|
From a friend in England. He is far
too clever and deep a man to believe in "intellegent design" as many
fundamentalist Christians now do, but then what is he getting at in the
following quote? What at the most fundamental level is it all
about?
Ed
----- Original Message -----
From: Keith
Hudson
Sent: Friday, February 03, 2006 4:02
AM
Subject: (SAPIENTIA) Daily Wisdom
(142)
Friday's book is Mencken's Dictionary of Quotations and the random page opened on "Experiment". I've chosen a quotation by one of the greatest minds of all time, Francis Bacon. His definition of the scientific method -- the to-ing and fro-ing between experiment and theory -- is probably the best ever written. And yet there is still one more component of science, and this is one it shares with life itself. This is serendipitous discovery. Sir Alexander Fleming's discovery of penicillin in a petri dish left carelessly on the shelf of an open window is an example we all know about. Of course, it was a discovery that could only have happened to a prepared mind. As for life and evolution, the smallest accidental change to one of the groups on one of our DNA strands can change the character of a whole gene and can take a species along a new avenue, even into a new species in due course. Is there a prepared, observing mind involved here? Perhaps there is. Physicists are telling us increasingly that only information is the foundation of all the "hard" things we see or bump into us. Is this a mind? Or a mind-in-progress, looking with fascination as to what life -- this most unlikely event -- is actually producing? And does what each of us does and thinks in life actually affect this information network? Could be! "All true and fruitful natural philosophy hath a double scale or ladder, ascendent and decendent, ascending from experiments to the invention of cuases, and descending from causes to the invention of new experiments." Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning II (1605) Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.1.375 / Virus Database: 267.15.0/249 - Release Date: 02/02/2006 |
_______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] http://fes.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
