Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information

From the lives of three brilliant and eccentric thinkers, Robert Wright has fashioned an intellectual adventure story that is at once scientific and spiritual. Three Scientists and Their Gods is a look at the nature of both inquiry and faith, at the hazy line where scientific hypothesis passes over into fervent conviction. At the same time, it is a look at how modern science can inform our deepest convictions; it is, in the end, the story of what science has to say about the meaning of modern life. The narrative begins on a Caribbean island

owned by Ed Fredkin, a self-made millionaire and scientist who startled colleagues at MIT with his theory that reality consists ultimately not of mass or energy but of information; and that the universe is governed by a single simple programming rule- "the cause and prime mover of everything." Fredkin sees evidence for his "informational viewpoint" everywhere he looks; a mouse, he says, is nothing more than a "big, complicated informational process." From the Caribbean, Wright travels to Harvard University, there to examine the life and work of E. O. Wilson, renowned insect biologist and founder of sociobiology. Wilson has lately been studying the linkages between human genes and human culture, between "the information that shapes us and the information we shape." Wilson's theory of "gene-culture coevolution" has landed him in territory he knows all too well-a heated academic and political debate.

Finally, Wright heads for Manhattan, where Kenneth Boulding-devout Quaker, unconventional economist, and founding father of general systems theory-examines the societal changes wrought by information technology. Boulding's thought galvanizes the book's climax. Through his eyes we see that only by understanding information processing at many levels-within computers; in bacterial DNA, in and among human cells; in ant and ape societies; in multinational corporafions can we truly grasp the meaning of the information age. Boulding's ideas illuminate the future course of human evolution as well as timeless philosophical questions-even whether the universe is the product of chance or design.