Forum: The Road Ahead

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GLADWELL: But that's not being threatened. The intelligent-design debate is about what you teach 7-year-olds.

DYSON: What you teach 7-year-olds matters because they grow up.

GLADWELL: But we've already been talking about how great Google is. They can just Google evolution.

BROOKS: I think the debate is unimportant for a different reason, which is that 40% of people in the country don't believe in the theory of evolution, and yet we seem to march on regardless.

GLADWELL: None of this affects the way science is conducted in this century. Does it change you as a software salesman whether you believe in evolution or not? No--no more than it changes you whether you believe in Einstein physics.

DYSON: You can't limit your concern to short-term economic impact. This attitude closes off inquiry. It creates an approach to science that I think is dangerous.

GLADWELL: But keep in mind the idea we've discussed of the multiplication of identity. We will have more debates and disputes, like the one over creationism. When you're having 100 arguments at once, no one of them matters the way it used to. It's important not to use a 19th century moral lens to evaluate the kind of debates we're going to have in the 21st century. We have to accept that the general noise level will increase, but that doesn't matter. You can be a creationist at night and go to work in the morning as a pediatrician and save lives.

DYSON: The real challenge is going to be for the next generation of pediatricians who have to design your baby. It's in the field of genetics and genetic engineering where faith and morality questions will play out. Is it immoral now to abort a Down syndrome baby? In the future, should you use technology to create a perfect baby, finding the right genes? And then you'll be responsible for what you have created in a way that you never were before. No more "will of God ..."

THE CASE FOR OPTIMISM

BROOKS: Abortion rates are down a third, divorce rates are down, crime rates are down some 70%, school violence is down, suicide rates, drug addiction--all of the social indicators that were going the wrong way in the '70s and '80s turned around in the early '90s or so, and are still going in the right direction. So to me, we've changed the way we raise kids, and we probably made them a little more boring, but it is a remarkable generation of wholesomeness. If you don't like wholesomeness, then you're a pessimist, but if you sort of like it, then it's one reason to be fairly optimistic for the next 50 years.

GLADWELL: I'm generally optimistic because I feel that with the pace of development in China and India and other parts of the developing world, we're just adding to the available brainpower and unlocking these large populations of people and their ingenuity and giving them an education. How much easier will it be to solve the problems of the world when we've got 10 times as many brains working on them.

O'REILLY: I guess I'm an optimist too because, on the one hand, many of the technological innovations of the past few decades now are in the payoff stage. On the other, even a serious disruption-- global warming, a pandemic--could serve as a wake-up call, harnessing our ingenuity to make things better.

DYSON: That's true optimism!