”I`ve always had a weakness for the big questions,” Robert Wright said. ”Why are we here? Is there a discernible purpose to life? Why are people capable of love and hate? Which one will prevail in the end? Where is human evolution heading?”
Such issues, of course, are for theologians and philosophers what raw meat is for carnivores, but most scientists have no appetite for such transcendent speculations. In telling us how the universe works, science concentrates on tangibles, on problems and properties that can be measured.
But Wright, like a skillful detective who spurns the obvious avenues of investigation, began poking around in the Halls of Science and at ”the intersection of religion and science,” hoping to discover the best leads to humanity`s most compelling mystery.
”I wanted to examine what are traditionally considered spiritual questions from a scientific world view, to see if there are at least some clues to the answers,” Wright said during a visit to Chicago. ”Three centuries ago religion was the source of authority in society, but these days science really is.
”Science, by itself, cannot provide definitive answers to a lot of these questions, but personally, I`d settle for less than definitive answers.
Information was the focus. ”More and more scientists in various disciplines, whether it`s biology, physics or the social scientists, are viewing information as sort of fundamental to their work,” he said. ”There`s cultural information-songs and scientific theories and even information that chimpanzees pass to one another. And then there`s genetic information in our genes.”
He knew his way around. When he was senior editor at The Sciences, the magazine of the New York Academy of Sciences, he wrote a column called The Information Age, for which he won a National Magazine Award.
But he also knew he needed help. ”Obviously, this is a fairly grandiose project. So that`s one reason, first of all, I decided to let other people do the thinking,” he said.
The result is ”Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information” (Times Books, $18.95).
At 31, Wright, now a senior editor at New Republic magazine, has the scrubbed, boyish good looks of a Matthew Broderick, which gives him the appearance of someone more interested in sailing than cybernetics or the second law of thermodynamics, both of which he tackles in the course of his highly praised 302-page search.
He has the remarkable ability to make the most complicated technical theories, if not crystal clear, at least accessible, provocative and at times richly entertaining to even the most scientifically illiterate.
His guides were three trailblazing scientific mavericks who do not shrink from the metaphysical implications of their work.
A New York Times review calls his effort ”a masterly portrait of three eccentric thinkers.” A Los Angeles Times review describes Wright`s three subjects as ”extraordinary people, creative geniuses obsessed with their ideas, which are far from universally accepted,” and says the profiles ”are as good as they come.”
They are:
– Edward Fredkin, a self-educated, self-made millionaire who works in the fields of physics and computer science and who sees the universe as a gigantic computer.
– E.O. Wilson, who is invariably identified as ”the father of sociobiology” and who believes that genes account not only for everything physical about us but also for a good deal of our behavior.
”My experiences in some ways parallel Wilson`s,” Wright said. ”He was raised a Southern Baptist, then encountered the theory of evolution and had almost a conversion experience. I was raised a Southern Baptist, too, and was also impressed with the theory of evolution when I encountered it and saw it was incompatible with a literal reading of Genesis.”
– Kenneth Boulding, who began his career as an economist and then became one of the founders of what`s known as the general systems theory. ”This was big during the `50s and `60s,” Wright said. ”They compare structures at different levels of organization. They might compare an ant colony with human society, for example.”
Wright said one of the reasons he chose the title was that the three scientists demonstrated a kind of fervent devotion to their theories that is characteristic of religious belief.
But Boulding, a Quaker, is the only one of the three who believes in God. Wilson is an agnostic, and Fredkin holds that some sort of superior intelligence must have devised this problem-solving machine that is the universe.
Does science have the answers?
”I had vaguely religious inclinations when I began the book, and I guess they`re a little less vague now. I think people will always want something to do what religion does for them.”
”I share with Kenneth Boulding this tendency to look at life and think that evolution couldn`t have been an accident; a process as beautiful as evolution almost had to be thought up,” Wright said.
”More than that, I can see that human nature has this noble side that is battling to prevail over human nature`s baser side, which in a way is the story of religion-an attempt to help the nobler side prevail. And in that sense religion and evolution are very much in sync. Religion is almost trying to sustain the direction of evolution in that sense.”
