Sunday, June 26, 2005
Thought of the Day
The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.
Stephen Jay Gould
I can't tell you how much I admired Stephen Jay Gould for his intellect and good humor. He died of brain cancer a few years ago. I believe he will be remembered for a tweaking/perfecting of Darwin's differential reproduction (as an explanation of the origin of the species), which has come to be known as punctuated equilibrium. Gould thought that sometimes evolution progressed at a frenetic pace only to then have the changes last for millions of years of very little change. He's probably right.
But I wanted to type about the pedestals. At the beginning of the Renaissance, the learned men of Western Europe were sure of three things: 1) The centrality of the World in an ordered Universe; 2) That humans were the crown of creation; and, 3) That humans were unique in the animal world for their ability to think and act logically according to their rational thoughts.
Copernicus knocks us off the first pedestal. The Earth is not the center of the Universe; it's not even the center of the solar system--all the planets revolve around the sun (and it only gets worse from there--we learn that the sun is just one of billions of stars in our local galaxy and that there are perhaps a billion, billion galaxies each with a billion stars in an ever expanding space so vast it is beyond our ability to comprehend its magnitude). We are just a small planet going around a normal, somewhat aged, star in the unfashionable western edge of one arm of a totally standard galaxy, one of billions and billions (Do that in your best Carl Sagan voice). But hey, at least we're still higher rational life forms.
Darwin knocked us off the crown of creation pedestal. It turns out that species adapt to their changing environment (if they are able) through happy transcription errors and spontaneous mutation of the DNA; and it is all random and without purpose, (other than the one rule of life--have children which have children), so there is no directed movement towards higher and better function and we are no more evolved or better than an amoeba. Well, the learned men think after about 1860, we may live on a flyspeck in an ocean of stars and we may just be the result of a chain of changes dictated by chance, but we have a brain and at least we are rational thinkers.
Then Freud shows us that we are hardly rational--people have no freakin' idea why they do half the stuff they do--and we learn later that we are unconscious pawns to a complex set of brain chemicals over which we have little control and no defenses. Rational thinkers? The modern neurobiologist snorts in derision. Pull the other one.
And the result of being knocked off of all three pedestals is 20th Century mankind.
Stephen Jay Gould
I can't tell you how much I admired Stephen Jay Gould for his intellect and good humor. He died of brain cancer a few years ago. I believe he will be remembered for a tweaking/perfecting of Darwin's differential reproduction (as an explanation of the origin of the species), which has come to be known as punctuated equilibrium. Gould thought that sometimes evolution progressed at a frenetic pace only to then have the changes last for millions of years of very little change. He's probably right.
But I wanted to type about the pedestals. At the beginning of the Renaissance, the learned men of Western Europe were sure of three things: 1) The centrality of the World in an ordered Universe; 2) That humans were the crown of creation; and, 3) That humans were unique in the animal world for their ability to think and act logically according to their rational thoughts.
Copernicus knocks us off the first pedestal. The Earth is not the center of the Universe; it's not even the center of the solar system--all the planets revolve around the sun (and it only gets worse from there--we learn that the sun is just one of billions of stars in our local galaxy and that there are perhaps a billion, billion galaxies each with a billion stars in an ever expanding space so vast it is beyond our ability to comprehend its magnitude). We are just a small planet going around a normal, somewhat aged, star in the unfashionable western edge of one arm of a totally standard galaxy, one of billions and billions (Do that in your best Carl Sagan voice). But hey, at least we're still higher rational life forms.
Darwin knocked us off the crown of creation pedestal. It turns out that species adapt to their changing environment (if they are able) through happy transcription errors and spontaneous mutation of the DNA; and it is all random and without purpose, (other than the one rule of life--have children which have children), so there is no directed movement towards higher and better function and we are no more evolved or better than an amoeba. Well, the learned men think after about 1860, we may live on a flyspeck in an ocean of stars and we may just be the result of a chain of changes dictated by chance, but we have a brain and at least we are rational thinkers.
Then Freud shows us that we are hardly rational--people have no freakin' idea why they do half the stuff they do--and we learn later that we are unconscious pawns to a complex set of brain chemicals over which we have little control and no defenses. Rational thinkers? The modern neurobiologist snorts in derision. Pull the other one.
And the result of being knocked off of all three pedestals is 20th Century mankind.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 9:51 PM 
