Loren Eiseley, "The Hidden Teacher"
in The Unexpected Universe |
H-bomb
explosion
Einewetok Atoll |
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Mother nature cannot
be fooled, gulled, duped, or cheated. The organism who can
predict the future survives; the one who can't, doesn't. Evolution
proceeds by perpetually pruning it's handiwork.
The rules of statistics rule the universe. The tools of statistics predict the future. "S = k lnW" was the recent discovery that what man called "energy" two millennia ago—and saw as something that lets man live—is a statistical secret of Nature. She keeps her secrets well. Most men see statistics as a pack of lies. Man lives in time and space, and not alone. The child must see past her egocentrism to survive childhood and enter a larger society. Until recently, each ethnos could remain ethnocentric by proving its "superiority" through superior killing power. Something has changed. Egocentrism and ethnocentrism haven't changed. However, man's power to kill has improved by orders of magnitude, and mutually reciprocal destruction is a newly built freeway awaiting its first glazed-eyed speedsters. Man's power to deny any and all "other" life the "energy" of Mother Nature has similarly increased. Man's ability to "see" Nature's secrets hasn't. Man's minds stagnate in numerous swamps of ego- and ethno- self-indulgences while powerful instabilities of unseen mutual reciprocities among living organisms build up in human time scales. Mother Nature watches in geological and evolutionary time. The noise in the newscasts
are sounds of Mother Nature sharpening her pruning shears.
The above,
and the three pages preceding it,
Since then, time has moved through a critical point in human history, which
brought powerful positive feedback
RETURN
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