Raymond Tallis dives in head first.
"You've heard about some of these pet projects,
they don't really make a whole lot of sense and
sometimes dollars go to projects that have little
or nothing to do with the public good. Things
like fruit fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not."
Governor Sarah Palin, October 27th, 2008.
Sarah Palin is on the stump, rousing the faithful
in support of the causes, the values and the
world picture for which she and true Republicans
everywhere stand. She is against big government
because this means high taxes squandered on
projects that bring no conceivable benefit to
anyone apart from those who are paid out of those
taxes. An example occurs to her: fruit fly
research in Paris (adding, 'France', in case her
audience may have thought she was talking about
Paris Texas or Paris Hilton). Pause for audience
laughter. And then she adds (and you can almost
see the famous wink, though it is not there on the video), "I kid you not."
There is probably little point in explaining to
someone who (so the story goes) thinks that
'Africa' is a country, that she could not have
chosen a less telling example. Research on fruit
flies which has been conducted for over a
century, annd not just in Paris, France has
been an enormously fertile sourcee of knowledge
and insights. It has cast light on mutations, on
evolution, on the expression of genes and the
interaction between genes and the environment,
and in my own field, on the mechanisms of ageing.
As Adam Rutherford of the Guardian pointed out,
the fruit fly is on a par with the mouse as the
founding model organism for the field of
genetics. It is more useful to instead reflect on
the phenomenon of 'knowingness' and other
shallows in our consciousness, to which we are
all prone. For Palin's confident howler is a
perfect illustration of the connexion between
knowingness and lack of knowledge: the less you
know, the less you will be aware of your
ignorance. The familiar metaphor is that the
wider the circle of our knowledge, the greater
its contact with the unknown, and the more
oppressive our feeling of cognitive inadequacy.
By contrast, a small mind finds a small world to
match it, and the smaller the mind the more it feels it has the world sussed.
<http://philosophynow.org/issue72/72tallis.htm>Link
--
Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/04/sarah-palins-i-kid-you-not-knowingness.htm>monochrom
at 4/11/2009 08:20:00 PM
