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Nature and Society Quotations featured in the December 2007 - January 2008 edition ••••••• The human mind serves evolutionary success, not truth. John Gray ••••••• “Religion is not going away,” he announced. Even those of us who fancy ourselves rationalists and scientists, he said, rely on moral values - a set of distinctly unscientific beliefs. Where, for instance, does our conviction that human rights are universal come from? “Humans’ rights to me are as mysterious as the holy trinity. You can’t do a CT scan to show where humans’ rights are, you can’t cut someone open and show us their human rights. It’s not an empirical thing, it’s just something we strongly believe. It’s a purely metaphysical entity.” Quoting Edward Slingerland ••••••• Quoting Churchill: “you have to be an optimist because there is no point in being a pessimist”. In contrast with Churchill we came across this on the internet: I rather agree with the observation that optimists are doomed to disappointments, while pessimists can only be pleasantly surprised. I appreciate each day and the things in it all the more for my awareness of their fragility and transience. "dj" on 24 November 2007 ••••••• ..but consider what we now know: editors can reduce or increase the likelihood of mass murders, and encourage a nation to war or peace. Given such power, it is surely not too much to ask that they tread lightly. Michael Bond, on reportage of the Virginia Tech massacre ••••••• It is wrong to destroy the habitability of our planet and ruin the prospects of every generation that follows ours. The climate crisis offers us the chance to experience what few generations in history have had the privilege of experiencing: a generational mission; a compelling moral purpose; a shared cause; and the thrill of being forced by circumstances to put aside the pettiness and conflict of politics and to embrace a genuine moral and spiritual challenge. Al Gore 2007 ••••••• By cleverly manipulating our core emotions, advertising gets us to buy products that are never quite what they seem. (Have you ever seen a car advertisement shot in rush hour traffic?) Gerry McGovern ••••••• A pine cut down, a dead pine, is no more a pine than a dead human carcass is a man. Can he who has discovered only some of the values of whalebone and whale oil be said to have discovered the true use of the whale? Can he who slays the elephant for his ivory be said to have seen the elephant? These are petty and accidental uses; just as if a stronger race were to kill us in order to make buttons and flageolets of our bones; for everything may serve a lower as well as a higher use. Every creature is better alive than dead, men and moose and pine trees, and he who understands it aright will rather preserve its life than destroy it. Henry David Thoreau, 1817-62 ••••••• But the temptation to frame these debates in terms of certainty is fraught with danger. Certainty is an unforgiving taskmaster. It may seem prudent to say when the scientists are certain then we’ll know what to do, but it is a mere step from there to say we should do nothing until we are certain. David Malone, New Scientist ••••••• I’ve just got back from living with the Penan people of Sarawak, Malaysia, who are losing their lives, livelihoods and their forests because of the outside world buying hardwoods. Forget demonising the loggers, we are the reason these things are happening. What we buy comes from so far away that we have no idea what consumerism is doing to the rest of the world. Bruce Parry, ••••••• Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has established the first radically anthropocentric society and has thereby broken the primary law of the universe, the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe and that the primary norm of reality and value is the universe community itself in its various forms of expression, especially as realized on the planet Earth. Thomas Berry ••••••• As every climate scientist knows, there will always be facts that won’t fit even the best model of global climate. That’s the nature of models and the weather – and it illustrates just how badly we can be led astray by the fiction that science is about certainty. If we are honest and say the scientists’ conclusions aren’t certain, we may find this being used as justification for doing nothing, or even to allow wriggle room for the supernatural to creep back in again. If we pretend we’re certain when we are not, we risk being unmasked as liars. David Malone, New Scientist 4 August 2007 ••••••• There was more than one kind of ocean in the past, just as there will be a new ocean to come in our immediate future, and if that future is too immediate, God help us all. Peter D Ward, Under a Green Sky ••••••• Are we going to continue destroying the planet, just to be somewhat more comfortable for a little while? Dmitry Orlov ••••••• Day in and day out, television provides us with examples of the exceptional. Should we be surprised that we’re left feeling rather unexceptional? ... Television seems to intensify a sense of relative deprivation and distorts our sense of where we stand in various pecking orders and hierarchies, such as age, appearance and social influence ... Our society’s growing melancholy comes from the increasing gap between reality and expectations raised by vague, ambient, emotive images over time. As the electronic delivery system of distorted points of comparison, television acts as a false reflection of the outside world ... Loathing yourself can be even easier if you watch a lot of television awash with the beautiful people. Aric Sigman ••••••• Switching off Mackay argues that the cumulative effects of all the change he describes has combined with a rising tide of prosperity at the turn of the 21st century to induce Australians to disengage from big issues. A sense of powerlessness began to affect the national mood, and this intensified after the terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001 ... In the midst of these and other global horrors, we began to master the art of “switch-off”, focusing inward on domains we could control: our homes and gardens, our own bodies. In a world which called on us to live with high levels of ambiguity and unpredictability, we began to yearn for the magic simplicities of fundamentalisms of all kinds, and to make out our credit cards to indulge our desire for the soothing balm of narcissism. Shelley McInnis, Canberra Times, 6 Oct 2007 ••••••• Television is unique, the perfect medium to produce strong [neurochemical] rewards for paying attention to something. So what is so powerful about this reward? Compared to the pace with which real life unfolds and is experienced by young children, television portrays life with the fast-forward button fully-pressed. Rapidly changing images, scenery and events, and high-fidelity sounds are overly stimulating and, of course, extremely interesting. Once you are used to food with salt, sugar and monosodium glutamate flavour enhancers, real food doesn’t taste as interesting. Television is the flavour enhancer of the audiovisual world, providing unnatural levels of sensory stimulation. Nothing in real life is comparable to this. Television overpays the young child to pay attention to it, and in doing so it seems to physically spoil and damage his attention circuits. In effect, television, regardless of program content, corrupts the reward system that enables us to pay attention to the other things in life. Aric Sigman ••••••• Mobile phones have positive network externality (the utility of my phone increases every time someone else buys a mobile phone) - the holy grail of 21st century economics. Cars are so 20th century - they have negative network externality (the utility of my car goes down every time someone else buys a car thereby driving up my congestion, etc). Cars - just say no! N Goddard, writing on a ••••••• You can start [dealing effectively with reality] by taking all the mental effort that you are currently wasting on the subject of cars, and how to run them on fuels other than gasoline, and instead focus your energy on how to rescue our political institutions so that a truly informed public can reconstruct a bankrupt society into a living and credible republic. James Kunstler, ••••••• What we inherit from our fish ancestors Our time as fish has left us with one central spine, two arms, two legs, jaws, teeth, lungs and the habit of both eating and breathing through our mouth. From Chapter 6 of Your body: The fish that evolved, What we inherit from our amphibian ancestors Our time as amphibians has left us with a bendable neck, elbows, knees, wrists, ankles, five toes on each foot and five fingers on each hand. This was also he time when we lost our fins, our gills and most of our fish scales. From Chapter 7 of Your body: The fish that evolved, What we inherit from our reptile ancestors Our time as reptiles has left us with a waterproof skin with no scales, a lumbar region of our spine with no ribs, elbows and knees that bend in opposite directions, an eardrum and the first stages of becoming warm blooded. From Chapter 8 of Your body: The fish that evolved, What we inherit from our four-legged mammal ancestors Our time as four-legged mammals has left us with a waterproof skin with warm blood, hair, perspiration, breasts, pendulous testicles and the ability to rotate our shoulders in opposite directions and to touch our toes. We also develop in our mother’s womb and no longer from an egg in a nest, and we drink milk as newborn infants. From Chapter 9 of Your body: The fish that evolved What we inherit from our tree-dwelling primate ancestors From our tree-dwelling ancestors we have inherited grasping hands with an opposable thumb and great manual dexterity, fingernails and fingerprints, an extremely wide range of arm movement including a rotatable forearm, a prominent collarbone, a large big toe, an ability to balance on our hind legs, a very mobile neck, forward-facing eyes and depth perception, the ability to distinguish red from green and permanently displayed male genitals. This was also the time we lost our ancestral tail. From Chapter 10 of Your body: The fish that evolved December 2007 - January 2008 edition accessible here Back to top
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