Words&Dirt

“‘To all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and, uh, the, the shackles of oppression, he offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!’ His delivery grew more assured now. ‘Armed with superb physical and mental training, a crack team of assistants, and ancient wisdom, he roams the globe, performing amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains! He is’––he paused and threw Joe a helpless, gleeful glance, on the point of vanishing completely into his story now–– ‘the Escapist!’”

––The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, pg. 121

“We are all still primitives compared to what we might become. Hunter-gatherers and college-educated urbanites alike are aware of fewer than one in a thousand of the kinds of organisms––plants, animals, and microorganisms––that sustain the ecosystems around them. They know very little about the real biological and physical forces that create air, water, and soil. Even the most able naturalist can trace no more than a faint outline of an ecosystem to which he has devoted a lifetime of study.

Yet the great gaps in knowledge are beginning to be filled. That is the strength of cumulative science in a literate world. People learn and forget, they die, and even the strongest institutions they erect deteriorate, but knowledge continues to expand globally while passing from one generation to the next. Any trained person can retrieve and augment any part of it. By this means all the species of organisms in ecosystems such as the Kalahari Desert will eventually come to be known. They will be given scientific names. Their place in the food web will be discovered, their anatomy and physiology penetrated to the level of cell and molecule, the instinctive behavior of the animals reduced to neuron circuitry, then to neurotransmitters and ion exchange. The explanations can be joined in space from molecule to ecosystem, and in time from microsecond to millennium.

With consilient explanation, the units at different levels of biological organization can be reassembled. Among them will be whole plants and animals as we normally see them––not as collections of molecules in biochemical time, too small and fast-changing to be visible to the unaided eye, not as whole populations living in the slow motion of ecological time, but as individual plants and animals confined to the sliver of organismic time where human consciousness, being organismic itself, is forced to exist.

Returning to that narrow sliver after the science-led grand tour of space-time, we arrive home in the world for which the evolution of the brain prepared us.”

––Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, by Edward O. Wilson, pg. 257-8