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Edited on Mon Mar-02-09 02:03 PM by Peace Patriot
the Mother Jones piece yet, nor more recent works. I think I do understand his thesis, for which there is compelling evidence--that the series of events that led from simple cellular life to the animals and to us was controlled by random chance, and that those who start with a God thesis--evolution somehow being directed to, or having an inclination to, produce us--blind themselves to the evidence. It is an anti-anthropocentric thesis, and like an icy shower to copulating dogs, is a jolt to the momentum of our egos. A necessary jolt. Rather like my tiny ants on a leaf surrounded by a gigantic ocean. We have difficulty grasping the full meaning of time, chance and big numbers. The universe is truly unimaginably big; and the variation of life on earth, and the time spans involved, are by themselves--just in this tiny spot in the great cosmos, on this little leaf we inhabit--impossible for our tiny ant brains to fully comprehend. We can write the numbers down and contemplate them; we can't really grasp them.
I was really into Goddess images when I read his book, long ago, and came away with an image--not his, my own--of Mother Nature strewing a truly overwhelming abundance of life forms, staggering in its variety, into her primeval soup cauldron, and, due to this chance and that, only a few survived, and we evolved from those. Her strategy is abundance. And--not unimportant to me at the time (and still)--our inability to fully comprehend the numbers involved in producing life itself, and complex life forms, has led to our suicidal practices of monoculture and destruction of highly complex ecosystems. We don't understand that it takes thousands of species, from bacteria and fungi to fish, birds, bears and lions, evolved together in a web of life, to produce the trees we take for our houses. We cannot reproduce that abundance (not yet anyway). When we destroy it for one product--wood--it is gone. Logging is not "sustainable," as the logging corporations allege. They can continue to grow trees for a while, in the increasingly desertified ecosystem they are creating, but it is inferior wood, subject to disease, and eventually the ecosystem will die. Throughout the history of human civilization, we have done this--destroyed vastly complex ecosystems, generally forests--but we don't tend to notice or absorb the lesson, because of the time spans involved. How did Greece, northern Africa, the Middle East, and large swaths of China get to be the way they are--deserts? They were once lush and green. We did that, with our agricultural practices--by not understanding the basic principles of Nature: variation and abundance. They are the fundamental principles of evolution over time, and of current, existing, evolved ecosystems. Some indigenous farmers--say, in Peru--understand this. 'Higher' civilizations do not. (And I really mean those inverted commas! We're not 'higher'--we're killing the planet.)
To put it another way, patriarchal (male) habits of thinking and organization hunt for meat and throw a slab of meat on the fire, and gnaw on it for dinner, and consider this nutrition. Matriarchal (female) habits of thinking boil a cauldron and throw everything available into it--vegetables, tubers, herbs, spices, bits of fat and meat, beans, seeds, nuts, flowers, eggs, milk, water and whatnot--including all the complex substances that our complex bodies need for proper nutrition and best health, and our bodies eliminate what they don't need. The abundance principle (everything we might need) vs the mere sustenance (full belly is all we need) principle.
Anyway, that's how I came to be an environmentalist. But S J Gould never addressed the question of why chemicals bother interacting and creating life, nor why the matter in the universe is organized into complex, whirling galaxies, with unimaginably vast, apparently empty reaches of space between these complex structures, rather than a whole lot of random bits of rocks and matter more or less evenly scattered over the same space (not his field--but it's a related question). What gives the simple parts the momentum to create the complex parts?
And, no, it is NOT an unscientific question of being vs. nothingness (and I would argue with you about that, by itself). It is a question of the organization of what is. Why is what is not randomly scattered about, but rather in motion toward the highly organized?
You know, perhaps the answer to chemicals evolving into living matter is gravity--that mysterious thing--at the quark level. But I still don't think that would answer the question entirely. Why did what seems to be a randomly sparked universe develop gravity? If space is infinite, why didn't every little particle just blow away? What gave the earliest particles momentum to gather together, as they exploded outward (if the Big Bang theory is correct, at least for this universe--the apparent one)? And, similarly, at the microcosmic level, here on earth, why didn't Mother Nature's cauldron just result in an undifferentiated mush? Why are there carrots, and tomatoes and bits of meat in it? Even if you grant random chance of abundance and variety as the principle of evolution, you don't explain why chemicals end up being a carrot or a bison. You can explain that what is, is what survives. But you don't explain why what is, is. What made that happen? Why are there carrots, bisons, human beings and galaxies, rather than a random abundance of chemicals?
I am sure that I am, myself, right now, not understanding numbers--the vast numbers of random chemicals that are still blowing thither and yon throughout the universe. And maybe random chance ultimately explains it all--that, with that much space, and that many chemical components, and that much time, there are bound to be some bits of higher (more complex) organization. That is a possibility, but I'm not convinced of it. My brain seeks order, organization and 'first causes,' and my brain is a product of that vast soup of chemicals that somehow thought up gravity.
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