By contrast, God, as Galton's friend Thomas Huxley drily noted, was inordinately fond of beetles.
More accurately God seems to have an inordinate fondness for microbes - he introduced them at the very beginnings of life, created millions of species and gazillions of individuals and they remain in those numbers today, almost four billion years later.
Humanoids, by pointed contrast, came very late in God's scheme, almost as an afterthought, with only a few humble species that today have dwindled down to one only species with an unique approach to extinction.
Instead of external events (say a big asteroid smashing into the Earth) leading to our species' extinction, we're going to kill ourselves off - Evolution's first ever example of collective suicide.
Rather than gas, pills or rope we are currently deciding between nuclear bombs or human-created global warming as our way to end it all.
Is evolutionary success to be measured by a genetic urge to collective self-immolation, as the Progressives believe ---- or is it how many viable offspring that are produced and for how long ?
Is Man or bacteria to be the current benchmark for evolutionary success ?
Galton and God still seem divided on this point ....
Showing posts with label thomas huxley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label thomas huxley. Show all posts
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
POPULAR SCIENCE has always included people talking to scientists as well as scientists talking to people ...
HALIFAX - Professor Bernie Lightman, the editor of the prestigious history of science journal ISIS, told the 150th anniversary lecture celebration of the Nova Scotia Institute of Science (NSIS) at Kings College University on May 7th, that Victorian popularizers of Science encompassed far more types of individuals and organizations than the well known science practicioner-popularizers like Thomas Huxley that most histories of Victoria science popularization begin and conclude with.
In speaking to the NSIS of non-scientists who dared speak in public about the sacred religion of Science (all bow), Lightman was in a very real sense, speaking to the converted.
But Lightman's account of the extraordinarily wide variety of Victoria popularizers was a rebuke to popular science as it is regarded today, where most of those allowed to write about science are either prominent scientists or prominent science journalists.
It is no game for amateurs both editors and readers seem to say.
Perhaps in the area of popular science books, this is definitely true.
But citizen amateurs are writing lots about science in blogs and being seriously read - to adapt an old joke about the Internet: 'on the Internet, no one knows you're a blog'.
Meaning that visually, the blog of the top science journalist at the New York Times, of a Nobel Prize winning scientist, or from Josephine Blow from down the road , all tend to look alike.
The blogging price of entry starts low and it starts free and neither Nobel Prize-winning academic footnoting nor mega media corporate money will enable any blog to separate themselves from their lessors.
A future century's Dr Lightman will , beyond a doubt, be looking at blogs rather than lecture halls and Powerpoint magic lantern shows to locate the nexus of popular scientific debate in the 21st century....
In speaking to the NSIS of non-scientists who dared speak in public about the sacred religion of Science (all bow), Lightman was in a very real sense, speaking to the converted.
But Lightman's account of the extraordinarily wide variety of Victoria popularizers was a rebuke to popular science as it is regarded today, where most of those allowed to write about science are either prominent scientists or prominent science journalists.
It is no game for amateurs both editors and readers seem to say.
Perhaps in the area of popular science books, this is definitely true.
But citizen amateurs are writing lots about science in blogs and being seriously read - to adapt an old joke about the Internet: 'on the Internet, no one knows you're a blog'.
Meaning that visually, the blog of the top science journalist at the New York Times, of a Nobel Prize winning scientist, or from Josephine Blow from down the road , all tend to look alike.
The blogging price of entry starts low and it starts free and neither Nobel Prize-winning academic footnoting nor mega media corporate money will enable any blog to separate themselves from their lessors.
A future century's Dr Lightman will , beyond a doubt, be looking at blogs rather than lecture halls and Powerpoint magic lantern shows to locate the nexus of popular scientific debate in the 21st century....
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