Via Eric Rauchway (of The Edge of the American West, but guest-blogging at Crooked Timber), here is a list of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals, as put together by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. (You can vote for your top five.) Here are the natural scientists they’ve chosen to include:
- Richard Dawkins, biologist, author
- Jared Diamond, biologist, historian
- Neil Gershenfeld, physicist, computer scientist
- James Lovelock, environmental scientist
- Lee Smolin, physicist
- Harold Varmus, medical scientist
- J. Craig Venter, biologist, entrepreneur
- E.O. Wilson, biologist
Bjørn Lomborg is also on the list, but I don’t count him as a natural scientist — Sunita Narain is also a close call, but seems to fall more on the activism side than pure environmental science. Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker would also be there if you classified linguistics as a natural science. I also didn’t include economists, who are certainly social scientists in my classification. And V.S. Ramachandran I counted as more of a psychologist. This is a thankless task.
Note that the list is concerned with public intellectuals — people who have influenced the wide-ranging public discussion in some substantial way — so there’s no point in wondering why Lee Smolin is there but not Ed Witten. You are, however, allowed to wonder why there aren’t more physicists over all, and whether physicists should be blaming themselves or shaking impotent fists of rage at the selection committee. Either way, those biologists are kicking our butts.
Lomborg, Smolin… so “top public intellectual” can mean “one who disagrees with nearly every respectable person in his field, and instead of persuading others through peer-reviewed literature, appeals to the general public for support”?
If the “respectable” people can’t be bothered to explain themselves compellingly to the general public — then, yeah.
I’m honestly surprised that Smolin made the list and, say, Stephen Hawking didn’t.
Ah, I see they allow voting, and not only for the people on their list. I don’t see Gore as adequately offsetting Lomborg; I’m writing in Hames Hansen.
I wondered why Freeman Dyson did not make the list.
Err, James Hansen, that is. Typing is hard.
His influence seems to be fading, but Jaron Lanier (virtual reality, AI, consciousness issues in conjunction with society etc. – not a narrow worker but wide-ranging) should still be on the list IMHO. BTW, some of the more virulent commenters on Pharyngula really ragged on him in a thread that got into the realness of consciousness etc. They said he stole ideas, didn’t deserve fame, etc, and was basically a slob. I think they were just piqued at his on-target and witty criticisms of their hero Daniel Dennett (on the list, but a deception-mongering Pied Piper in my opinion just like Wittgenstein, Ryle, and other ironically post-modernist explainers-away of consciousness.)
From physics, I would be inclined to nominate Brian Greene. But, I think part of the issue is that physics WON. I can’t think of any physics issues that are real topics of public controversy. Smolin probably made the list because he tried to manufacture one. What Greene is doing–education–is far more important.
The comments so far are strange, and don’t seem to be taking into account these criteria—indeed, they fail to grasp the concept of public intellectual, in many cases, as opposed to (say) someone all the nerds have heard about. In this respect I think it’s almost a minimum that you have to write a popular science book, or at least give lots of general-public lectures. (And yes, there are counterexamples on the list.)
But to be fair there is an overt bias toward controversy in the criteria themselves.
virulent commenters on Pharyngula really ragged on him in a thread that got into the realness of consciousness etc. They said he stole ideas, didn’t deserve fame, etc, and was basically a slob.
Pharyngula commenters calling anyone a slob is amusing. Adolescent groupthink at it’s finest. The more subtle paradoxes of consciousness are beyond them. But should Lanier be included? I haven’t seen or heard much of him lately. And can someone be considered a serious intellectual who has no non-honorary degrees?
Jeff – I appreciate your snarky take on the Pharyngula crowd. I often think I might be reading “Little Green Footballs” but with different enemies. As for Jaron, I think “public intellectual” should be about accomplishments, quality, and presence in the public eye more than official marks of academic respectability. He may or may not still be justified in that top 100, I too think he’s slipped in visibility and output.
PS: Speaking of consciousness, is there a quality blog/site etc. out there, especially for mysterians? I know about JCS, just wondering what else.
tx
There is only one computer scientist and he is really a physicist.
Also, zero mathematicians. I know modern math is hardly part of public discourse, but you’d think there would be at least one with enough fame to land a spot on the list.
“Fool’s names and fool’s faces often appear in public places.” Read that in a book for young people when I was about 10 years old. The wagon train was passing Independence Rock, and the protagonist was upset because his mother wouldn’t allow him to use some tar to add his name to the rock. His grandmother told him that. Stuck with me for 50 years now. Remember it every time I drive up Cow Creek Canyon and see “Zenchenko” painted in 3-foot high letters on the rocks above the falls. Mickey Zenchenko (now calls himself “Mike”) was kind of a second-rate kid, and painting & repainting his name like that over the last 40 years was probably the biggest idea he ever had in life.
If everyone voted for Mickey, he might be added to the list of “Top 100 Public Intellectuals”. As Mickey himself might say, who says only real intellectuals should be on the list?
It’s tough to think of a way a physicist could take her deep knowledge of physics and use it to get involved in “public life.” The biologists have it easy — a little extrapolation from your subject matter gets you sociobiology and all sorts of neo-Victorian ideas that you can toss around in articles about war, politics, gender, anything really. Pity the physicist who must begin “treat voters as a network of dipoles where up is Obama and down is Clinton…”
The only real route for a physicist is Chomsky’s — just take all those good Enlightenment notions from your science and apply it to the world.
There must be some mistake – Ben Stein was not even on the list.
Simon,
Carl Sagan seems like a better model than Chomsky. But then, maybe I’m confused about the definition of public intellectual.
Brian Greene, Kachru, Roger Penrose, Lisa Randall and Stephen Hawking are conspicously missing.
I’d also put Weinberg in there (since he publishes a lot in various widely read journals, often on intellectually interesting subjects).
As for astrophysicists, Rees probably deserves to be up there.
“but Jaron Lanier (virtual reality, AI, consciousness issues in conjunction with society etc. – not a narrow worker but wide-ranging) should still be on the list IMHO. BTW, some of the more virulent commenters on Pharyngula really ragged on him in a thread that got into the realness of consciousness etc. They said he stole ideas, didn’t deserve fame, etc, and was basically a slob.”
That would a notable criticism, if it were true, which it apparently is not.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=2fn&as_q=Jaron+Lanier&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&num=10&lr=&as_filetype=&ft=i&as_sitesearch=scienceblogs.com%2Fpharyngula&as_qdr=all&as_rights=&as_occt=any&cr=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&safe=images
If they are looking for shear impact, negative or positive, then A. Q. Khan should be on the list. He may not be much of a role model, but there is no doubt that his physics has had a profound impact on the world today.
Contributors to FP are naturally over represented, but that’s life for you.
While it is sad that there are no chemists or geologists, I can’t actually think of any who ought to qualify.
Ehhh…Brian Greene?
IMHO,
there are a lot of other people I might include:
Singer/Songwriters: Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, John Prine, Steve Earle, and Smokey Robinson to name a few.
Certainly some other scientists that might be on my list: Murray Gell Mann, Michael Turner, Raphael Bousso, Louis Crane, and Stuart Kaufmann.
And why not Barack Obama?
e.
The Blake who wrote comment #18 was not me, although I was going to say much the same thing.
I’d suggest Alan Sokal as a physicist who has had a noticeable influence on intellectual discourse; the preface to his new book, Beyond the Hoax, has some interesting comments on the nature and role of “public intellectuals” in general.
I noticed something interesting: six of the public figures on the list don’t have en.wikipedia entries. (Thérèse Delpech, Fan Gang, Ivan Krastev, Minxin Pei, Lilia Shevtsova, Yan Xuetong). Isn’t that odd?
(I didn’t try looking up all 100 – I noticed one of the omissions by accident, used a script to find the rest, and verified them all manually with wikipedia’s internal search engine.)
All intellectuals aspiring to go public would do well to read e.e. cummings poem on the topic. 😉
That’s a poor list.