didn't provide insights into a genuine understanding of the intricacies of human thinking. Today the question is dead. The answer had become a matter of faith.

RAFAEL E. NÚÑEZ, currently at the Department of Psychology of the University of Freiburg, is a research associate of the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked for more than a decade on the foundations of embodied cognition, with special research into the nature and origin of mathematical concepts. He has published in several languages in a variety of areas, and has taught in leading academic institutions in Europe, the United States, and South America. He is the author (with George Lakoff) of Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being; and co-editor (with Walter Freeman) of Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of Action, Intention, and Emotion.

Many neuroscientists, myself included, went into brain research because of an interest in the fact that our brains make us who we are. But the topics we end up working on are typically more mundane. It's much easier to research the neural basis of perception, memory or emotion than the way perceptual, memory, and emotion systems are integrated in the process of encoding who we are. Questions about the neural basis of personhood, the self, have never been at the forefront of brain science, and so are not, strictly speaking, lost questions to the field. But they are lost questions for those of us who were drawn to neuroscience by an interest in them, and then settle for less when overcome with frustration over the magnitude of the problem relative to the means we have for solving it. But questions about the self and the brain may not be as hard to address as they seem. A simple shift in emphasis from issues about the way the brain typically works in all of us to the way it works in individuals would be an important entry point. This would then necessitate that research on cognitive processes, like perception or memory, take subjects' motivations and emotions into consideration, rather than doing everything possible to eliminate them. Eventually, researchers would study perception, memory, or emotion less as isolated brain functions than as activities that, when integrated, contribute to the real function of the brain-- the creation and maintenance of the self.

JOSEPH LEDOUX is a Professor of Neural Science at New York University. He is author of The Emotional Brain.