A Note on Stephen J Gould...
May 28, 2002
Didn't get a chance to post something about the masterful Stephen J Gould, a great popularizer of science and the theory of evolution. James Randi, in this weeks latest edition of SWIFT provides these quotes from Gould's long and distinguished career:
Nothing is more dangerous than a dogmatic worldview � nothing more constraining, more blinding to innovation, more destructive of openness to novelty. The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. No rational order of divine intelligence unites species. The natural ties are genealogical along contingent pathways of history. The fundamentalists, by "knowing" the answers before they start (when examining evolution), and then forcing nature into the straitjacket of their discredited preconceptions, lie outside the domain of science � or of any honest intellectual inquiry.
I think those are rather fitting, given our current struggles with fundamentalism both here and abroad.
People have asked me on several occasions how I can be a skeptic and an atheist and still be moral. Well, outside of a long explanation, this is a pretty good summation:
Skepticism's bad rap arises from the impression that, however necessary the activity, it can only be regarded as a negative removal of false claims. Not so... Proper debunking is done in the interest of an alternate model of explanation, not as a nihilistic exercise. The alternate model is rationality itself, tied to moral decency � the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.
(Some have also asked, in light of my poor culinary and stylistic skills, how I can possibly be gay. My usual reply?
Just lucky, I guess.)
Posted by Jody at May 28, 2002 12:43 PM