Market and Competition

Market and Competition

Popular books about science continue to fly off the presses, so apparently publishers continue to believe they have a market. Recent years have seen an explosion of popular science books, motivated by, I think, the simple fact that people want to know how science regards their world.

Among many other recent science books are the following, all of which touch on subjects answered in The Computer Between My Ears:

• The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist by Frans De Waal (2001)
• Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley (2000)
• The Triple Helix by Richard Lewontin (2000)
• The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Keller (2000)
• Mean Genes by Terry Burnham and Jay Phelan (2000)
• Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution by Richard Fortey (2000)
• Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright (1999)
• Mother Nature by Sarah B. Hrdy (1999)
• The Origins of Virtue : Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation by Matt Ridley (1998)
• How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker (1997)
• The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins (1996)
• Consciousness Explained by Daniel C. Dennett (1995)
• The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker (1995)
• The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology by Robert Wright (1992)

Unlike many of these books, The Computer Between My Ears is meant to be more than just reportage on the world of science. At its heart is a critique meant to be taken seriously by serious scientists, as well as reporters of science, and the public who cares about science.

Thoughtful scientists are already aware of many of the risks of metaphorical thinking. Science writing often contains asides about metaphor, for example, Richard Lewontin, in his book The Triple Helix, quotes Norbert Wiener: "The price of metaphor is eternal vigilance."

In fact, Wiener said this at the dawn of the digital age, just as the brain-as-a-computer metaphor was poised to hijack neuroscience and artifical intelligence studies. (At least in part through the activities of Wiener himself.) Though it's all right to say that vigilance is required to use metaphor, it's not always apparent what this sort of vigilance would look like, nor is it always obvious what the cost is of letting down one's guard. The Computer Between My Ears will describe both for the pleasure of scientists and the public alike.

Some of the claims made in The Computer Between My Ears are likely to be controversial. Evolutionary psychology has a long history of being attacked, and a long history of inadequate (though vituperative) response. Economists, who only get people to listen to them by claiming to receive truth from on high, are also likely to be annoyed by this analysis, as they were annoyed by Deirdre McCloskey's analysis in The Rhetoric of Economics (2d ed. 1992). The same can be said of several of the other fields to be covered, especially the ones where the slip has been made from metaphor to equation, as in artificial intelligence studies. Controversy of this sort is to be welcomed, however, as evidence that the critiques have found a tender target. (And, I suppose, to sell books.)

Market and Competition