I think you should try being interested in natural sciences. I’ll get over it if you turn out indifferent to the details, but it’s your duty to at least look around for a bit and check things out. My path from indifference concerns entirely the fact of evolution and its, to me, unceasing beauty.
Biological evolution (lest you got all the wrong ideas) is a scientific fact—quite distinctly from the theories describing the process. The details of how evolution occurs we are inherently less sure of, but we’re extremely certain that Darwin got the gist of natural selection. And some fascinatingly intelligent people are working on devising fitting theories for the most complicated mechanisms in evolution. The most often you might tend to hear about evolution, though, is when flat-out denial is confronted.
Indeed, some people deny parts or the entirety of our collective knowledge concerning evolution. As an uninterested high-school freshman, I could have only sneered at the stereotypical redneck Americans—clutching to an age-old myth of a supernatural space-god modelling a plasticine Earth-sphere in seven days (prior to establishing the meaning of day as a unit of time). This never stopped being peculiar—just about every statement in the Bible has been negated and replaced with ‘it’s the metaphor that counts’—but the seven-day nonsense stuck to Westboro Baptist (et al.) doctrine like superglue. And so evolution became a social issue—a stigmatised ‘world view’, no good, no healthy. And it’s not just the Westboro Baptist types—it’s elected politicians in some parts of the world who believe creationist nonsense. But for me, in a Central European post-communistic republic, we sure knew better. We take evolution for granted.
But the secular people have a problem here. We have become accustomed to accept things without recognising what they mean. Taking shit for granted is not a kosher stance for an educated society. An average Joe, me ranking among these on things evolutionary some eight years ago, has no idea what we’re collectively subscribing to.
If you’ve never read of evolution or seen a BBC documentary about it, let me tell you you’re prone to misunderstand it. My concept of evolution, for years, has been just short of Lamarckistic—the idea that living things accumulate features during their lifetime. This way, change would happen over generations and we’d have a bunch of different species in no time, derived from one original. The erroneous idea of evolution from before the discovery of natural selection, really.
But oh, how beautiful it was to dive past the ‘I recognise evolution because I’m not as stupid as those who don’t’ façade. Go, I encourage you, and watch a documentary, do a Google search, or read Richard Dawkins on evolution. Your eyes will be opened to the true beauty of the natural world.
All living things, from an amoeba through a pine tree through a stomach bacterium to modern humans, have a three-and-a-half-billion-year-old ancestor. A humongous carbon-based family of Earthlings: from you through the guy over there to a fucking dandelion. It’s all interconnected. More importantly, life is designed by omission. There is no creator intervening in evolution, it’s just the vast amounts of time for the reproductively weak individuals to be left out of the gene pool, with no foresight whatsoever. (Actually, it’s not that simple, but the principle stands in general.)
So, that’s how I found I didn’t want to be a lawyer, a banker, an economist, a journalist. At least not primarily. Because in the secular pursuit of scientific truths, I think you’re bound to find beauty in something. A principle. A system. The selfish gene theory of evolution in biology, the potential to harness power chemically, the vastness of fractals in mathematics. That’s my case for the natural sciences. And with that vague endorsement and lack of structure, I’m kicking off this blog.
Enjoy.
Žádné komentáře:
Okomentovat