1988) In the past few years, the playing field of American intellectual life has shifted, and the traditional intellectual has become increasingly marginalized. A 1950s education in Freud, Marx, and modernism is not sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s. Indeed, the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quit often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washed its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comments on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.

John Brockman
The Third Culture (1995)

1989) Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn't change much; science does; and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.

Stewart Brand
quoted by John Brockman in
The Third Culture (1995)

1990) The universe is a difficult enough place to understand already without introducing mystical mysteriousness that's not actually there. [...] [T]he universe is genuinely mysterious, grand, beautiful, awe inspiring. The kinds of views of the universe which religious people have traditionally embraced have been puny, pathetic, and measly in comparison to the way the universe actually is. The universe presented by organized religions is a poky little medieval universe, and extremely limited.

Richard Dawkins
interviewed by John Brockman in
"A Survival Machine" in
The Third Culture (1995)

1991) There's only one general principle in biology, and that, of course, is Darwinism.

Richard Dawkins
interviewed by John Brockman in
"A Survival Machine" in
The Third Culture (1995)

1992) I have a problem with scientists who spend most of the time looking at their own navels, trying to define what it is they're supposed to be studying. It's like a game where both teams stand around arguing about what the rules are supposed to be. [...[ There's a disease of middle-aged literary men called Hearty Degeneration of the Fat; when you get old, you boom about Big Issues. G.K. Chesterton was a classic example. Scientists, I guess, have a related problem - Anguished Uncertainty of the Elderly is probably a better term. All of a sudden you forget that science is the art of the answerable and you begin to speculate about things that basically lie outside science altogether.

Steve Jones
interviewed by John Brockman in
The Third Culture (1995)