Skip to main content

Rob Dunn - Four Way Interview

Photo by Amanda Ward
Rob Dunn is an ecologist and evolutionary biologist, focusing on the biodiversity of humans. He is a professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University and in the Center for Evolutionary Hologenomics at the University of Copenhagen. The author of several books, his latest is A Natural History of the Future.

Why Science?

I love science and I love art and I love them for the same reason. Both struggle to lay hold of deep truths about the world and the story of humans relative to those truths. I've been a scientist for a couple decades or more, depending on when you start counting, but the potential to work with other people to understand things no one has ever understood before remains as raw and thrilling as it has ever been. It is lightning. So too the feeling before the discovery that one might be on to something. 'What if,' the conversation in the laboratory begins. 'What if...'

Why this book?

If you watch the news, it is easy to become convinced that the future is purely technological. Either we will all live either live in bubbles on other planets (see for example the rate at which the rockets of billionaires are being flung upward) or we will live in a metaverse, connected via the Internet and disconnected from the worlds around us. As an ecologist, it is obvious that what is missing from this story is the living world.

If we go to space, we will still be subject to the rules of life. So too if we move permanently indoors. Yet, in discussions about the future, the story of the living world is quiet. An afterthought. A potted plant in a bubble. I wanted to tell the stories of the ways in which the rules of life will continue to influence humanity. But also, I wanted to make clear that we have overestimated our own power. The rugged processes of nature are far more powerful and lasting than is humanity itself. Long after we are gone those processes will continue. That seemed to me like a story that was missing, so I wanted to tell it in this book. 

What’s next? 

Bookwise, I'm not sure. I'm in the phase when I'm just reading a lot and thinking and talking and then reading some more. 

What’s exciting you at the moment?

I'm really excited about working with visual artists and fiction writers to think about new ways to imagine the future. The scenarios that scientists think about tend to be very focused on, say, climate or human population sizes. They tend to say very little about the ways in which humans live on a daily basis. Artists and writers have been more creative. So why don't we pull artists, writers and scientists (and other scholars) to think together about diverse kinds of planetary scenarios. I think creating these scenarios may well be very important.  It is very hard to work toward a future that you haven't yet envisioned. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more