Findings

I was apprehensive last night as I headed uptown to Columbia University to hear anthropologist Richard Leakey and three others remind their audience that our species is driving Earth’s sixth great wave  of mass extinction. I thought the event might be a downer. Boy, was it.

In 20 or 30 years, Leakey projected, “60 to 70 percent of the species we know today will disappear.” The national parks and animal sanctuaries we’ve created are islands, and whenever there’s a significant climate change--like the one we’re causing right now--“island species disappear because they can’t get off the island.” Furthermore, while human evolution has slowed to a crawl or stopped, the pathogens that attack us are evolving like crazy. We exist ourselves because of previous extinctions, Leakey pointed out--if the dinosaurs hadn’t been wiped out, our mammalian ancestors wouldn’t have taken over. However, he said, “There’s no guarantee at all that in a sixth extinction, our species would survive.”

4:00 PM. People are lining up for “Cool Jobs,” one of the festival’s hottest events among the not-yet-employed. A pair of 9-year-olds, Eli Cash and his friend Orion, peer down the escalator and speculate about physics: “Imagine if this disappeared and it was over a hundred million feet down to the bottom and it took you fifty years to get down there? And there was no elevator?”

When he grows up, Eli plans to write a book about history from the 1400s to the 1900s, with special emphasis on the Pilgrims. Orion--“like the star”--plans to be a nuclear scientist “and maybe make something that would go all the way to Neptune in one day.”

8:00 PM. It’s the first evening of the 2008 World Science Festival, a constellation of events about science scattered across New York City’s cultural institutions. There are so many tempting ones happening at once that it’s painful to choose. West of Central Park, at Symphony Space, a group of scientists--along with the storytelling collective The Moth and Stephen Hawking’s daughter Lucy Hawking--is spinning tales of heroic failures and experiments gone wrong. Across the East River in Long Island City, behavioral economist Dan Ariely is regaling his audience with games and experiments designed to show them just how irrational they really are. Elsewhere in the city there’s a stage adaptation of “Einstein’s Dreams,” a panel discussion about bioart in the age of terrorism, and a cosmological debate.

It was hard to pass those up, but I decided to come to the 92nd Street Y to hear (from right to left, above) neuroethicist Patricia Churchland of the University of California, San Diego; neuroscientist Antonio Damasio of the University of Southern California; philosopher Daniel Dennett of Tufts University; evolutionary biologist Marc Hauser of Harvard; and moderator Jon Meacham, Newsweek’s managing editor, discuss the science of right and wrong.