Who are the Third Culture Intellectuals?


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The work and ideas of the intellectuals featured at this site give meaning to the term "third culture": physicists, evolutionary biologists, philosophers, biologists, computer scientists, psychologists, social, behavioral, and anthropological scientists, and science journalists.

In 1991, John Brockman published an essay, "The Emerging Third Culture" which inspired an ongoing series of one-on-one discussions (1991-1994) in which Brockman talked with many "third culture" scientists about their work and the work of other scientists included in this site. The result was the publication of The Third Culture: Beyond The Scientific Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 1995), a book that is not an anthology, nor an overview, but an oral history of a living document of a dynamical emergent system, a celebration of the ideas of third culture thinkers who are defining the interesting and important questions of our times. In The Third Culture they communicate their thoughts to the public and to one another. It is an exhibition of this new community of intellectuals in action.

The 23 original thinkers included in the print version are:

Paul Davies
Richard Dawkins
Daniel C. Dennett
Niles Eldredge
J. Doyne Farmer
Murray Gell-Mann
Brian Goodwin
Stephen Jay Gould
Alan Guth
W. Daniel Hillis
Nicholas Humphrey
Steve Jones
Stuart Kauffman
Stuart Langton
Lynn Margulis
Marvin Minsky
Roger Penrose
Steven Pinker
Martin Rees
Roger Schank
Lee Smolin
Francisco Varela
George C. Williams