Skip to main content

How to Sidetrack Oneself, Demonstrated

For several years, while I was still warm and functioning, I co-taught an interdisciplinary course with a biologist.  At the heart of the course was the question of what evolution is, and what its consequences have been.

[Oh, dear Lord, let me indulge in one of my pet peeves, right now!  Have you noticed that almost everyone has lost the ability to state a question indirectly?  Indirectly?  That is to say, to refer to a question; not to ask it directly.  I just did that:  "At the heart of the course was the question of what evolution is, and what its consequences have been."  What people almost universally say these days would be something like this:  "At the heart of the course was the question of what is evolution,  and what have been its consequences."  If, as I am doing, you are writing that sentence, you have to punctuate it like this:  At the hear of the course was this question:  "What is evolution, and what have been its consequences?"  But if you want to report what the question was, you have to swap the places the nouns and verbs take, because you are not directly asking the question; you are reporting it.  Well, there you are:  evidence for a misspent life!]

Let us return to the question of what was that course about.

(You did catch that, didn't you?)

When the Cosmos series came out, we decided to incorporate the film series into the course, to show that everything has evolved--the cosmos itself--and not just the biological life that is a part of everything that is.  It always seemed to me that Carl Sagan's narration of what has happened, and how we are a part of it, was the high point of the whole course.

Now Neil deGrasse Tyson is the narrator for a remaking and updating of the Cosmos programs.  He is splendid, but Carl Sagan forever captured my heart, even earlier, when first I read, The Dragons of Eden.  As religious fundamentalists did with the original series, they have turned their indignation upon the new Cosmos series.  They want equal time to talk Turtle Talk; you know, that the earth rests on the back of a 6,000 year old turtle, and that if you sail too far west, you will fall off the edge.  No big bang!  No finches evolving on separate Galapagos islands!  No human ancestors!  No new flu viruses!  No millions and billions of years!  Just gods and demons and a recent creation and the appearance of incredible age, the appearance of genetic inheritance, the appearance of all kinds of sensible things, but the fact of heaven above, and a magic turtle on whose back we ride the salty sea!  Maybe that Coyote is the creator.  Maybe that Thor is hammering out the thunder, or that it is a Hebrew god speaking on Mt. Sinai, or. . . .

Personally, I am partial to that turtle.  I think he deserves air time alongside Neil deGrasse Tyson, and the Dragons of Eden before him.

There you have it again:  a scientific series that asks how did things happen, and how did we get here?

(You did catch that, didn't you?)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more