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The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution
Thirty-five years ago, C. P. Snow, in a now famous essay, wrote about the polarization of the "two cultures" -- literary intellectuals on the one hand, and scientists on the other. Although he hoped for the emergence of a "third culture" that would bridge the gap, it is only recently that science has changed the intellectual landscape.
Brockman's thesis that science is emerging as the intellectual center of our society is brought to life vividly in The Third Culture, which weaves together the voices of some of today's most influential scientific figures,
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins on the implications of evolution Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, Daniel C. Dennett, and Roger Penrose on how the mind works
Murray Gell-Mann and Stuart Kauffman on the new sciences of complexity
The Third Culture is an honest picture of science in action. It is at once stimulating, challenging, and riveting.
Brockman's thesis that science is emerging as the intellectual center of our society is brought to life vividly in The Third Culture, which weaves together the voices of some of today's most influential scientific figures,
Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins on the implications of evolution Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky, Daniel C. Dennett, and Roger Penrose on how the mind works
Murray Gell-Mann and Stuart Kauffman on the new sciences of complexity
The Third Culture is an honest picture of science in action. It is at once stimulating, challenging, and riveting.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
About the author
John Brockman
69 books619 followersJohn Brockman is an American literary agent and author specializing in scientific literature. He established the Edge Foundation, an organization that brings together leading edge thinkers across a broad range of scientific and technical fields.
He is author and editor of several books, including: The Third Culture (1995); The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years (2000); The Next Fifty Years (2002) and The New Humanists (2003).
He has the distinction of being the only person to have been profiled on Page One of the "Science Times" (1997) and the "Arts & Leisure" (1966), both supplements of The New York Times.
He is author and editor of several books, including: The Third Culture (1995); The Greatest Inventions of the Past 2000 Years (2000); The Next Fifty Years (2002) and The New Humanists (2003).
He has the distinction of being the only person to have been profiled on Page One of the "Science Times" (1997) and the "Arts & Leisure" (1966), both supplements of The New York Times.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
June 17, 2017
While my academic career has focused on the humanities, this book changed my mind about the "STEM" fields. From evolutionary biology to physics to philosophy to math to computer science, Brockman compiles the latest and greatest contributors to share their ideas with the public in an approachable way. This is very useful for interdisciplinary studies!
July 2, 2026
My wife found this book and thought I would be interested in it. But I was not really. Firstly it is 30 years old. Why should one read about what people thought about the deep questions that long ago? And then the book contains interviews by Brockman. So one should think that what these men (and one woman) had to say was just some short shallow summary of their views. I looked into the book all the same and the next thing I disliked was the title. So they think of themselves (well, actually Brockman) as some new elite, a third culture. Meaning they know about both, real science (physics and biology) and philosophy. Or, I should say, they are at least not proud of their ignorance.
To my surprise I found that I actually liked the concept of the book. Not so much because of what they have to say but as an example of human psychology. So all these famous men (and one woman) give a brief introduction to what they are doing, or to some pet theory. (And they are quite famous. I have read at least one book by nine of the participants.) And then we get the reaction of (some of) the others. And in most cases it is either: I know the man and deeply respect him, or it is, I don’t know him but what he says is more or less wrong. Or irrelevant. So this is the way first class scientists behave?
And a short statement of a couple of pages does not necessarily give you an understanding of the issue at hand but it is surprisingly easy to get a picture of the character of the man. Gould and Dennett and even Pinker you cannot help but to like. But Penrose and even more Minsky manage to present themselves as unlikeable (I nearly said assholes). Lee Smolin who I very much like says that Penrose is a true genius, but what he has to say is nonsense (I think) but the way he says it is even worse. I know, if any man has a right to be arrogant it is Penrose. But maybe he should not exercise this right.
If you want to learn about human nature, read this book.
What about the ideas? I found them not really dated at all. Which, of course, is either a very sad thing, or shows my ignorance. There just is no progress in the understanding of consciousness. We are still struck with String theory (nobody believes in it anymore but there is no alternative). Cosmology? Nothing really new there. The discussion about evolution, a controversy between Gould and Dawkins (and Dennett), not really worth fighting for. The only area where there was definitely progress is AI. Which makes the arguments here quite interesting from a historical point of view.
7/10
To my surprise I found that I actually liked the concept of the book. Not so much because of what they have to say but as an example of human psychology. So all these famous men (and one woman) give a brief introduction to what they are doing, or to some pet theory. (And they are quite famous. I have read at least one book by nine of the participants.) And then we get the reaction of (some of) the others. And in most cases it is either: I know the man and deeply respect him, or it is, I don’t know him but what he says is more or less wrong. Or irrelevant. So this is the way first class scientists behave?
And a short statement of a couple of pages does not necessarily give you an understanding of the issue at hand but it is surprisingly easy to get a picture of the character of the man. Gould and Dennett and even Pinker you cannot help but to like. But Penrose and even more Minsky manage to present themselves as unlikeable (I nearly said assholes). Lee Smolin who I very much like says that Penrose is a true genius, but what he has to say is nonsense (I think) but the way he says it is even worse. I know, if any man has a right to be arrogant it is Penrose. But maybe he should not exercise this right.
If you want to learn about human nature, read this book.
What about the ideas? I found them not really dated at all. Which, of course, is either a very sad thing, or shows my ignorance. There just is no progress in the understanding of consciousness. We are still struck with String theory (nobody believes in it anymore but there is no alternative). Cosmology? Nothing really new there. The discussion about evolution, a controversy between Gould and Dawkins (and Dennett), not really worth fighting for. The only area where there was definitely progress is AI. Which makes the arguments here quite interesting from a historical point of view.
7/10
June 12, 2021
Full of amazing ideas, but lousily written. Many of the once controversial concepts in the book became a household norm (I was so shocked that Life Science were not considered as precise science in the first half of the 20th century!). If there is any grand scientific concept changing, it's that new scientific findings are almost always group discovery now, not by some big names who could magically come up with new ideas from nowhere. If this book could be rewritten as a 21st century edition, it should not be organized by those leading scientists, but by the topic itself. The book's structure is a mess. All ideas are scattered everywhere.
March 12, 2026
The Public Intellectual in a Lab Coat: Why “The Third Culture” Still Matters in an Age of AI and Crisis
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 12th, 2026
John Brockman’s “The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution” is the sort of book that arrives already arguing with the room. It does not clear its throat. It does not ask permission. It announces, in effect, that a transfer of power has taken place in modern intellectual life and that the old custodians of meaning either have not noticed or cannot quite bear to admit it. The literary intellectual, once enthroned as the public interpreter of reality, has been displaced. In his place stands a new kind of figure: the scientist who does not merely discover but explains, synthesizes, publicizes, provokes. Brockman’s claim, stated with characteristic confidence, is that science has become public culture and that the deepest questions of human life are now being posed most urgently by evolutionary biologists, cognitive scientists, physicists and theorists of complexity.
That proposition was combative in 1995. It sounds, from the vantage of our present, less like a provocation than like a dispatch from the front edge of a transformation that has since become ordinary. We live in a world in which neuroscientists write about consciousness for mass audiences, physicists speak in the accents once reserved for metaphysicians, evolutionary theory spills into arguments about morality and culture, and computer scientists, having first promised new tools, now find themselves asked to pronounce on intelligence, labor, creativity and the future of the species. Brockman was early to the scene and he knew it. “The Third Culture” reads, in that sense, like both anthology and manifesto, a field report from the moment when the scientist as specialist began mutating into the scientist as public intellectual.
The book’s form is deceptively loose. Brockman assembles a sequence of edited conversations with an astonishing roster of thinkers: George C. Williams, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Brian Goodwin, Steve Jones, Niles Eldredge, Lynn Margulis, Marvin Minsky, Roger Schank, Daniel Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, Francisco Varela, Steven Pinker, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin, Paul Davies, Murray Gell-Mann, Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Langton, J. Doyne Farmer and W. Daniel Hillis. Even now, the list has the electric quality of a greenroom stocked with intellectual headliners. Brockman’s gift was not only to recognize who mattered, but to understand that the real event was not any single theory in isolation. It was the cumulative atmosphere generated when these minds were placed in proximity: Darwinian selection next to self-organization, cognitive science next to cosmology, computational models of mind beside speculation about quantum consciousness, all of it gathered under the larger assertion that knowledge had begun to leak across old disciplinary borders.
What gives the book its pulse is not simply intelligence but velocity. Brockman prefers movement to stillness, the frontier to the synthesis, the unfinished argument to the settled account. He edits for thrust. These are not heavily footnoted essays in the academic sense, nor are they dutiful popularizations sanded smooth for a general audience. They are sharpened acts of translation, attempts to carry thinking from the lab, seminar room or institute out into culture without draining it of ambition. Brockman’s own prose, especially in the introduction, has the clipped, declarative rhythm of a man not describing a change but helping engineer it. He writes like an impresario of ideas, which is both his strength and, at moments, his weakness. There is glamour in his confidence, but also a hint of salesmanship. One feels, every so often, that the book is not merely presenting a movement but branding one.
Still, what a movement it is. The first section, devoted to evolutionary thought, remains the book’s most dramatic because it stages not consensus but contest. George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins push the gene-centered view with elegant severity. Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge complicate that picture with punctuated equilibrium, contingency and a more layered view of evolutionary history. Brian Goodwin resists the reductionist confidence of the ultra-Darwinians and turns toward form, pattern and self-organization. Lynn Margulis, among the most thrilling presences in the book, restores microbial life and symbiosis to the center of the story, reminding the reader that competition is only one of nature’s verbs. What emerges from these chapters is not a single account of life but a set of overlapping explanatory ambitions, each trying to answer the same old question in a newer language: What, exactly, is driving the pageant of form?
Brockman is at his best when he allows these thinkers to expose their temperaments as well as their theories. Gould arrives as the great essayist of contingency, expansive and resistant to easy triumphalist narratives. Dawkins is clean-edged, rhetorically efficient, drawn to the ruthless beauty of replication and selection. Margulis possesses the kind of intellectual force that seems to alter the pressure in the room. The pleasure here is not merely educational. It is dramatic. One reads to see not only what these scientists believe, but how belief itself changes timbre from one discipline to another, how an argument about genes becomes, in another voice, an argument about metaphor, emphasis, causality, worldview.
The second section, “A Collection of Kludges,” shifts from life’s history to the architecture of mind, and here the book becomes both stranger and more contemporary. Marvin Minsky’s brain, jury-rigged from partial solutions and evolutionary hacks, sounds uncannily like an ancestor to our present understanding of intelligence as distributed process rather than centralized essence. Roger Schank’s assertion that information is surprise feels newly legible in an era addicted to disruption. Dennett’s intuition pumps, Francisco Varela’s emergent self, Steven Pinker’s language instinct, Penrose’s insistence that consciousness may outrun computation: together these chapters produce not one theory of mind, but a cacophonous prehistory of arguments that now dominate discussions around artificial intelligence, cognition and the limits of mechanism. Read now, in the age of large language models and machine-generated fluency, these conversations do not feel quaint. They feel preparatory. The questions have returned wearing newer clothes.
That is one of the book’s most arresting qualities. It keeps accidentally becoming topical. The chapters on complexity, self-organization and adaptive systems, once associated with the glamour of the Santa Fe Institute and the intellectual weather of the 1990s, now read like early chapters in a story that would later encompass climate modeling, networked contagion, supply-chain shocks, algorithmic markets and the uneasy recognition that many of the systems governing our lives cannot be managed through linear intuition. Murray Gell-Mann, Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Langton and J. Doyne Farmer each, in different ways, insist that order is not always imposed from above. Sometimes it bubbles up from below, from rule-bound local interactions accumulating into emergent global behavior. This is one of the book’s deepest and most persistent refrains. Genes do it. Brains do it. Economies do it. Perhaps culture does too.
The cosmology section supplies the book with metaphysical altitude. Martin Rees, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin and Paul Davies widen the frame until the human species begins to look like a passing turbulence in a much older and stranger arrangement. Here the book risks becoming thinly transcendent, but it often rewards the risk. Guth on inflation, Smolin on quantum gravity, Davies on origins and law: these chapters remind the reader that one of Brockman’s central arguments is not merely that scientists are now public intellectuals, but that they are public intellectuals because they have inherited the old philosophical territory. The big questions did not go away. They migrated. What philosophers once asked under the sign of ontology, physicists now ask under the sign of cosmology. The effect is not necessarily to make the universe less mysterious. It is to change the grammar of the mystery.
And yet the book is not uniformly successful. It is often exhilarating, but it is also uneven in exactly the way anthologies of live intelligence tend to be. Some chapters feel incandescent. Others feel like compressed briefing papers. There are passages where one senses the friction of transcription beneath the polish, the sentence still bearing the memory of speech. Brockman, for all his curatorial brilliance, does not fully solve the formal problem of the collection. The book accumulates force more atmospherically than structurally. It can feel less like a symphony than a brilliant conference one wandered through room by room, exhilarated, oversaturated, occasionally exhausted.
Its omissions are also revealing. Brockman claims to be mapping a new intellectual order, but his map is selective and strategically narrow. The social sciences hover at the edge of the volume, acknowledged but underrepresented. The humanities are treated less as partners in an unfinished conversation than as a fading establishment, self-enclosed and suspicious of empirical reality. One understands the polemical utility of that opposition. “The Third Culture” needs its antagonist. But the binary is too clean. The best science writing has often depended on the resources Brockman seems eager to subordinate: historical sensitivity, philosophical nuance, a feel for rhetoric and inheritance, an understanding that data alone does not decide what societies do with knowledge. If the book sometimes overstates the exhaustion of “the literary intellectual,” it is because Brockman underestimates how much of his own case relies on literary performance. This is, after all, a book of staging, framing, scene-setting, persona. It wins partly by means it does not fully honor.
There is also, now, an unavoidable retrospective shadow around Brockman’s later milieu, the elite salon culture of billionaire dinners, idea networks and scientific prestige circuits that would eventually attract a harsher kind of scrutiny. One need not reduce “The Third Culture” to that afterlife to feel its faint retroactive chill. If anything, the book becomes more interesting when read with that historical knowledge in the background, because it reveals both the nobility and the seduction of intellectual glamour. Brockman believed ideas should travel through powerful networks. He was right. He also believed networks themselves were intrinsically ennobling. History has been less charitable on that point.
Yet the book’s larger achievement survives the complications of its milieu. What Brockman grasped, with unusual sharpness, was that several intellectual revolutions were colliding at once: evolution was escaping the boundaries of biology, cognition was being recast in computational terms, complexity was emerging as a cross-disciplinary logic, and cosmology was once again becoming a public theater of first and last things. To gather these movements into one volume and insist that they belonged to a shared cultural moment was an act of considerable editorial imagination. In that respect, the book belongs in the lineage not only of “The Two Cultures,” to which it responds so openly, but of books like “Consilience,” “Complexity,” “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” “The Selfish Gene” and “Consciousness Explained” – works that do not merely summarize knowledge but attempt to rearrange the reader’s sense of what counts as knowledge in the first place.
There is, too, something endearingly 20th-century about the book’s confidence that if the smartest people are put into circulation, culture will improve. That faith now looks both naïve and moving. We have seen too much since then – the politicization of expertise, the monetization of attention, the confusion of intelligence with wisdom, the brittleness of institutions that believed information alone would save them. But “The Third Culture” was never really a book about certainty. It was a book about permission: permission for scientists to speak in larger registers, permission for readers to seek metaphysics in molecular biology and cosmology, permission for public thought to be rebuilt around empirical discovery without apologizing for its scale.
As literature, it is not immaculate. As intellectual theater, it is irresistible. As cultural diagnosis, it is bold enough to still be arguable. That may be the highest compliment one can pay it. The book remains alive not because all its claims proved true, or because all its contributors aged equally well, but because its central wager remains unsettled. Who gets to interpret reality for the rest of us? The old answer no longer convinces. Brockman supplied a new one before most people knew the question had changed.
I would rate “The Third Culture” 84 out of 100: a brilliant, uneven, historically catalytic book whose ambition is larger than its form, and whose flaws are inseparable from the very confidence that made it matter.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | March 12th, 2026
John Brockman’s “The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution” is the sort of book that arrives already arguing with the room. It does not clear its throat. It does not ask permission. It announces, in effect, that a transfer of power has taken place in modern intellectual life and that the old custodians of meaning either have not noticed or cannot quite bear to admit it. The literary intellectual, once enthroned as the public interpreter of reality, has been displaced. In his place stands a new kind of figure: the scientist who does not merely discover but explains, synthesizes, publicizes, provokes. Brockman’s claim, stated with characteristic confidence, is that science has become public culture and that the deepest questions of human life are now being posed most urgently by evolutionary biologists, cognitive scientists, physicists and theorists of complexity.
That proposition was combative in 1995. It sounds, from the vantage of our present, less like a provocation than like a dispatch from the front edge of a transformation that has since become ordinary. We live in a world in which neuroscientists write about consciousness for mass audiences, physicists speak in the accents once reserved for metaphysicians, evolutionary theory spills into arguments about morality and culture, and computer scientists, having first promised new tools, now find themselves asked to pronounce on intelligence, labor, creativity and the future of the species. Brockman was early to the scene and he knew it. “The Third Culture” reads, in that sense, like both anthology and manifesto, a field report from the moment when the scientist as specialist began mutating into the scientist as public intellectual.
The book’s form is deceptively loose. Brockman assembles a sequence of edited conversations with an astonishing roster of thinkers: George C. Williams, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Dawkins, Brian Goodwin, Steve Jones, Niles Eldredge, Lynn Margulis, Marvin Minsky, Roger Schank, Daniel Dennett, Nicholas Humphrey, Francisco Varela, Steven Pinker, Roger Penrose, Martin Rees, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin, Paul Davies, Murray Gell-Mann, Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Langton, J. Doyne Farmer and W. Daniel Hillis. Even now, the list has the electric quality of a greenroom stocked with intellectual headliners. Brockman’s gift was not only to recognize who mattered, but to understand that the real event was not any single theory in isolation. It was the cumulative atmosphere generated when these minds were placed in proximity: Darwinian selection next to self-organization, cognitive science next to cosmology, computational models of mind beside speculation about quantum consciousness, all of it gathered under the larger assertion that knowledge had begun to leak across old disciplinary borders.
What gives the book its pulse is not simply intelligence but velocity. Brockman prefers movement to stillness, the frontier to the synthesis, the unfinished argument to the settled account. He edits for thrust. These are not heavily footnoted essays in the academic sense, nor are they dutiful popularizations sanded smooth for a general audience. They are sharpened acts of translation, attempts to carry thinking from the lab, seminar room or institute out into culture without draining it of ambition. Brockman’s own prose, especially in the introduction, has the clipped, declarative rhythm of a man not describing a change but helping engineer it. He writes like an impresario of ideas, which is both his strength and, at moments, his weakness. There is glamour in his confidence, but also a hint of salesmanship. One feels, every so often, that the book is not merely presenting a movement but branding one.
Still, what a movement it is. The first section, devoted to evolutionary thought, remains the book’s most dramatic because it stages not consensus but contest. George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins push the gene-centered view with elegant severity. Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge complicate that picture with punctuated equilibrium, contingency and a more layered view of evolutionary history. Brian Goodwin resists the reductionist confidence of the ultra-Darwinians and turns toward form, pattern and self-organization. Lynn Margulis, among the most thrilling presences in the book, restores microbial life and symbiosis to the center of the story, reminding the reader that competition is only one of nature’s verbs. What emerges from these chapters is not a single account of life but a set of overlapping explanatory ambitions, each trying to answer the same old question in a newer language: What, exactly, is driving the pageant of form?
Brockman is at his best when he allows these thinkers to expose their temperaments as well as their theories. Gould arrives as the great essayist of contingency, expansive and resistant to easy triumphalist narratives. Dawkins is clean-edged, rhetorically efficient, drawn to the ruthless beauty of replication and selection. Margulis possesses the kind of intellectual force that seems to alter the pressure in the room. The pleasure here is not merely educational. It is dramatic. One reads to see not only what these scientists believe, but how belief itself changes timbre from one discipline to another, how an argument about genes becomes, in another voice, an argument about metaphor, emphasis, causality, worldview.
The second section, “A Collection of Kludges,” shifts from life’s history to the architecture of mind, and here the book becomes both stranger and more contemporary. Marvin Minsky’s brain, jury-rigged from partial solutions and evolutionary hacks, sounds uncannily like an ancestor to our present understanding of intelligence as distributed process rather than centralized essence. Roger Schank’s assertion that information is surprise feels newly legible in an era addicted to disruption. Dennett’s intuition pumps, Francisco Varela’s emergent self, Steven Pinker’s language instinct, Penrose’s insistence that consciousness may outrun computation: together these chapters produce not one theory of mind, but a cacophonous prehistory of arguments that now dominate discussions around artificial intelligence, cognition and the limits of mechanism. Read now, in the age of large language models and machine-generated fluency, these conversations do not feel quaint. They feel preparatory. The questions have returned wearing newer clothes.
That is one of the book’s most arresting qualities. It keeps accidentally becoming topical. The chapters on complexity, self-organization and adaptive systems, once associated with the glamour of the Santa Fe Institute and the intellectual weather of the 1990s, now read like early chapters in a story that would later encompass climate modeling, networked contagion, supply-chain shocks, algorithmic markets and the uneasy recognition that many of the systems governing our lives cannot be managed through linear intuition. Murray Gell-Mann, Stuart Kauffman, Christopher Langton and J. Doyne Farmer each, in different ways, insist that order is not always imposed from above. Sometimes it bubbles up from below, from rule-bound local interactions accumulating into emergent global behavior. This is one of the book’s deepest and most persistent refrains. Genes do it. Brains do it. Economies do it. Perhaps culture does too.
The cosmology section supplies the book with metaphysical altitude. Martin Rees, Alan Guth, Lee Smolin and Paul Davies widen the frame until the human species begins to look like a passing turbulence in a much older and stranger arrangement. Here the book risks becoming thinly transcendent, but it often rewards the risk. Guth on inflation, Smolin on quantum gravity, Davies on origins and law: these chapters remind the reader that one of Brockman’s central arguments is not merely that scientists are now public intellectuals, but that they are public intellectuals because they have inherited the old philosophical territory. The big questions did not go away. They migrated. What philosophers once asked under the sign of ontology, physicists now ask under the sign of cosmology. The effect is not necessarily to make the universe less mysterious. It is to change the grammar of the mystery.
And yet the book is not uniformly successful. It is often exhilarating, but it is also uneven in exactly the way anthologies of live intelligence tend to be. Some chapters feel incandescent. Others feel like compressed briefing papers. There are passages where one senses the friction of transcription beneath the polish, the sentence still bearing the memory of speech. Brockman, for all his curatorial brilliance, does not fully solve the formal problem of the collection. The book accumulates force more atmospherically than structurally. It can feel less like a symphony than a brilliant conference one wandered through room by room, exhilarated, oversaturated, occasionally exhausted.
Its omissions are also revealing. Brockman claims to be mapping a new intellectual order, but his map is selective and strategically narrow. The social sciences hover at the edge of the volume, acknowledged but underrepresented. The humanities are treated less as partners in an unfinished conversation than as a fading establishment, self-enclosed and suspicious of empirical reality. One understands the polemical utility of that opposition. “The Third Culture” needs its antagonist. But the binary is too clean. The best science writing has often depended on the resources Brockman seems eager to subordinate: historical sensitivity, philosophical nuance, a feel for rhetoric and inheritance, an understanding that data alone does not decide what societies do with knowledge. If the book sometimes overstates the exhaustion of “the literary intellectual,” it is because Brockman underestimates how much of his own case relies on literary performance. This is, after all, a book of staging, framing, scene-setting, persona. It wins partly by means it does not fully honor.
There is also, now, an unavoidable retrospective shadow around Brockman’s later milieu, the elite salon culture of billionaire dinners, idea networks and scientific prestige circuits that would eventually attract a harsher kind of scrutiny. One need not reduce “The Third Culture” to that afterlife to feel its faint retroactive chill. If anything, the book becomes more interesting when read with that historical knowledge in the background, because it reveals both the nobility and the seduction of intellectual glamour. Brockman believed ideas should travel through powerful networks. He was right. He also believed networks themselves were intrinsically ennobling. History has been less charitable on that point.
Yet the book’s larger achievement survives the complications of its milieu. What Brockman grasped, with unusual sharpness, was that several intellectual revolutions were colliding at once: evolution was escaping the boundaries of biology, cognition was being recast in computational terms, complexity was emerging as a cross-disciplinary logic, and cosmology was once again becoming a public theater of first and last things. To gather these movements into one volume and insist that they belonged to a shared cultural moment was an act of considerable editorial imagination. In that respect, the book belongs in the lineage not only of “The Two Cultures,” to which it responds so openly, but of books like “Consilience,” “Complexity,” “Gödel, Escher, Bach,” “The Selfish Gene” and “Consciousness Explained” – works that do not merely summarize knowledge but attempt to rearrange the reader’s sense of what counts as knowledge in the first place.
There is, too, something endearingly 20th-century about the book’s confidence that if the smartest people are put into circulation, culture will improve. That faith now looks both naïve and moving. We have seen too much since then – the politicization of expertise, the monetization of attention, the confusion of intelligence with wisdom, the brittleness of institutions that believed information alone would save them. But “The Third Culture” was never really a book about certainty. It was a book about permission: permission for scientists to speak in larger registers, permission for readers to seek metaphysics in molecular biology and cosmology, permission for public thought to be rebuilt around empirical discovery without apologizing for its scale.
As literature, it is not immaculate. As intellectual theater, it is irresistible. As cultural diagnosis, it is bold enough to still be arguable. That may be the highest compliment one can pay it. The book remains alive not because all its claims proved true, or because all its contributors aged equally well, but because its central wager remains unsettled. Who gets to interpret reality for the rest of us? The old answer no longer convinces. Brockman supplied a new one before most people knew the question had changed.
I would rate “The Third Culture” 84 out of 100: a brilliant, uneven, historically catalytic book whose ambition is larger than its form, and whose flaws are inseparable from the very confidence that made it matter.
March 17, 2010
Brockman is an interesting man and a good editor for this anthology. The premise of Third Culture is unique: taking its title and approach from C.P. Snow's famed essay "The Two Cultures", which concerned the divide between liberal arts/social sciences knowledge fields and knowledge of the hard and life sciences in society, Brockman has brought together essays from leading scientists such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Lynn Margulis about their specific areas of science and geared towards a lay readership, thus explaining cutting-edge research (at the time of publication, around 1996, at least) in a way people can understand its importance.
In general, it's a good collection, but it's heavy on the biosciences and I would have liked to have seen more on the so-called hard sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy) and also some inclusion of various aspects of applied engineering. Someone who is an engineer or scientist yet involved in national policy like Dr. Janet Fender (optics expert and USAF scientist) would have been great in this volume. Moreover, there is not enough bringing together the various essays . . . Brockman himself could have, and should have, written more supportive material to make clear how what, say, Dennett writes of is associated with another author's content. It feels too thrown-together in places, and yet if you know how bright and detail-oriented Brockman is, you'd expect him to have a fine-tailored effort without nearly a comma out of place. That said, it's a rare anthology and contains some great writing.
In general, it's a good collection, but it's heavy on the biosciences and I would have liked to have seen more on the so-called hard sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy) and also some inclusion of various aspects of applied engineering. Someone who is an engineer or scientist yet involved in national policy like Dr. Janet Fender (optics expert and USAF scientist) would have been great in this volume. Moreover, there is not enough bringing together the various essays . . . Brockman himself could have, and should have, written more supportive material to make clear how what, say, Dennett writes of is associated with another author's content. It feels too thrown-together in places, and yet if you know how bright and detail-oriented Brockman is, you'd expect him to have a fine-tailored effort without nearly a comma out of place. That said, it's a rare anthology and contains some great writing.
July 23, 2013
I love the idea of scientists displacing "public intellectuals", though I think Brockman's idea is strained. What does language being an instinct (Steven Pinker) have to do with the earth being an integrated living system (Lynn Margulus) have to do with machine intelligence (Marvin Minsky)? The difficulty is having this constellation of edge-of-science ideas organized into a coherent theme, while saying something more than just "yay science!"
To me the most amazing (though thoroughly unsupported by scientific evidence) theory encountered in this book is that natural selection operates not just on life forms, but universes. If (if!!!) black holes generate universes which generate black holes which generate universes, perhaps there is selective pressure for universe to be born when produce the maximum number of black holes.
The the most schadenfreudely satisfying experience was seeing Roger Penrose's theory on consciousness followed by an avalanche of criticism. Penrose thinks the brain is non-computational because hey Godel, and because quantum mechanics. I was glad to see me sea-sicknesses echoed by others.
To me the most amazing (though thoroughly unsupported by scientific evidence) theory encountered in this book is that natural selection operates not just on life forms, but universes. If (if!!!) black holes generate universes which generate black holes which generate universes, perhaps there is selective pressure for universe to be born when produce the maximum number of black holes.
The the most schadenfreudely satisfying experience was seeing Roger Penrose's theory on consciousness followed by an avalanche of criticism. Penrose thinks the brain is non-computational because hey Godel, and because quantum mechanics. I was glad to see me sea-sicknesses echoed by others.
December 7, 2018
Brockman's discusses C.P Snow's seminal essay: Two Cultures where Snow describes two polar groups who don't talk to each other: the scientists and the literary intellectuals "who incidentally while no one was looking took to referring to themselves as 'intellectuals' as though there were no others".
Brockman then introduces the: third culture: scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual. (Think popular scientists like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.)
He presents essays from various scientists from a range of fields who are also known for their writing ability.
My problem with this book is there isn't a discernable thread running through the selection of essays, and many weren't of any interest to me.
Brockman then introduces the: third culture: scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual. (Think popular scientists like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.)
He presents essays from various scientists from a range of fields who are also known for their writing ability.
My problem with this book is there isn't a discernable thread running through the selection of essays, and many weren't of any interest to me.
January 16, 2008
this book is an excellent summary / introduction for non-scientifically inclined friends to read science as if it's literature...
and even tho i'm well versed in most of the authors, it's still a pleasure to read, the clarity, lucidy, and scale of the subject matter... timeless.
fabulous. read it now if you've not.
and even tho i'm well versed in most of the authors, it's still a pleasure to read, the clarity, lucidy, and scale of the subject matter... timeless.
fabulous. read it now if you've not.
September 6, 2014
I picked up this book 20 years after publication. The essays have not passed the test of time.
September 1, 2025
中譯本：第三種文化。簡單說，第三種文化，指的就是科普工作者，包含作家和翻譯者之類。科普的契機則是科學研究拓展到演化、複雜理論後，開始與人文學科傳統的論述場域多有重疊。諸如：宇宙、生命、疾病、遺傳、大腦、心智、生態、人工智能等。道金斯說：「我自己的書，既是把科學家熟知的資料大眾化，也是原創的著作，雖然沒在科學期刊上發表，也沒用上一堆難懂的行話，卻改變了同行科學家的思考方式。我使用的語言，任何一個聰明人都能了解。我希望更多的人這麼做。」我欣喜接受這文化，並敬佩之！
December 20, 2019
(Read all except part 3)
April 1, 2026
No. Just no.
Epstein's intellectual enabler?
Names found in Epstein files.
Epstein's intellectual enabler?
Names found in Epstein files.
December 6, 2014
The preface of this book sets out to debunk the place of literary intellectuals with the very heavy hand that such intellectuals are jargonistic, anti-realist, arrogant pricks who would usurp the place of the real intellectuals, humble scientists whose work has been long misunderstood. Or something like that. The introduction is kind of off putting, with the claim that literature isn't applicable to anything whereas science is. This position isn't very interesting, although it's been present as a debate between these two sides for too long.
The essays in this book however, are far more interesting and don't have anything to do with the frame of the introduction. Much of the work of these scientists is theoretical, yet they speak in clear mostly unambiguous terms. Brockman seeks to create an intercourse with the public and these scientists who work, often, in the fringes of their communities. That's what he means by third culture. And to some extent it's kind of successful, I think. There's plenty to pick from, and lots of different ideas to choose from. Frankly, it's a little overwhelming. But this is a good introductory text. It's difficult sometimes to make the claim that science is only useful if it yields a useful application. But useful is such a subjective term. And theoretical works are more about reframing issues so as to create new relationships in familiar areas which may be dismissed by traditional methods of inquiry.
So really, this book is exploratory, as theorists tend to be. Interesting reading but it's truly undecidable. Food for thought, really.
The essays in this book however, are far more interesting and don't have anything to do with the frame of the introduction. Much of the work of these scientists is theoretical, yet they speak in clear mostly unambiguous terms. Brockman seeks to create an intercourse with the public and these scientists who work, often, in the fringes of their communities. That's what he means by third culture. And to some extent it's kind of successful, I think. There's plenty to pick from, and lots of different ideas to choose from. Frankly, it's a little overwhelming. But this is a good introductory text. It's difficult sometimes to make the claim that science is only useful if it yields a useful application. But useful is such a subjective term. And theoretical works are more about reframing issues so as to create new relationships in familiar areas which may be dismissed by traditional methods of inquiry.
So really, this book is exploratory, as theorists tend to be. Interesting reading but it's truly undecidable. Food for thought, really.
October 9, 2010
Skvělá kniha esejů. Čtenář by měl ale počítat s tím, kniha ve vás prohloubí dojem, že současné humanitní vědy se živí komentářemi ke komentářům komentářů a že zajímavá témata se dají najít jen v přírodních vědách. Žádná třetí kultura, která by byla syntézou poznatků humanitních a přírodních věd, se nekoná, třetí kulturu v knize zastupují jen eseje přírodovědců, fyziků, astronomů...
October 20, 2019
Na první pohled zajímavé téma píšících vědců, kteří popisují svou práci a své myšlenky, což trochu sráží výběr lidí velmi alternativních a následně komentáře kolegů a konkurentů, kteří často nemají slitování. Velmi zajímavý je doslov, který ukazuje limity současné populární vědecké publicistiky, kdy dotyční neodkáží správně používat terminologii či píší totálním balábile.
Want to Read
May 8, 2009This sounds pretty great. I'm very interested in the whole idea of synthesizing the humanities, the social sciences and natural sciences (which is essentially the idea behind "the third culture").
Want to Read
January 26, 2008
May 10, 2008
Do you want to know scientists? Read this, you will learn other things to read. Also, Dawkins and Gould were very catty.
Want to Read
May 29, 2009Really fascinating essays on the cutting edge of scientific understanding, each followed by criticism and analysis by experts in the field.
to-keep-reference
March 2, 2016 Visión de Paralaje Pág.321 toma el artículo de Nicholas Humphrey que aparece en este libro.
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