Darwin ain’t your nanny

…so don’t expect him to hold your hand while you mouth the words you’re trying to read out of his tome. If he feels like quoting somebody in French and you don’t know the difference between salut and adieu, well, tant pis pour toi!

"Gratiolet opens his preface with the aphorism, 'Il est dangereux dans les sciences de conclure trop vite.' I fear he must have forgotten this sound maxim by the time he had reached the discussion of the differences between men and apes, in the body of his work."

But seriously, he quotes various people in the original French, some of it important and thorough technical information, and he never translates a word for the reader. Just assumes you can read it or will work it out if you care. The picture is the fourth instance, at least, in Descent of Man, and it’s by far the shortest and simplest quote. The first of the book proper (there’s one in the introduction, too) appears on page four of my edition and reads as follows:

“It is notorious that man is constructed on the same general type or model as other mammals. … Vulpian remarks: Les différences feelles qui existent entre l’encéphale de l’homme et celui des singes supérieurs, sont biens minimes. Il ne faut pas se faire d’illusions à cet égard. L’homme est bien plus près des singes anthropomorphes par les caractères anatomiques de son cerveau que ceux-ci ne le sout non-seulement des autres mammifères, mais même de certains quadrumanes, des guenons et des macaques. But it would be superfluous here to give further details…”

I speak a little French, but I’m missing a bit of this, too — I think feelles, at any rate, is antiquated language if it’s not a typo. The gist of the long quote is that the differences between the human brain and that of the anthropomorphous apes is very small, much smaller than the differences between the higher and lower primates. The author quoted says we should not delude ourselves about this. (Side note: sad, isn’t it, that some still insist on deluding themselves about such things more than 140 years after Darwin was quoting somebody else who already had said this.)

The handwritten quote in the image says that it’s dangerous, in the sciences, to make hasty conclusions. Same’s true outside of science, of course–first lesson of philosophy, for one.

On possibility, prudence, and a dangerous lack of wisdom

I’ve been gathering quotes on my haphazard bookmarks (aka library check-out receipts). Here are a few from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to understand a little bit about it.

There’s a new world next door. And we know how to get there.

All our self-inflicted environmental problems, all our weapons of mass destruction are products of science and technology. So, you might say, let’s just back off from science and technology. Let’s admit that these tools are simply too hot to handle. Let’s create a simpler society, in which no matter how careless or short-sighted we are, we’re incapable of altering the environment on a global or even on a regional scale. …

Such a world culture is unstable, though, in the long run if not the short–because of the speed of technological advance. … Unless there are severe constraints on thought and action, in a flash we’ll be back to where we are today. … And while such a devolution of the global civilization, were it possible, might conceivably address the problem of self-inflicted technological catastrophe, it would also leave us defenseless against eventual asteroidal and cometary impacts.

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses, a species returned to circumstances more like those for which it was originally evolved, more confident, farseeing, capable, and prudent–the sorts of beings we would want to represent us in a Universe that, for all we know, is filled with species much older, much more powerful, and very different.

[But] If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves. … If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future.

Ok, so they weren’t all on the backs of check-out receipts, but that’s mainly because I was close to the end and wanted to finish before I distracted myself with copying the text. That and I tend to go for larger pieces of paper for the really long quotes. I love how optimistic Sagan could be – and how he didn’t lose sight of the fact that while humans could do even more amazing things than we’ve already done, we pose a significant threat of blowing ourselves up first.

The ultimate romantic nerd

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

I found this video via a forum thread on a particularly win xkcd. It is weird, a little trippy, and utterly awesome. Cheers to the late, great Sagan.

The world at your feet

The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

(Franz Kafka)

In grade school, I often deferred to my parents’ 1992 Encyclopædia Britannica set, which held a prominent space in our living room, when I had an assignment that required a bit of research. I felt lucky–and a bit superior, I must admit–to have such a thorough and well-regarded source of information right at my fingertips. Practically anything I might want to know about, it seemed, was right on that bookshelf. Whew.

Now, that set seems like a relic.

Who needs a hundred pounds of printed material whose contents will be obsolete within a few years anyway, now that we have the Internet? With a four-pound device and a wireless connection to this global network, I can access any information from an up-to-date version of the Encyclopædia, not to mention a veritable deluge of scholarly entries from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and numerous other specialised sources. (Forgive the British spelling; I couldn’t resist.)

Through this interface, I can read news almost as it happens–as a matter of course–and I can follow magazines on any subject; and I can discuss this information with others who are reading it at their own terminals located around the world, all in real time. These are people with whom I never would have imagined, a couple of decades ago, I would ever speak.

This is a portal to a globally-connected communication network, and it’s a little screen sitting on my desk. I have access to much of the knowledge and research of my entire species (over its entire history), with just a few minutes and a few words typed into a device the size of an average hardback book. I can converse with people sitting at similar terminals separated by hundreds or thousands of miles’ distance. I can reach all of this without standing up from my desk, inside my home. I can carry it with me, too, but I can just as well connect to a terminal at any of numerous other locations. The network is ubiquitous, as are its terminals. It is communications interface, media outlet, entertainment complex, publishing center, darkroom, library, and storage cabinet at least as large–figuratively–as a house.

How can I not be amazed?

A poem for Wednesday: From the Daodejing

Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other;
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not possessing,
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.

` Daodejing, ch. 2

(I don’t know which translation it is.)