Science enhances our experience with the world, rather than diminishes it.
For example, by understanding genes, we better understand that all of us are a kind of palimpest, messages layered up ones before us. This is the beginning thrust of Book of The Dead, written by eminent science thinker Richard Dawkins last year.
I didn’t finish this. It didn’t capture me but I respect Dawkins. Below some notes for my future reference.
My notes:
- Palimpest: manuscript with text superimposed on other older text
- All of us are a kind of palimpest, a genetic book of all that came before us
- “If you want to succeed in the world, you have to predict, or behave as if predicting, what will happen next.”
- “All useful prediction relies on the future being approximately the same as the past”
- Fourier analysis of sound waves
- Writing hypothetically of what his thinks Scientist of the Future (sof) will be able to do
- Sir Darcy Thomson: “Everything is the way it is because it got that way”
- “It is the gene pool of the species, not the genome of the individual, that changes under the door and chisel”