More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
rump roast on the supermarket cow
Well into my procreating years I am, so far, voluntarily childless, having squandered my biological resources reading and writing, doing research, helping out friends and students, and jogging in circles, ignoring the solemn imperative to spread my genes. By Darwinian standards I am a horrible mistake, a pathetic loser, not one iota less than if I were a card-carrying member of Queer Nation. But I am happy to be that way, and if my genes don’t like it, they can go jump in the lake.
writer Terry Bisson, widely circulated on the Internet, which has the incredulity going the other way. It reports a conversation between the leader of an interplanetary explorer fleet and his commander in chief, and begins as follows:
In The Ascent of Man, Jacob Bronowski wrote: I remember as a young father tiptoeing to the cradle of my first daughter when she was four or five days old, and thinking, “These marvelous fingers, every joint so perfect, down to the fingernails. I could not have designed that detail in a million years.” But of course it is exactly a million years that it took me, a million years that it took mankind … to reach its present stage of evolution.
More recently, computer simulations from the new field of Artificial Life have shown the power of natural selection to evolve organisms with complex adaptations. And what better demonstration than everyone’s favorite example of a complex adaptation, the eye? The computer scientists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger simulated a three-layer slab of virtual skin resembling a light-sensitive spot on a primitive organism. It was a simple sandwich made up of a layer of pigmented cells on the bottom, a layer of light-sensitive cells above it, and a layer of translucent cells forming a protective cover.
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Can we even imagine what it would be like not to think of other people as having minds? The psychologist Alison Gopnik imagines it would be like this: At the top of my field of vision is a blurry edge of nose, in front are waving hands … Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth; they shift and protrude in unexpected ways. … Two dark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises. … The noisy skin-bags suddenly [move] toward you, and their noises [grow] loud, and
...more
Without an understanding of what the mind was designed to do in the environment in which we evolved, the unnatural activity called formal education is unlikely to succeed.
They don’t pause to wonder why a God who knows our intentions has to listen to our prayers, or how a God can both see into the future and care about how we choose to act. Compared to the mind-bending ideas of modern science, religious beliefs are notable for their lack of imagination (God is a jealous man; heaven and hell are places; souls are people who have sprouted wings). That is because religious concepts are human concepts with a few emendations that make them wondrous and a longer list of standard traits that make them sensible to our ordinary ways of knowing.
The problem with the religious solution was stated by Mencken when he wrote, “Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.” For anyone with a persistent intellectual curiosity, religious explanations are not worth knowing because they pile equally baffling enigmas on top of the original ones. What gave God a mind, free will, knowledge, certainty about right and wrong? How does he infuse them into a universe that seems to run just fine according to physical laws? How does he get ghostly souls to interact with hard matter? And most perplexing of all, if the
...more
