NABCEP [RE-wrenches]

Joel Davidson joeldavidson at earthlink.net
Mon Dec 23 09:08:24 PST 2002


Matt,
The science of evolution is a lott more complicated than what we are taught in
compulsory education organizations. The primary function of any organism and any
organization is to survive. To put it bluntly, people and organizations will do
anything to maintain the status quo.
Best regards,
Joel Davidson
"Nothing in the history of science can be more interesting or instructive than
the intellectual drama of such a slow transformation in a fundamental view of
life - from an initial recognition of trouble, to attempts at accommodation
within a preferred system, to varying degrees of openness toward substantial
change, and sometimes, among the most flexible and courageous, even to full
conversion. I particularly like to contemplate the contributions of external and
internal factors to such a change: new data mounting a challenge from the
outside, coordinated with an internal willingness to follow the logic of an old
system to its points of failure, and then to construct a revised theory imposing
a different kind of consistency upon an altered world (with minimum changes for
those who remain in love with their previous certainties and tend to follow
conservative intellectual strategies, or with potentially revolutionary impact
for people with temperaments that permit, or even favor, iconoclasm and
adventure.) Reward and risk go hand in hand, for the great majority of
thoroughly radical revisions must fail, even though the sweetest fruits await
the few victors in this chanciest and most difficult of all mental adventures."
from "A Tree Grows in Paris" by Stephen Jay Gould, professor of zoology and
geology and evolutionary essayist for Natural History magazine. (I strongly
recommend reading Gould's collected essays, which, by the way, are nice
Christmas gifts to give to amateur and professional scientists.)

matthew tritt wrote:

> In Nature, only organisms which are able to change and adapt survive; those
> too fixed and rigid in their patterns to adapt to new situations don't. A
> Lott can be learned from nature, oui?
>
> Matt-T

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