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.

Comments

Roger Highfield - Stephen Hawking: genius at work interview

Roger Highfield OBE is the Science Director of the Science Museum Group. Roger has visiting professorships at the Department of Chemistry, UCL, and at the Dunn School, University of Oxford, is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a member of the Medical Research Council and Longitude Committee. He has written or co-authored ten popular science books, including two bestsellers. His latest title is Stephen Hawking: genius at work . Why science? There are three answers to this question, depending on context: Apollo; Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, along with the world’s worst nuclear accident at Chernobyl; and, finally, Nullius in verba . Growing up I enjoyed the sciencey side of TV programmes like Thunderbirds and The Avengers but became completely besotted when, in short trousers, I gazed up at the moon knowing that two astronauts had paid it a visit. As the Apollo programme unfolded, I became utterly obsessed. Today, more than half a century later, the moon landings are

Splinters of Infinity - Mark Wolverton ****

Many of us who read popular science regularly will be aware of the 'great debate' between American astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis in 1920 over whether the universe was a single galaxy or many. Less familiar is the clash in the 1930s between American Nobel Prize winners Robert Millikan and Arthur Compton over the nature of cosmic rays. This not a book about the nature of cosmic rays as we now understand them, but rather explores this confrontation between heavyweight scientists. Millikan was the first in the fray, and often wrongly named in the press as discoverer of cosmic rays. He believed that this high energy radiation from above was made up of photons that ionised atoms in the atmosphere. One of the reasons he was determined that they should be photons was that this fitted with his thesis that the universe was in a constant state of creation: these photons, he thought, were produced in the birth of new atoms. This view seems to have been primarily driven by re

Deep Utopia - Nick Bostrom ***

This is one of the strangest sort-of popular science (or philosophy, or something or other) books I've ever read. If you can picture the impact of a cross between Douglas Hofstadter's Gödel Escher Bach and Gaileo's Two New Sciences (at least, its conversational structure), then thrown in a touch of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest , and you can get a feel for what the experience of reading it is like - bewildering with the feeling that there is something deep that you can never quite extract from it. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom is probably best known in popular science for his book Superintelligence in which he looked at the implications of having artificial intelligence (AI) that goes beyond human capabilities. In a sense, Deep Utopia is a sequel, picking out one aspect of this speculation: what life would be like for us if technology had solved all our existential problems, while (in the form of superintelligence) it had also taken away much of our appare

Search This Blog