The Edge question for 2008 is up and it is, What have you changed your mind about? This particular question tends to focus the contributors to respond within their areas of expertise (and there is a lot of that) rather then generally. I think that makes the excercise more interesting and more informative. For example, from neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux, on memory...

...[E]ach time a memory is used, it has to be restored as a new memory in order to be accessible later. The old memory is either not there or is inaccessible. In short, your memory about something is only as good as your last memory about it. This is why people who witness crimes testify about what they read in the paper rather than what they witnessed. ...

Very interesting. And here's Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, who now says that good, quality, old stuff is really no good.

Give me 100% not-cotton clothing, genetically modified food (from a farmers' market, preferably), this-year's laptop, cutting-edge dentistry and drugs.

There's expert opinion on evolutionary biology, the latest in physics, artificial intelligence, cosmology, computer science, philosophy, psychology, the disappearance of the dinosaurs and something I hadn't heard of before, neuro-economics. James Geary:

The stock market is filled with patterns. But the vast majority of those patterns are meaningless, at least in the short term. The hourly variance of a stock price, for example, is far less significant than its annual variance. When you're checking your portfolio every hour, the noise in those statistics drowns out any real information. But our brains evolved to detect patterns of immediate significance, and the nucleus accumbens sends a jolt of pleasure into the investor who thinks he's spotted a winner. Yet studies consistently show that people who follow their investments closely earn lower returns than those who don't pay much attention at all. Why? Because their nucleus accumbens isn't prompting them to make impulsive decisions based on momentary patterns they think they've detected.

I'm less than halfway through and my head hurts. In a good way, of course.