From Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos, The Book”, Chapter 11, (Ballantyne Books paperback edition Nov.1985, pages 227-231).
“…..The information stored in the DNA double helix of a whale or a human or of any other beast or vegetable on earth is written in a language of four letters – the four different kinds of nucleotides, the molecular components that make up DNA. How many bits of information are contained on the hereditary material of various life forms? How many yes/no answers to the various biological questions are written in the language of life? A virus needs about 10,000 bits – roughly equivalent to the amount of information on a full page. But the viral information is simple, exceeding compact, extraordinarily efficient. Reading it requires very close attention. These are the instructions it needs to infect some other organism and to reproduce itself – the only things that viruses are any good at. A bacterium uses roughly a million bits of information – which is about 100 printed pages. Bacteria have a lot more to do than viruses. Unlike the viruses, they are not thoroughgoing parasites. Bacteria have to make a living. And a free-swimming one-celled amoeba is much more sophisticated; with about four hundred million bits in its DNA, it would require some eighty 500-page volumes to make another amoeba.
A whale or a human being needs something like five billion bits. These bits of information in our encyclopaedia of life – in the nucleus of each of our cells – if written out in, say, English, would fill a thousand volumes. Every one of your hundred trillion cells contains a complete library of instructions on how to make every part of you. Every cell in your body arises by successive cell divisions from a single cell, a fertilized egg generated by your parents. Every time that cell divided, in the many embryological steps that went into making you, the original set of genetic instructions was duplicated with great fidelity. So your liver cells have some unemployed knowledge about how to make your bone cells, and vice-versa. The genetic library contains everything your body knows how to do on its own. The ancient information is written in exhaustive, careful redundant detail – how to laugh, how to sneeze, how to walk, how to recognize patterns, how to reproduce, how to digest an apple.
Eating an apple is an immensely complicated process. In fact, if I had to synthesize my own enzymes, if I consciously had to remember and direct all the chemical steps required to get energy out of food, I would probably starve. But even bacteria do anaerobic glycolysis, which is why apples rot: lunchtime for the microbes. They and we and all creatures in between possess many similar genetic instructions. Our separate gene libraries have many pages in common, another reminder of our common evolutionary heritage. Our technology can duplicate only a tiny fraction of the intricate biochemistry that our bodies effortlessly perform: we have only just begun to study these processes. Evolution, however, has had billions of years of practice. DNA knows.
But suppose what you had to do was so complicated that even several billion bits was insufficient. Suppose the environment was changing so fast that the pre-coded genetic encyclopaedia, which served perfectly well before, was no longer entirely adequate. Then even a gene library of 1,000 volumes would not be enough. That is why we have brains.
Like all our organs, the brain has evolved, increasing in complexity and information content, over millions of years. Its structure reflects all the stages through which it has passed. This brain evolved from the inside out. Deep inside is the oldest part, the brainstem, which conducts the basic biological functions, including the rhythms of life – heartbeat and respiration. According to a provocative insight by Paul Maclean, the higher functions of the brain evolved in three successive stages. Capping the brainstem is the R-complex, the seat of aggression, ritual, territoriality and social hierarchy, which evolved hundreds of millions years ago in our reptilian ancestors. Deep inside the skull of every one of us there is something like the brain of a crocodile. Surrounding the R-complex is the limbic system or mammalian brain, which evolved tens of millions of years ago in ancestors who were mammals but not yet primates. It is a major source of our moods and emotions, of our concern and care for the young.
And finally, on the outside, living in uneasy truce with the more primitive brains beneath, is the cerebral cortex, which evolved millions of years ago in our primate ancestors. The cerebral cortex, where matter is transformed into consciousness, is the point of embarkation for all our cosmic voyages. Comprising more than two thirds of the brain mass, it is the realm of both intuition and critical analysis. It is here that we have ideas and inspirations, here that we read and write, here that we do mathematics and compose music. The cortex regulates our conscious lives. It is the distinction of our species, the seat of our humanity. Civilization is the product of the cerebral cortex.
The language of the brain is not the DNA language of the genes. Rather, what we know is encoded in cells called neurons – microscopic electrochemical switching elements, typically a few hundredths of a millimeter across. Each of us has perhaps a hundred billion neurons, comparable to the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Many neurons have thousands of connections to their neighbors. There is something like a hundred trillion such connections in the human cerebral cortex.”
“…..The information content of the human brain expressed in bits is probably comparable to the total number of connections among the neurons – about a hundred trillion bits. If written out in English, say, that information would fill some twenty million volumes, as many as in the world’s largest libraries. The equivalent of twenty million books is inside the heads of every one of us. The brain is a very big place in a very small space. Most of the books in the brain are in the cerebral cortex. Down in the basement are the functions our remote ancestors mainly depended on – aggression, child-rearing, fear, sex, the willingness to follow leaders blindly. Of the higher brain functions – reading, writing, speaking – seem to be localized in particular places in the cerebral cortex. Memories, on the other hand, are stored redundantly in many locales…….”
“…..The brain does much more than recollect. It compares, synthesizes, analyzes, generates abstractions. We must figure out much more than our genes can know. That is why the brain library is some ten thousand times larger than the gene library. Our passion for learning, evident in the behavior of every toddler, is the tool for our survival. Emotions and ritualized behavior patterns are built deeply into us. They are part of our humanity. But they are not characteristically human. Many other animals have feelings. What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.”
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
The Natural Sciences
From Edward O. Wilson’s “Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge”, chapter 4, pp.45-48
“….Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences – physics, chemistry and biology – humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep, shadowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above, and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong, because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined……
With instrumental science humanity has escaped confinement and prodigiously extended its grasp of physical reality. Once we were nearly blind, now we can see – literally. Visible light, we have learned, is not the sole illuminating energy of the universe, as pre-scientific common sense decreed. It is instead an infinitesimal sliver of electromagnetic radiation, comprising wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter), within a spectrum that ranges from gamma waves trillions of times shorter to radio waves trillions of times longer. Radiation over this span, in wildly varying amounts, continually rain down on our bodies. But without instruments we were oblivious to its existence. Because the human retina is rigged to report only 400 to 700 nanometers, the unaided brain concludes that only visible light exists.
Many kinds of animals know better. They live in a different visual world, oblivious to part of the human visible spectrum, sensitive to some wavelengths outside it. Below 400 nanometers, butterflies find flowers and pinpoint pollen and nectar sources by the pattern of ultraviolet rays reflected off the petals. Where we see a plain yellow or white blossom, they see spots and concentric circles in light and dark. The patterns have evolved in plants to guide insect pollinators to the anthers and nectar pools.
With the aid of appropriate instruments we can now see the world with butterfly eyes.
Scientists have entered the visual world of animals and beyond because they understand the electromagnetic spectrum. They can translate any wavelength into visible light and audible sound and generate most of the spectrum from diverse energy sources. By manipulating selected segments of the electromagnetic spectrum they peer downward to the trajectories of sub-atomic particles and outward to star birth in distant galaxies whose incoming light dates back to near the beginning of the universe. They (more accurately we, since scientific knowledge is universally available) can visualize matter across thirty seven orders of magnitude. The largest galactic cluster is larger than the smallest known particle by a factor of one with about thirty-seven zeroes following it.
I mean no disrespect when I say that pre-scientific people, regardless of their innate genius, could never guess the physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense……and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest pre-scientific probe into the unknown, has yielded zero. No shaman’s spell or fast upon a sacred mountain can summon the electromagnetic spectrum. Prophets of the great religions were kept unaware of its existence, not because of a secretive god but because they lacked the hard-won knowledge of physics………
All our other senses have been expanded by science. Once we were deaf; now we can hear everything. The human auditory range is 20 to 20,000 Hz, or cycles of air compression per second. Above that range, flying bats broadcast ultrasonic pulses into the night air and listen to echoes to locate moths and other insects on the wing. Many of their potential prey listen with ears tuned to the same frequencies as the bats……..
We have even uncovered basic senses entirely outside the human repertory. Where humans detect electricity only indirectly by a tingling of skin or flash of light, the electric fishes of Africa or South America, a medley of freshwater eels, catfish, and elephant-nosed fishes, live in a galvanic world. They generate charged fields around their bodies with trunk muscle tissue that has been modified by evolution into organic batteries……They also communicate with one another by means of coded electrical bursts. Zoologists, using generators and detectors, can join the conversation. They are able to talk as through a fish’s skin.
From these and countless other examples can be drawn an informal rule of biological evolution important to the understanding of the human condition: if an organic sensor can be imagined that picks up any signal from the environment, there exists a species somewhere that possesses it. The bountiful powers of life expressed in such diversity raise a question about the incapacity of the unaided human senses. Why can’t our species, the supposed summum bonum of Creation, do as much as all the animals combined, and more? Why were we brought into the world physically handicapped?
Evolutionary biology offers a simple answer. Natural selection……prepares organisms only for necessities…..It follows that each species lives in its own sensory world.…….Natural selection, in short, does not anticipate future needs. But this principle, while explaining so much so well, presents a difficulty. If the principle is universally true, how did natural selection prepare the mind for civilization before civilization existed? That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.
“….Without the instruments and accumulated knowledge of the natural sciences – physics, chemistry and biology – humans are trapped in a cognitive prison. They are like intelligent fish born in a deep, shadowed pool. Wondering and restless, longing to reach out, they think about the world outside. They invent ingenious speculations and myths about the origin of the confining waters, of the sun and the sky and the stars above, and the meaning of their own existence. But they are wrong, always wrong, because the world is too remote from ordinary experience to be merely imagined……
With instrumental science humanity has escaped confinement and prodigiously extended its grasp of physical reality. Once we were nearly blind, now we can see – literally. Visible light, we have learned, is not the sole illuminating energy of the universe, as pre-scientific common sense decreed. It is instead an infinitesimal sliver of electromagnetic radiation, comprising wavelengths of 400 to 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter), within a spectrum that ranges from gamma waves trillions of times shorter to radio waves trillions of times longer. Radiation over this span, in wildly varying amounts, continually rain down on our bodies. But without instruments we were oblivious to its existence. Because the human retina is rigged to report only 400 to 700 nanometers, the unaided brain concludes that only visible light exists.
Many kinds of animals know better. They live in a different visual world, oblivious to part of the human visible spectrum, sensitive to some wavelengths outside it. Below 400 nanometers, butterflies find flowers and pinpoint pollen and nectar sources by the pattern of ultraviolet rays reflected off the petals. Where we see a plain yellow or white blossom, they see spots and concentric circles in light and dark. The patterns have evolved in plants to guide insect pollinators to the anthers and nectar pools.
With the aid of appropriate instruments we can now see the world with butterfly eyes.
Scientists have entered the visual world of animals and beyond because they understand the electromagnetic spectrum. They can translate any wavelength into visible light and audible sound and generate most of the spectrum from diverse energy sources. By manipulating selected segments of the electromagnetic spectrum they peer downward to the trajectories of sub-atomic particles and outward to star birth in distant galaxies whose incoming light dates back to near the beginning of the universe. They (more accurately we, since scientific knowledge is universally available) can visualize matter across thirty seven orders of magnitude. The largest galactic cluster is larger than the smallest known particle by a factor of one with about thirty-seven zeroes following it.
I mean no disrespect when I say that pre-scientific people, regardless of their innate genius, could never guess the physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense……and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest pre-scientific probe into the unknown, has yielded zero. No shaman’s spell or fast upon a sacred mountain can summon the electromagnetic spectrum. Prophets of the great religions were kept unaware of its existence, not because of a secretive god but because they lacked the hard-won knowledge of physics………
All our other senses have been expanded by science. Once we were deaf; now we can hear everything. The human auditory range is 20 to 20,000 Hz, or cycles of air compression per second. Above that range, flying bats broadcast ultrasonic pulses into the night air and listen to echoes to locate moths and other insects on the wing. Many of their potential prey listen with ears tuned to the same frequencies as the bats……..
We have even uncovered basic senses entirely outside the human repertory. Where humans detect electricity only indirectly by a tingling of skin or flash of light, the electric fishes of Africa or South America, a medley of freshwater eels, catfish, and elephant-nosed fishes, live in a galvanic world. They generate charged fields around their bodies with trunk muscle tissue that has been modified by evolution into organic batteries……They also communicate with one another by means of coded electrical bursts. Zoologists, using generators and detectors, can join the conversation. They are able to talk as through a fish’s skin.
From these and countless other examples can be drawn an informal rule of biological evolution important to the understanding of the human condition: if an organic sensor can be imagined that picks up any signal from the environment, there exists a species somewhere that possesses it. The bountiful powers of life expressed in such diversity raise a question about the incapacity of the unaided human senses. Why can’t our species, the supposed summum bonum of Creation, do as much as all the animals combined, and more? Why were we brought into the world physically handicapped?
Evolutionary biology offers a simple answer. Natural selection……prepares organisms only for necessities…..It follows that each species lives in its own sensory world.…….Natural selection, in short, does not anticipate future needs. But this principle, while explaining so much so well, presents a difficulty. If the principle is universally true, how did natural selection prepare the mind for civilization before civilization existed? That is the great mystery of human evolution: how to account for calculus and Mozart.
The Edge of Forever
From Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos, The Book”, Chapter 10, (Ballantyne Books paperback edition Nov.1985, pages 200-201 and 212-213).
“….”Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before creation?.....
How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression…….
Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end………”
{The Mahapurana (The Great Legend), Jinasena (India, ninth century)}
Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density – a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures – perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all. It was not that all the matter and energy were squeezed into a minor corner of the present universe; rather, the entire universe, matter and energy and the space they fill, occupied a very small volume. There was not much space for events to happen in.
In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased……..”
“….If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?
Every culture has a myth of a world before creation, and of the creation of the world, often by the mating of gods or by the hatching of a cosmic egg. Commonly, the universe is naively imagined to follow human or animal precedent. Here, for example, are five small extracts from such myths, at different levels of sophistication, from the Pacific Basin:
In the very beginning everything was resting in perpetual darkness; night oppressed everything like an impenetrable thicket.
(The Great Father myth of the Aranda people of Central Australia)
All was in suspense, all calm, all in silence, all motionless and still; and the expanse of the sky was empty.
(The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya)
Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud that floats in nothingness. He slept not, for there was no sleep, he hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger. So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind. He said to himself, “I will make a thing”.
(A myth from Maiana, Gilbert Islands)
First there was the great cosmic egg. Inside the egg was chaos, and floating in chaos was P’an Ku, the Undeveloped, the divine Embryo. And P’an Ku burst out of the egg, four times larger than any man today, with a hammer and chisel in his hand with which he fashioned the world.
(The P’an Ku myths, China, around third century)
Before heaven and earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous….
That which was clear and light drifted up to become heaven, while that which was heavy and turbid solidified to become earth. It was very easy for the pure, fine material to come together, but extremely difficult for the heavy, turbid material to solidify. Therefore heaven was completed first and earth assumed shape after. When heaven and earth were joined in emptiness and all was unwrought simplicity, then without having been created things came into being. This was the great Oneness but all became different……….
(Huai-nan Tau, China, around first century, B.C.)
Theses myths are tributes to human audacity. The chief difference between them and our modern scientific myth of the Big Bang is that science is self-questioning, and that we can perform experiments and observations to test our ideas. But those other creation stories are worthy of our deep respect……….”
“….”Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before creation?.....
How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression…….
Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end………”
{The Mahapurana (The Great Legend), Jinasena (India, ninth century)}
Ten or twenty billion years ago, something happened – the Big Bang, the event that began our universe. Why it happened is the greatest mystery we know. That it happened is reasonably clear. All the matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at extremely high density – a kind of cosmic egg, reminiscent of the creation myths of many cultures – perhaps into a mathematical point with no dimensions at all. It was not that all the matter and energy were squeezed into a minor corner of the present universe; rather, the entire universe, matter and energy and the space they fill, occupied a very small volume. There was not much space for events to happen in.
In that titanic cosmic explosion, the universe began an expansion which has never ceased……..”
“….If the general picture of an expanding universe and a Big Bang is correct, we must then confront still more difficult questions. What were conditions like at the time of the Big Bang? What happened before that? Was there a tiny universe devoid of all matter, and then the matter suddenly created from nothing? How does that happen? In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must of course ask next where God comes from. And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and decide that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. Or, if we say that God has always existed, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?
Every culture has a myth of a world before creation, and of the creation of the world, often by the mating of gods or by the hatching of a cosmic egg. Commonly, the universe is naively imagined to follow human or animal precedent. Here, for example, are five small extracts from such myths, at different levels of sophistication, from the Pacific Basin:
In the very beginning everything was resting in perpetual darkness; night oppressed everything like an impenetrable thicket.
(The Great Father myth of the Aranda people of Central Australia)
All was in suspense, all calm, all in silence, all motionless and still; and the expanse of the sky was empty.
(The Popol Vuh of the Quiché Maya)
Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud that floats in nothingness. He slept not, for there was no sleep, he hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger. So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind. He said to himself, “I will make a thing”.
(A myth from Maiana, Gilbert Islands)
First there was the great cosmic egg. Inside the egg was chaos, and floating in chaos was P’an Ku, the Undeveloped, the divine Embryo. And P’an Ku burst out of the egg, four times larger than any man today, with a hammer and chisel in his hand with which he fashioned the world.
(The P’an Ku myths, China, around third century)
Before heaven and earth had taken form all was vague and amorphous….
That which was clear and light drifted up to become heaven, while that which was heavy and turbid solidified to become earth. It was very easy for the pure, fine material to come together, but extremely difficult for the heavy, turbid material to solidify. Therefore heaven was completed first and earth assumed shape after. When heaven and earth were joined in emptiness and all was unwrought simplicity, then without having been created things came into being. This was the great Oneness but all became different……….
(Huai-nan Tau, China, around first century, B.C.)
Theses myths are tributes to human audacity. The chief difference between them and our modern scientific myth of the Big Bang is that science is self-questioning, and that we can perform experiments and observations to test our ideas. But those other creation stories are worthy of our deep respect……….”
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Centuries of Search
“….A time will come when diligent research over long periods will bring to light things which now lie hidden. A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject….And so this knowledge will be unfolded only through long successive ages. There will come a time when our descendants will be amazed that we did not know things that are so plain to them……Many discoveries are reserved for ages still to come, when memory of us will have been effaced. Our universe is a sorry little affair unless it has in it something for every age to investigate……Nature does not reveal her mysteries once and for all.”
Seneca, Natural Questions, Book 7,(first century AD)
“……Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before creation?........How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression……
Know that the world was uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.”
The Mahapurana, The Great Legend, Jinsena, India, Ninth century
“…….we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens……The diversity
of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking for fresh nourishment.”
Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum
“……If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing to his gods……When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon…..does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?”
Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron von Holbach, Système de la Nature, London, 1770
“…….Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed…… There is grandeur in this view of life…..that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
“…….We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times – a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes……How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos - The Book, (p.275), New York, 1985
Seneca, Natural Questions, Book 7,(first century AD)
“……Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised and should be rejected.
If God created the world, where was he before creation?........How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression……
Know that the world was uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end.”
The Mahapurana, The Great Legend, Jinsena, India, Ninth century
“…….we ought not to ask why the human mind troubles to fathom the secrets of the heavens……The diversity
of the phenomena of Nature is so great, and the treasures hidden in the heavens so rich, precisely in order that the human mind shall never be lacking for fresh nourishment.”
Johannes Kepler, Mysterium Cosmographicum
“……If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing to his gods……When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon…..does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?”
Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron von Holbach, Système de la Nature, London, 1770
“…….Probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from one primordial form, into which life was first breathed…… There is grandeur in this view of life…..that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1859
“…….We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where life is sparked by sunlight and lightning in the airs and waters of youthful planets; where the raw material for biological evolution is sometimes made by the explosion of a star halfway across the Milky Way; where a thing as beautiful as a galaxy is formed a hundred billion times – a Cosmos of quasars and quarks, snowflakes and fireflies, where there may be black holes and other universes……How pallid by comparison are the pretensions of superstition and pseudoscience; how important it is for us to pursue and understand science, that characteristically human endeavor.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos - The Book, (p.275), New York, 1985
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