Wolfe, who calls himself "the social secretary of neuroscience," often turns to current research to inform his stories and cultural commentary. His 1996 essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," raised questions about personal responsibility in the age of genetic predeterminism. Similar concerns led Gazzaniga to found the Law and Neuroscience Project. When Gazzaniga, who just published Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, was last in New York, Seed incited a discussion: on status, free will, and the human condition.

Click on the image to watch highlights from the Salon.

Tom Wolfe: Mike, I don't want you to think I'm giving up my right to disagree with you down the line — I may not have to — but you're one of the very few evolutionary thinkers and neuroscientists that I pay attention to, and I'll tell you why. In the '90s, when the subject of neuroscience and also genetics started becoming hot, there was a tendency to conflate genetic theory and evolutionary theory with neuroscience, as if the two were locked, which just isn't true. Remember Jose Delgado, the wave brain physiologist who was at Yale at one time?

Michael Gazzaniga: Oh yeah. Sure.

TW: The guy stood in a smock in a bullring and put stereotaxic needles in the brain of a bull and just let himself be charged. He had a radio transmitter. The bull is as far away as that wall is from me, and he presses the thing and the bull goes dadadada and comes to a stop.

MG: Right.

TW: He's still with us; he's in his 90s. Anyway, his son, also Jose Delgado, and also a neuroscientist, was interviewed recently and he said, "The human brain is complex beyond anybody's imagining, let alone comprehension." He said, "We are not a few miles down a long road; we are a few inches down the long road." Then he said, "All the rest is literature."

Many of today's leading theorists, such as E. O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Dan Dennett, probably know about as much on the human brain as a second-year graduate student in neuropsychology. That isn't their field. Wilson is a great zoologist and a brilliant writer. Dawkins, I'm afraid, is now just a PR man for evolution. He's kind of like John the Baptist — he goes around announcing the imminent arrival. Dennett, of course, is a philosopher and doesn't pretend to know anything about the brain. I think it has distorted the whole discussion.

MG: Well, let me roll the cameras back to the '80s and '90s, when neuroscience was taking off. There were new techniques available to understand the chemical, physiological, and anatomical processes in the brain. Imaging was starting up and the inrush of data was enormous and exciting. So there was a hunger for the big picture: What does it mean? How do we put it together into a story? Ultimately, everything's got to have a narrative in science, as in life. And there was a need for people who didn't spend their time looking down a microscope to tell a story of what this could mean. I would say that some of the people who've made attempts at that did a very good job. But I will hold out for the fact that if you haven't slaved away looking at the nervous system with the tools of neuroscience — if you're only talking about it — you don't quite have the same respect for it. Because it is an extraordinarily complex machine. If Jose Delgado says we're 2 inches down the road to this long journey, I would say it's more like 2 microns.

TW: Right.

MG: It's a very daunting task. When I was at Dartmouth College in the late '50s studying biology, they were just beginning to tell us about DNA. It was a dream. Linus Pauling said, "Someday there's going to be molecular medicine." And the response was: "What are you talking about?"
In the past 55 years, there's been this explosion of work and incredible, intricate knowledge about how genes work. My youngest daughter is now a graduate student in genetics, I'm happy to report. So this past Christmas, I said, "I'm going to buy a genetics textbook and read the sucker, and I'm going to be able to converse with my daughter." I got to page two, and I said, "I'm going to talk to her about other things."

TW: Ha ha.

MG: It's far too complicated. But it's at a point where there's an explosion of information all over the world. And you feel it — the next new idea is waiting to happen.

TW: I think all this excitement has spawned a replacement for Freudian psychologists. They've been replaced by the evolutionary psychologists, whose main interest seems to be to retrofit the theory of evolution on whatever ended up happening. I read an example in your new book of a woman who's come up with an elaborate theory that music has a survival benefit in the evolutionary sense because it increases the social cohesiveness of populations. I would love for her to read a piece that appeared recently in the New Yorker about a tribe, the Pirahã in the Maici River, a little tributary of the Amazon. This tribe, it turns out, has a language with eight consonants and three vowels. I think they have a sum total of 52 words or something like that. As a result, they have little art, they have no music, no dance, and no religion. They're usually cited because they seem to be a terrible exception to Noam Chomsky's rule that all people are born with a structure that enables them to put words in a grammatical form. Not the Pirahã! And they're not stupid or retarded in any sense. They just had never increased their language abilities — and they don't want to.

MG: Yeah. Well, exceptions are historic. Look, the good evolutionary psychologists are good. They're telling us not to fall into the trap of thinking that everything's fixable via simple learning mechanisms or social engineering. They're saying, "Look, there are basic aspects to human nature that are common to all members of our species and have been there a long time." What's exciting is that we've developed this cognitive mechanism to free us from the things that determine so much of our behavior. And by doing so, we've sort of cut the rope from the rest of the animal kingdom. We can do things and we can cultivate certain behavior, even though there are obviously a lot of tendencies that are part of our biology. For example, here's an idea that comes from evolutionary psychology, an observation that I think is rather shrewd: Why are members of our species drawn to the fictional experience? Here you are, someone who's spent your life with fiction —

TW: — I was at one time a journalist. We don't deal with fiction. Not intentionally.

MG: Ha ha — right. But it's a fascinating thing to think of the role that fiction and make-believe play. Do you feel, when you create a body of fiction, that you're opening up possibilities for people to think about problems in a different way? To confront things they don't yet know about?

TW: Well, I do take issue with the idea that all stories have a bearing on evolutionary benefits or survival benefits. In my opinion all stories have to do with status. When people say, "I just want some good escape literature," what they're looking for are dramatizations of people facing status problems. Harry Potter is like every child who feels overwhelmed by this adult world around him, and he overcomes it in ways that don't interest me in particular — he can pull things out of the air. But, like Anna Karenina, it's a story about status problems. Tolstoy and Flaubert would be paupers today, writing these novels, which are all based on the idea that a woman must remain chaste. They'd be laughed out of town. The story of Anna Kerenina and Vronsky would be a Page Six item and then that would be the end of it. But if we successfully put ourselves in the mindset of the 19th century, we can really enjoy the status problems that they have.

MG: Do you think all art is about status?

TW: Well, certainly not music. Dance, maybe yes, maybe no. But literature and movies, yes. To me the crucial point is something, which I don't think even Chomsky understands, about speech and language. Chomsky and many other people are wonderful at telling us how language works, and about differences in languages and the historical progression of languages across the face of the Earth. But I seem to be the one person who realizes the properties of speech. Speech is an artifact. It's not a natural progression of intelligence, in my opinion — we have to look only at the Pirahã for that. It's a code. You're inventing a code for all the objects in the world and then establishing relationships between those objects. And speech has fundamentally transformed human beings.

MG: By speech I assume you mean language and not the actual act of speaking?

TW: To me, it's the same, speech and talking.

MG: Okay, so what do you think language and speech are for? I mean, it's probably an adaptation. We're big animals, and that's one of the goodies that we got.

TW: I think speech is entirely different from other survival benefits. Only with speech can you ask the question, "Why?"

MG: Right.

TW: Animals cannot ask why. In one way or another, they can ask what, where, and when. But they cannot ask why. I've never seen an animal shrug. When you shrug, you're trying to say, "I don't know why." And they also can't ask how.

MG: Yeah.

TW: With language you can ask that question. I think it's at that point where religion starts.

MG: Right.

TW: Humans got language and they were suddenly able to say, "Hey, why is all this here? Who put it here?" And my assumption is that they said, "There must be somebody like us but much bigger, much more powerful, that could make all these trees, the streams. God must be really something, and you'd better not get on the wrong side of him." I think that's the way it started.

STORYTIME, ALL THE TIME

MG: As you may know, I came across this phenomenon that I call the Interpreter. It's something that's in the left hemisphere of the human; it tries to put a story together as to why something occurred. So, we found this in patients who've had their brains divided. What we could do is sort of tiptoe into their nonspeaking right hemisphere and get them to do something like walk out of the room or lift their hand up. Then we would ask the left hemisphere, "Why did you do that?" And they would cook up a story to make sense out of what their disconnected right hemisphere just did. The left brain didn't know that we'd pulled a trick on them, so they concoct an explanation for why they walked out of the room. And it's because this left hemisphere can ask, "Why? What's that all about?" But one of the things we've never been able to unpack is whether this Interpreter is completely overlapping with the language system and is therefore a sort of press agent for its own mechanism. What we do know is that there are separate systems for different types of cognition. And the Interpreter seems to be located in the parts of the brain where language is located. So many people do think that interpretive capacity comes with language; that this is the deal with language — it comes along for the ride. Others believe that there are actually all kinds of different cognitive mechanisms happening, and language reports them out. So the function of language is to talk about it, talk about what you know and communicate, "Hey! Look here, I know how to cook a fish. Here, let me show you how."

TW: I've always been interested in your theory of the Interpreter. When I was in graduate school, I was introduced to this concept of social status in the work of Max Weber, the German sociologist. And the more I thought about it, the more I could see that status was not simply something that was appearances and houses and automobiles, or even ranks in a corporation or that sort of thing. It invaded every single part of life. I remember when I was in graduate school, there was a setup wherein a common bathroom was shared by two rooms. And there was a student from India — a brilliant scientist — who had apparently come from way out in the countryside, with no natural social standing and not many amenities. Now, you'd think the things you do in absolute private would not be driven by status concerns. But he heard three of his American friends joking about the fact that when they went into the bathroom, they found footprints on the toilet seat. Well, this fellow had never seen a porcelain toilet before. He was crushed. He felt absolutely humiliated, and here was something that goes on in private.

Anyway, this was something before I'd ever heard of neuroscience, and I said, "There must be something in the brain that registers this, your status in every kind of situation." And I kept looking for it. Freud had been such a powerful figure that everyone seemed to think, "Freud's got the bottom line, why should we go through all these complicated neurons and everything to see how he got there. He's got it." I hoped to find the answer in Delgado's book, but it wasn't really there. It wasn't until I ran across your concept of the Interpreter that I thought, "Hey, maybe we've got it."

MG: Well, the key concept in understanding status has to do with the idea of social comparison. The Interpreter fires up and almost reflexively starts to compare the new person with one's self and others. Multiple factors seep into this narrative being built by the Interpreter and the importance of status is one of the products of that process.

Still, I think the essential question that neuroscience has to answer is why, when I interact with someone, I don't think it's my brain talking to their brain. I'm talking to Tom Wolfe, and you're listening to Mike Gazzaniga, right? We instantly convert to that: I give you an essence right off the bat. I put you at the level of a person with mental states and all the rest of it. That mechanism, it makes us all dualists in a way. Absolute dualists. That mechanism is the deep mystery of neuroscience, and no one has touched it yet. No one knows how that works. That's the goal.

For my part, what I've come to realize is that the neuroscience of the next 20 years will be studying social processes of humans. In order to get to the biology of anything, you need technology that allows you to study the human mind. It's only really in the past 10 or 15 years that we've had the new methods of imaging. And they keep getting better and better and better. The ability to think about other people is probably the impetus behind all these marvelous things the human brain can do.

TW: Every time we go into a room with other people, it's as if we have a teleprompter in front of us and it's telling us the history of ourselves versus these people. We can't even think of thinking without this huge library of good information and bad information.

MG: That's why the great psycholinguist George Miller, whom we shared a dinner with once, called us the "informavores." That's how he wanted to cast us.

When you get up in the morning, you do not think about triangles and squares and these similes that psychologists have been using for the past 100 years.

You think about status. You think about where you are in relation to your peers. You're thinking about your spouse, about your kids, about your boss. Ninety-nine percent of your time is spent thinking about other people's thoughts about you, their intentions, and all this kind of stuff. So sorting all that out, how we navigate this complex social world, there's going to be a neuroscience to it, and I think it's going to be very powerful.

THE NEW IDENTITY CRISIS

MG: I'm involved in a new project called "Neuroscience and the Law," which I think you're familiar with. It brings up the idea that there are these causal forces that make us do the things we do, that by the time you're consciously aware of something, your brain's already done it. How else could it be? Because the brain is what's producing these mental events that we're sorting through. So these ideas — what I call the ooze of neuroscience — are going out everywhere, and people are willing to accept that: "My brain did it. Officer, it wasn't me." These defenses are popping up all over the judicial system. But if we adopt that, then it's hard to see why we have a retributive response to a wrongdoing. It would seem to me to be morally wrong to blame someone for something that was going to happen anyway because of forces beyond their control. So people get into this loop, and they get very concerned about the nature of our retributive response. This puts you right smack in the middle of the question: Are we free to do what we think we're doing?

TW: Oh, it's the hottest subject in academia. Philosophy students are flocking to neuroscience because they think the answers are all there, not in our silly, cherished way of thinking. It's called "materialism," to some. We are computers, and a computer is programmed a certain way, and there's nothing the computer can do to change its programming. I think materialism is too grand a word for it. It's mechanical. I mean, here's what happens. The scientist says, "We are machines." There's no ghost in the machine. There's no little tiny "me" in the conning tower surveying the universe and figuring out a place within it. It's a machine. Things get more and more complicated when it comes to humans, but it's still a machine. Obviously, this machine has no free choice. It's programmed to do certain things. It's as if you threw a rock in the air, and in midflight you gave that rock consciousness. That rock would come up with 12 airtight, logical reasons why it's going in that direction. This has caught on like wildfire. The flaw in that is that speech, language, creates so many variables. Speech reacts. It's the only artifact I can think of that reacts.

MG: Well, I think using the term "free will" is just a bad way to capture the problem. Because here's the question: Free from what? What are you trying to be free from?

TW: It's a very simple definition: You make your own decisions.

MG: Yeah. But who is "you"? "You" is this person with this brain that has been interacting with this environment since you were born, learning about the good and the bad, the things that work and don't work. You've been making decisions all the way along, and now you have a new one and you want to be free to make it. So psychologically, the Interpreter is telling you you're making this decision. But the trick is understanding that your brain is basing the decision on past experience, on all the stuff it has learned. You want a reliable machine to make the actual act occur. You want to be responding rationally to any challenge that you get in the world, because you want that experience to be evaluated. That's all going on in your brain second by second, moment to moment. And as a result, you make a decision about it. And phenomenologically, when the decision finally comes out, you say, "Oh, that's me!"

TW: Speech has introduced so many variables into your machine that it becomes pointless to argue whether this is free or not free will. Obviously, it's not free in the sense that if you don't have this body, you can't do anything. But it is free in the sense that because of your experiences and because of the reactions of speech constantly feeding you new material, your brain is going to operate differently from anybody else's, and that is the free will — whether you call it mechanical or not. Everybody becomes such an individual, it becomes pointless to say, "You didn't make that decision." It's an absurd idea.

MG: Well, I think we're saying the same thing. There is a very clever little experiment that you would be amused by, run by my colleague Jonathan Schooler. He has a bunch of students read a paragraph or two from the Francis Crick book, Astonishing Hypothesis, which is very deterministic in tone and intent. And then he has another group of students reading an inspirational book about how we make our own decisions and determine our own path. He then lets each group play a videogame in which you're free to cheat. So guess who cheats? The people who have just read that it's all determined cheat their pants off.

I think people who try to find personal responsibility in the brain are wrongheaded. Think of it this way: If you're the only person in the world, you live alone on an island, there's no concept of personal responsibility. Who are you being personally responsible to? If somebody shows up on the island though —

TW: — Friday was his name.

MG: Yeah, exactly. Then you've got a social group. And the group starts to make rules; that's the only way they're going to function. Out of those rules comes responsibility. So responsibilities are to the relationships within the social groups, and when someone breaks a rule, they're breaking a social rule. So don't look for where in their brain something went wrong; look at the fact that they broke a rule, which they could have followed. I'm actually kind of hard-nosed about this. I think people should be held accountable for lots of stuff.

TW: No, I would certainly agree with that. In fact, my theory of status is that all of us live by a set of values that, if written in stone, would make not me but my group superior in some way. I think there are just so many kinds of status layers due solely to likeness. You can always find a group that seems to justify whatever you're doing.

MG: Our species seems brilliant at forming groups — indeed support groups — for almost anything. And no matter what the group is about, no matter what its character, it becomes advocatory.

To enter the somewhat formidable Neo-Renaissance building at Boltzmanngasse 3 in Vienna, you must pass through a small door sawed from the original cathedrallike entrance. When I first visited this past March, it was chilly and overcast in the late afternoon. Atop several tall stories of scaffolding there were two men who would hardly have been visible from the street were it not for their sunrise-orange jumpsuits. As I was about to pass through the nested entrance, I heard a sudden rush of wind and felt a mist of winter drizzle. I glanced up. The veiled workers were power-washing away the building's façade, down to the century-old brick underneath.

In 1908 Karl Kupelwieser, Ludwig Wittgenstein's uncle, donated the money to construct this building and turn Austria- Hungary into the principal destination for the study of radium. Above the doorway the edifice still bears the name of this founding purpose. But since 2005 this has been home of the Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation (IQOQI, pronounced "ee-ko-kee"), a center devoted to the foundations of quantum mechanics. The IQOQI, which includes a sister facility to the southwest in the valley town of Innsbruck, was initially realized in 2003 at the behest of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. However, the institute's conception several years earlier was predominantly due to one man: Anton Zeilinger. This past January, Zeilinger became the first ever recipient of the Isaac Newton Medal for his pioneering contributions to physics as the head of one of the most successful quantum optics groups in the world. Over the past two decades, he and his colleagues have done as much as anyone else to test quantum mechanics. And since its inception more than 80 years ago, quantum mechanics has possibly weathered more scrutiny than any theory ever devised. Quantum mechanics appears correct, and now Zeilinger and his group have started experimenting with what the theory means.

The image of the idle Russian scientist, desperate for cash and teeming with nuclear know-how, has haunted American foreign policymakers since the fall of the Soviet Union. Seeking to keep idle hands from the devil's work, in 1994 the US Department of Energy began bankrolling dozens of scientific institutes throughout the former Soviet Union. A crisis was apparently averted, and the seemingly successful programs have continued through today. But a January 2008 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that two of the Russian institutes receiving US funds had shipped nuclear equipment to a reactor in Iran. The revelation that a nonproliferation program may in fact have abetted nuclear proliferation prompted calls on Capitol Hill to pull the plug.

To supporters of anti-proliferation efforts, funding Russian research is the foreign-policy equivalent of handing a schoolyard bully crayons and coloring books: Keeping him busy is meant to keep him out of trouble. The program that the GAO reviewed, called the Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention (IPP), took that idea a step further, asking the bullies to draw like Marc Chagall. Matching US companies up with underemployed ex-Soviet scientists was meant to spur technological innovation. Brian Finlay, codirector of the Henry L. Stimson Center's Cooperative Nonproliferation Program, says the Russian approach to science differs significantly from the West's: "There is a wealth of innovation we can capitalize on." Every year there are more businesses in line than there is IPP money to fund them. And handing out crayons can turn a bully into something of a teacher's pet. "We're finding things out," says Matthew Bunn, of Harvard University's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "It's greatly underappreciated how much we have learned from these kinds of programs about what goes on in Russian institutions." For example, when a delegation of Iranian nuclear scientists visits their Russian counterparts, the US intelligence community learns about it.

Some time ago, in the outskirts of a typical spiral galaxy, a wandering spacecraft encountered a promising world. The azure planet orbited third from its yellow star, at just the right distance to allow liquid water at its surface. As the probe approached, gaps in the clouds far below revealed continents scattered amidst a world-girdling ocean. In a vast cosmic desert, this was an oasis. The probe sampled the atmosphere, finding abundant oxygen and traces of methane. Chemistry dictates that the two reactive gases could never coexist for long; something was replenishing them. Analyzing starlight reflected off the land, it saw regions absorbing light at wavelengths corresponding to no known non-biological process. Perhaps this was vegetation. The spacecraft also detected powerful, modulated radio emissions from the surface—almost certainly a sign of substantial technology. There was life on this planet, and at least some of it seemed intelligent. The date was December 8, 1990, and the spacecraft was the Jupiter-bound Galileo probe. The planet, of course, was Earth. For the first time, scientists had proved Earth's biosphere could be clearly detected from space.

In principle, the only limits in our quest to find extraterrestrial life are the size of the observable universe and our imagination. Beyond sheer luck, any chance of success depends upon how we shape our search. Realizing this, the visionary astronomer Carl Sagan conceived the Galileo observations of Earth with the simple premise that we'd have better chances if we could first demonstrate that we could detect life on our own planet from space. When the Galileo probe successfully identified life here, it proved Sagan's point that we can best seek that which we know how to find—planets like ours, life like us.

It's a quiet sunday morning when we roll into Weifang city, in China's Shandong province, to interview local food producers, but our hosts are unperturbed. The export scandals are still months away, and the government is happy to show Western journalists the glories of China's rapidly evolving food system. Within an hour, my interpreter and I are being escorted through the city's newest showcase—a duck-processing plant where a shift of workers had been brought in and several thousand ducks dispatched—so that I can witness China's most recent great step forward. And it is impressive. In huge, spotless rooms, rows of workers in clean-suits and hairnets are swiftly and methodically disassembling birds on a mechanical conveyor at a rate of 3,100 an hour. By tomorrow, these ducks will be bound for supermarkets in Beijing, to be snapped up by upscale shoppers as quickly as they can be put in the meat case.

China's new meat proficiency goes beyond duck. Under the potent combination of industrialization, meat science, and rising wealth, meat production here is soaring—and so is consumption. Per capita intake of poultry, pork, fish, and even beef has more than tripled since 1970—a radical change in a nation long thought to have an almost philosophical preference for veggies over meat. "The Chinese have always regarded animal foods as better" than vegetables or grains, assures Yang Xiao Guang, of the China Nutrition Association. "We just had no money to buy them."

Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has made a career of trafficking in moral ambiguity and complexity. Evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser has pioneered research into the idea of a universal morality grounded in biology. Hauser believes humans possess a moral grammar; Morris isn't so sure. The two met when Morris asked Hauser to be part of his short film for the 2007 Oscars. They kept in touch, exchanged ideas, and Hauser attended an early screening of Standard Operating Procedure, Morris's film about the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Recently in Boston they debated game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people.

Click on the image to watch highlights from the Salon.

Errol Morris: I'm not sure that I have any real grasp on morality at all, much less some universal idea of morality. I've thought a lot about what happened at Abu Ghraib, and maybe this shows just a fundamental deficiency on my part, but I've come away even more confused than when I started and more convinced that social science really hasn't grappled with these issues in a way that I find satisfactory.

It's fascinating that whenever we come up against something that is really complex, there is this very deep human need to find a simple explanation that can account for it. If it's something that's really bad, really wrong, people feel uneasy and want to figure out how to distance themselves from it; to tell themselves, "This doesn't concern me. This isn't about me. This is about somebody else, or some other group I don't belong to."

Marc Hauser: Okay, but you left out a huge question: How do you know it's wrong?

EM: Yeah.

MH: How do you even know? How does the human mind know that something is wrong? And once it does, what does it do with that information? Those are deep questions. I mean they've occupied people for centuries.

EM: Right. One of the stories that I tell in S.O.P. is about a suspected insurgent who's brought in by Navy SEALs, interrogated by the CIA, enters Abu Ghraib under his own power, leaves as a corpse on a gurney. So, who is responsible? Who should be blamed? And if they haven't been blamed and are responsible, why haven't they been blamed?

MH: Right.

EM: All of that really interests me.

MH: Well, so, what science is doing is trying to distinguish two aspects of the question of how we think about the world. Because even this kind of violence, depending on whose side you're on, will be evaluated differently, right?

EM: Yes.

MH: So, when the Nazis got together to exterminate the Jews, from their perspective, wanton killing of Jews was not wrong. It was perfectly right because Jews were "the other." You map a distinction by recruiting the most powerful and violent emotions you can—disgust, hate. You call the other parasitic vermin to recruit the most incredible imagery. Once you do that, the emotions wreak havoc and you feel perfectly justified exterminating the other.

So this is where I think some the universality comes in. Say I tell a story about a violent episode but I don't say who's involved. I think you'll get everybody to agree what, or who, is wrong. If you create a moral dilemma and give no identifying information—you strip away any in-group, out-group distinction—you'll get lots of consensus on what's right or wrong. This is what we're finding. But, once you plug in the partiality of my group and your group, the entire dynamic changes. And that shows a powerful aspect of the mind.

EM: Well, take the example of the Nazis.

MH: Yes.

EM: This is a question that I still wonder about. They said it's okay to kill Jews: Jews represent a threat to our way of life, to our gene pool, to our values, and so on. They've justified their behavior completely. But, if you think it's okay, then why try to cover it up? Why try to conceal the fact that you're doing it? That becomes the really complex question. You quickly enter this hall of mirrors. You can say, well, they thought it was the right thing to do, but they knew others might not view their behavior that way and that they should therefore cover their tracks. But isn't that tantamount to saying that they knew it was wrong? It's a real question.

MH: It is a real question. But ultimately, I think it comes back to having a sense of your place in the world. You have a sense of what others will respond to in terms of your actions and, ultimately, that feeds back into your behavior. So I think you're right, both the covering up and the ability to go forward are two parts of the story.

Errol Morris Credit: Julian Dufort

EM: There's a document that I've been really interested in. When the Russians entered Auschwitz in January 1945, the Germans attempted to destroy their records. But Auschwitz was so large that there was actually a building archive separate from the main Auschwitz archive that housed their construction documents. They forgot to destroy it. It was left completely intact.

There is a document in this archive. And written on it with red pencil are notations chastising the writer of the document for using a word for "gas chamber"—vergasungskeller. Essentially, the added notations tell the writer of the document: Don't use that word. You're not supposed to use that word. Don't use it ever again.

So, it tells me that there is an investment in hiding, in covering one's tracks.

MH: You seem surprised by that. What's surprising?

EM: I wouldn't say that I'm exactly surprised by it but it made me think that morality is the combination of two things: "I'm sorry," and "I'm sorry I got caught." There are two things always operating. There's you, and then there's what the world thinks of you.

MH: Yeah.

EM: If I do X, do I feel comfortable doing it? Do I feel comfortable doing X even though I know people will look at me with extreme disapproval?

MH: I mean that's the categorical imperative, right? If you want to work through the world of rights and wrongs, imagine would you feel comfortable doing it yourself. And now imagine a world in which everybody would do what you just did and would you feel comfortable there? You universalize it.

EM: It's a little different. It's not the categorical imperative. It's saying that when I do anything, I have a picture of other people looking at me and possibly disapproving of my actions. Maybe I just want to be liked by people. I don't want people to think that I'm a bad person, or an evil person.

MH: Right.

EM: I do things that may have nothing to do with who I am but a lot to do with how I want to be perceived by others.

MH: Right. And there's the selfish gene view of this, which is that we evolved minds that always take into account the other because it's self-serving, right? I think about what others are going to respond to in terms of my actions because I want to make sure that I'm maximizing my own self-good. And then there's the group selection view, the idea that we act altruistically because it benefits our group.

There are these interesting experiential games that have been developed by economists, and the typical economics view is we're self maximizing, we're selfish, rational players.

EM: Yeah.

MH: So you play these games, such as the ultimatum, where one individual starts off with a pot of money and can offer some proportion of this pot to an anonymous other. For example, let's say I start out with a pot of $10 and I'm told that if I make an offer to someone who I'll never see again, they'll get what I offer and I get what's left over. But if they reject my offer, no one gets anything.

EM: Okay.

Marc Hauser Credit: Julian Dufort

MH: This is a one-shot game. On the rational economics view, I should be giving you the smallest proportion of the pot possible. You should accept anything because something's better than nothing, right? But it turns out that most people offer about half, so about $5. And for people who offer less, usually in the range of $1 to $3, the recipient rejects. So there's some notion of fairness, which overrides the selfishness we expect. What would we think of ourselves if we offered so little? How would the recipient perceive that kind of offer? So this all plays into the view that the mind evolved with these regulatory mechanisms that counterbalance complete self-interest.

EM: Yes. I've never been terribly interested in zero-sum games, non-zero-sum games, the game theoretic analysis of human behavior.

MH: What's the intuition, though?

EM: The intuition? To make a crude generalization: In game theory you make a series of calculations. I need to appear generous or fair to ensure that the people around me will be more generous or fair. And so on and so forth. It assumes that people effectively communicate with each other.

MH: Say more about that.

EM: Well, very often it seems to me that in trying to analyze human behavior, people create these simplistic games or models that they feel will teach them something. But in real life, you're plunged into the middle of a confusing, uncertain nightmare.

MH: Yeah.

EM: I'll give you an example from Abu Ghraib. One of the soldiers, Sabrina Harman, took pictures of a corpse of al-Jamadi, who was, for all intents and purposes, killed by the CIA. She took pictures of the corpse and pictures were taken of her next to the corpse.

MH: Yeah.

EM: And in one of the pictures, she has her thumb up. People can't get beyond the thumb. Why? They think it tells us she is responsible for al-Jamadi's death. But she's not. The thumb hides the murder.

People look at the picture and make assumptions about what's going on in her head. And they're wrong. They've got it all wrong. And then they express various kinds of disapproval.

MH: Right.

EM: Anger, annoyance, horror. I don't think all of this can be easily analyzed in some kind of psychological model. I get caught up in how people interpret behavior to suit their own interests. How there's this very strange discontinuity between what actually goes on in the world and how the world is perceived; how we're endlessly misperceived by others and ourselves.

MH: Right.

EM: People look at this and they want to know, "How can I explain these pictures? How can I put them into some model of human behavior? How can I square them with my understanding about how human beings act?"

MH: Yeah.

EM: And then they truck out various psychological theories. Theories which I suppose are based on experiment. And it seems to me that the experiments are both misunderstood and don't have the great generality attributed to them. The most obvious example is Philip Zimbardo. Another candidate for this kind of thing is Stanley Milgram. The experiments tell us: People do this bad stuff because people always do bad stuff in such circumstances. It has a kind of circularity.

I'm not sure what these experiments actually show. I'm not sure that they have any application to Abu Ghraib or any other bad situation I can imagine. They often seem to me to be an excuse for not thinking about stuff, for creating a set of blinders around the complexity of the human experience so that one doesn't have to look at it, rather than the other way around.

MH: Right. So I think you've now hit on a true fact about human nature, which is that scientists are always trying to come up with experiments that can account for some significant proportion of variation. Unfortunately along the way we often have a tendency to think we're explaining more of the variation. What I often find happens—and it's happening right here, right now!—is that often when an account of some type of human behavior is brought forth to people not in the sciences, they'll come back and say but here's an example of where that doesn't work. And that's not playing the game quite fairly because the sciences are never going to give a complete explanation of every aspect of human behavior. But the hope is to find some common universal principle that accounts for a significant aspect of our behavior.

EM: Sure.

SHOT IN THE ARM

MH: Now take the Milgram experiments. About a year ago, there was a study done that replicated Milgram's experiment. So you may think how is that possible? Aren't those now deemed unethical?

Well they are but we can do them if they're in virtual reality space. This group in London—led by Mel Slater—created the Milgram experiments in virtual reality. So you're the subject and while you're in the experiment, you're hooked up to skin conductance gizmos, which look at the sweatiness of your palms and heart rate and track how revved up you're getting.

EM: Right.

MH: And what you find is that all of the factors that Milgram uncovered in his original experiment—how close you are to the individual, how much you've interacted with him before, how dominant the experimenter is in pushing you forward—all of those get mapped onto the physiological response of the subject in exactly the same way as they did in the original experiment. And they know it's not real. It's like, why do men look at Playboy or Penthouse? It's just a magazine. But the mind goes on automatic pilot in some cases, blind to reality.

So the interesting thing is that, of course, people know they're in a completely fake environment, it's virtual reality. And yet there are parts of the brain that don't get it. To use a term from cognitive science, there's a sense of encapsulation or insularity, so even though I know this is a visual illusion, I don't give a hoot.

EM: I don't care.

MH: Right. And that says something very important about the moral domain because there are parts of the brain that are just going to see the world in a particular way independently of rich belief systems.

EM: Right, but wait a second. Tell me what was immoral about the original Milgram experiments.

MH: Oh, well, one thing that has changed since those early experiments is the kind of information that you owe to your subjects when you test them in an experimental setting. That is, there is now a much greater burden to inform subjects of what is likely to happen in the experiment, and some of the negative consequences that might ensue. In the Milgram experiments, the issue was that some people might experience considerable trauma from engaging with the shock device. Thus, there is a burden of informing subjects, right?

EM: What specifically was immoral about the experiments for the subjects, though?

MH: Well, like in many psychological experiments, there was dishonesty. They didn't know that they were not shocking the individual. They were also, in some sense, coerced because the relationship between the experimenter and the subject was asymmetric. And those are the situations, which now, human subject committees are very sensitive to. You don't want to put people in a situation that forces them to do things that they knowingly don't want to do. You want people to have knowledge of both what they're going to do and the possible consequences of it.

EM: I look at it differently.

MH: Yeah.

EM: For whatever reason. I always thought that the big no-no with the Milgram experiments was that the people who "failed" the experiments, the person who came in and gave the "supposed" heart patient horrifying electric shocks, was going to have to live with that for the rest of his life. You go in there, you take the Milgram test, as it were, and you fail. You flunk.

MH: Right, right.

EM: Instead of saying, "No I won't do it, that's wrong, that's unacceptable," you administer dreadful shocks to people. Then someone tells you what's going on. You may feel lied to, of course, betrayed by the experimenter. But you're still left wondering: Am I a Nazi? Am I a villain? Am I a killer?

I read this book about great experiments in psychology. It was written by Lauren Slater—and very controversial actually.

MH: Oh yes. Right.

EM: And one of them, of course, was the Milgram experiment. They had sealed the records so you couldn't find out who passed, who failed; who eagerly administered electric shocks, who said, "No, I don't want to." She was able to locate the people who had failed the Milgram experiment and interview them. I thought it was really, really interesting. Did you read any of this stuff?

MH: I didn't read it, no.

EM: One person who had failed said, "This was a really valuable experience. Now I see what I'm capable of."

MH: Right. Yes.

EM: I'll be on the lookout. I'll observe my own behavior more closely, more carefully. He talked about it as though he'd received an inoculation. He'd received the Milgram vaccine against genocide. And so I wondered, could there be the Milgram vaccine?

MH: Well, at some level that's what Anthony Burgess plays with in A Clockwork Orange, right?

EM: Maybe.

STACKING THE DECK

MH: Some of those behavioral therapies have had success, to varying degrees. You know there was a program on—my great source for knowledge of the world—MTV.

EM: It's probably a really good source.

MH: Ha—right. It was a good source. It was a program on these intervention studies being done with kids who are juvenile delinquents who have been convicted of some fairly horrible crime and are then put into a prison where some of the more horrible convicts show them about the brutality of what it's like to be in a prison. Because a lot of these kids don't have any idea. And apparently these interventions are relatively successful, and with many of these kids they actually have a defeating effect.

EM: Interesting you should mention this because there's a film called Scared Straight. It's one of the worst things I've ever seen. It may have gotten an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.

It was the same idea. Kids who had committed various crimes were jailed with hardened criminals in a maximum-security prison. And, they're "scared straight."

MH: Right.

EM: Well the movie was really, really bad. On the level of craft, I thought: This is just awful. Then someone wrote an article about it. The kids in this program had come from an upper middle class suburb where the recidivism rate is zero. So, now I thought: bad movie and really bad social science. If the recidivism rate is zero, then it really doesn't matter whether they are "scared straight" or not, they are going to "go straight" regardless. And then I thought: really bad morality: Is this how you want to ensure compliance in a society? By scaring people?

The Milgram inoculation is a little bit different. It's scaring people by giving them an example of what they're capable of. It's not by saying: I'm going to take a two-by-four to the side of your head. It's not A Clockwork Orange.

MH: See what was more interesting about the MTV version of the documentary was that they actually talked about the cases that did not work. And those cases—where going to the prisons and scaring the pulp out of the kids had no effect—were cases where macho, violent behavior was part of their culture. And if the kid went back and said, you know, "I'm cured," the kid had less of a chance of surviving. And so, in the same way that a Milgram-type inoculation will work for some people, a scared straight version will work for other people.

EM: Okay.

MH: There was a study done a couple of years ago with a very, very large sample of boys; something like 500 boys who they'd tracked from a young age into their juvenile years. What they found was a gene with two modes of expression, so to speak. One mode expressed a high concentration of neurochemicals like serotonin and dopamine, chemistry linked to our impulsive behavior. The other mode expressed a low level of these chemicals.

EM: Uh huh.

MH: Now here is the fascinating part. Among the sample of boys observed, there were some who led a wonderful childhood, had caring parents. A second category was subjected to mild levels of violence from their parents. And the third category received high and fairly abnormal levels of parental violence. When you look at the profiles of these children during their juvenile-teen years, you find a striking pattern. The boys with the high expressing form of the gene appeared to be buffered against parental violence, whereas the boys with the low expressing form weren't, and they showed far higher rates of juvenile delinquency.

EM: Really?

MH: So it's a beautiful, albeit sad, case of gene-environment interaction. Depending on the cards you get, and the environment you land in, you could either end up fine, because you are genetically buffered from the nasty environment thrown your way, or deeply injured by this environment because there are no genetic defenses. This shows the importance of looking at how genetic systems build bodies and minds that set up opportunities for the environment, opportunities to sculpt outcomes in particular directions.

EM: Okay.

MH: I mean, it's this kind of genetic view that indicates why we're having this conversation, but dogs aren't, you know? After all, dogs are exposed to pretty much the same environment we are, but we chat, gossip, and pontificate, whereas they bark, with a few variants here and there.

EM: Well, as far as we know dogs aren't having this conversation.

MH: As far as we know, right. As Gary Larson put it, when we listen in on dog conversations, all we hear is "heh, heh, heh."

EM: Right, exactly.

MH: But this study is a nice example of how developmental factors can greatly influence morally relevant behavior in later life. This kind of story may have important implications for psychopathy where there is increasing evidence for early developmental problems, well before the signature of psychopathy shows itself in early adulthood. It's now fairly well documented that people who become psychopaths show signs of this disorder early, in the form of violence towards pets. Then later in life, this violence migrates to humans.

EM: From their pets? I'm suspicious of the whole idea of psychopathy.

MH: You can't go there.

EM: No, no, no. We can go there. Why not?

With the US Presidential campaign season headed into the party conventions, America's science community is growing ever-more confident that positive change is on the horizon. There are expectations that funding for research will improve, that tampering with scientific reports will end, and that science will be restored to a position of respectability in Washington.

In the past few years a debate has arisen within American science about the role it ought to play in fostering a better society. The interplay between science and democracy is the kind of philosophical exploration that Sheila Jasanoff, professor of Science and Public Policy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, has been observing and writing about for 30 years. In the first of a series of conversations about science, politics, and the coming election, Seed senior editor Don Hoyt Gorman spoke to her about some of the challenges facing American science culture.

Seed: How have you seen the campaigns responding to this surge of political engagement from the American science community?

SJ: Senator Hillary Clinton took the opportunity of the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik to speak at the Carnegie Institution of Washington about what she'd do for science. She said she would restore the integrity of science in Washington, and lift the stem cell funding ban. Clearly her handlers thought from the start that an important speech about science would be an astute and salient thing to do.

I want you to contemplate your teeth for a moment. I'm sure they're very familiar to you, to the point that you take them for granted (except, perhaps, on visits to the dentist), but take a moment to run your tongue over them one by one. They're beautiful! You have, lined up in an arc in your mouth, rows of exquisite abstract sculptures, each one an enameled column, with whorls and bumps and edges in stately and regular array, all matching and meshing to chew and cut. Almost all of us have imperfections in our teeth, of course, and yet there is something exquisite in their predictable patterns and characteristic shapes.

Teeth are wonderfully diagnostic; a skilled comparative anatomist can identify your genus, tell you about your diet, and summarize your evolutionary lineage by examining the shape of a single tooth. A whole mouthful can serve as a detailed biological road map to your ancestry.

Regularity is the hallmark of the arrangement of our teeth. Humans have a standard pattern: On each side, top and bottom, we have from front to back, two incisors, a single pointed canine, two premolars, and three molars. (The third molar is the wisdom tooth, which may or may not have erupted, depending on your age, or may have been extracted.) Each of these teeth has its own characteristic size and shape and a standard pattern of cusps or bumps, a pattern that is heritable and specified to a surprising degree.

The functional elegance of this rarefied speak is uniquely captured in one of its most inconspicuous words: "so." This isn't "so" the intensifier ("so expensive"); it's not the "so" that joins two clauses. This is the "so" that introduces a sentence, as in "So as we can see, modified Newtonian dynamics cannot account for the rotation of any of the three observed galaxies."

This "so" is key to a basic unit of scientific talk: the explanation. What follows "so" is another idea, insight, or fact—not because it's merely next in a series but because it's conceptually consequent: "So when chaperone proteins bind to their receptors, the process allows other bound proteins to expose their signal sequences." The versatility of this precursory "so" allows for a remarkable wealth of potential follow-through. The structure of the word itself makes it extremely useful, namely the sibilant "s" and the long, hollow "o," both of which are infinitely extendable and can carry a wild variety of emotional intonation. There's the curt "so," the wondering, wandering "soooooo," the exploratory "so?" In its crudest form it buys one time. At its most elegant, it facilitates the work of intellectual hopscotch—or Twister, if that's your game. "So" is here a verbal teleporter; it facilitates a leap from A to B that spares the listener the complexity in between without simultaneously dishonoring it. It abbreviates all the data, logic, information, or research experience that one might need to understand what follows. "So" is a transition between the "there" of specialized knowledge and the "here" of explanation.

When international leaders met in Bali last December to begin hammering out a new global pact on climate change, they butted heads over many things but agreed on this: Conservation of the world's tropical forests should play a critical role in the protocol that replaces Kyoto in 2012. The carbon dioxide released from deforestation accounts for roughly 20 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, and reducing that rate could be among the easiest and cheapest ways to slow global warming, according to experts. But with many of the planet's remaining forests located in developing nations—where the economic pressures to clear land for agriculture, timber, minerals, and, increasingly, biofuels are substantial—how could these countries reasonably be expected to participate?

The solution they settled upon, though clunky in name (Reducing Emission from Deforestation and Degradation), is elegant in concept: REDD mechanisms will assign a carbon storage value to forests, and nations that forego razing their trees will receive credits, which can then be sold on the carbon market. "These plans have the potential to shift the balance of underlying economic market forces that currently favor deforestation," said a team of researchers in Science. But REDDs will also test a much bigger idea: that it is possible to put a monetary value not just on nature's goods—like oil and timber—but also on nature's services; that we might begin accounting for the role an intact ecosystem plays as a carbon sink, a filter for water and air, a pollinator, and a home for biodiversity. As the first global experiment in this premise, REDDs will attempt to weave nature's services into the fabric of a capitalist economy, and in so doing will test whether markets can begin to drive the protection of Earth's resources, rather than their exploitation.

Until very recently, the devastating 1908 explosion of a space rock over the isolated Tunguska region of Siberia was thought to be a once-in-a-millennium event. Based on comparisons to nuclear weapon blast effects, many experts estimated the Tunguska object to be 50 to 100 meters. But new simulations by Mark Boslough at Sandia National Laboratories suggest the Tunguska object was much smaller than previously believed. And since smaller near-Earth objects (NEOs) are more common than larger ones, the implication is that the gap between such impacts may be centuries rather than millennia.

"Chances are we're not going to discover one of these before it hits," Boslough says, pointing out that the vast number of small NEOs far outweighs the capabilities of the few surveys currently seeking them. "The good news is most of the Earth is either sparsely populated or uninhabited, so the probability a city or populated area will be hit is small. The big ones, 1 kilometer or larger, are the ones we should worry about."

While space agencies, governments, and individuals worldwide work to develop new means to detect, and eventually prevent, an NEO disaster, the US government—though it provides the global majority of NEO research funding—is mostly paying lip-service to a risk that could threaten the survival of civilization. In 2005, the US Congress built off mandates from the 1990s, directing NASA to catalog 90 percent of potentially hazardous NEOs greater than 140 meters in diameter by the year 2020. Congress also asked NASA to study ways to deflect threatening NEOs. But burdened with completing the International Space Station and replacing the Space Shuttle fleet, NASA has yet to allot funds to the project. Stagnant science budgets also threaten the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, the top facility for studying NEOs. Citing budgetary limitations, NSF announced last year it will defund Arecibo's operation after 2010.

Illustrations by Bonnie Ralston, Samuel Sherman, © The Museum of Modern Art 2008. Click to enlarge.

In the autumn of 2006, The Museum of Modern Art and Seed launched a series of monthly salons to bring together scientists, designers, and architects, so they could meet and present their work and ideas to each other. Our aim was to explore the promising relationship between science and design and its increasing relevance.

As science and technology accelerate the pace of society, design has become more and more integral to our ability to adapt to change. Indeed, in the past few decades people have coped with dramatic changes in several long-standing relationships—with time, space, information, and individuality, to name a few. Designers are translating these "disruptive" scientific and technological innovations by providing thoughtful guidance and a collaborative approach. In order to step boldly into the future, we need design.

Adaptability is an ancestral distinction of human intelligence, but today's instant variations in rhythm call for something stronger: elasticity. The by-product of adaptability and acceleration, elasticity means being able to negotiate change and innovation without letting them interfere excessively with one's own rhythms and goals. It means being able to embrace progress, understanding how to make it our own. One of design's most fundamental tasks is to help people deal with change. Designers have the ability to grasp momentous changes in technology, science, and social mores and to convert them into objects and ideas that people can understand and use. Without designers, instead of a virtual city of home pages with windows, doors, buttons, and links, the internet would still be a series of obscure strings of code, and appliances would be reduced to standardized skeletons of functions. Without a visual design translation, many fundamental concepts—such as the scope of the human genome or its comparison with that of other primates—would remain ungraspable by most. Designers give life and voice to objects, and along the way they manifest our visions and aspirations for the future, even those we do not yet know we have.