Hey Ward!

What a pleasure to see you online some more ;) I resisted responding to
_every_ one of your intriguing points, but will indulge myself a little
bit...

Ward:
>I have had some discussions with a few people in the scientific world about
>the lack of willingness to put their knowledge and discoveries into plain
>language and write popularly so the average person with other interests can
>quickly understand the impact of scientific discoveries and knowledge in
>determining the technologies the world runs on that we ought to be more
>consciously taking a hand in deciding about. And frankly, they "just don't
>get it." I find that very frustrating, which is why I sometimes write these
>long treatises, because the science can be made very understandable if one
>just makes the effort.

The good pop science writers out there (which you, Ward, should consider as
a career for yourself IMO) make all the difference in the world to me.
There are _millions_ of reports of research every year in all the
disciplines and it grows and grows. Good pop scince writers help to bring
it all together for me. Somewhere I read that a genius in the mid-1800's
would've been the last human who _could_ have a conceptual grasp of all
Western scientific and mathematical knowledge accumulated to that point.
Since then it has surged out-of-control--if we define control as a
society's ability to assimilate and use new knowledge and understandings.
Everyone is by the "limitation-of-reality" a specialist these days since no
one can know more than a single digit per cent of what is knowable these
days.

This explosion of knowledge is not "contained" by any single general
paradigm anymore. Religion seems naive; Science is "ammoral"--neither is
dealing anymore (or can deal anymore) with the whole pie. Religion has
always considered the whole pie its domain and but has been dwarfed by
science. Particular scientific inquiries and fields of thought almost seem
to revel at times in ignoring every structural level but their own; and
even the grand masters of science--cosmology and physics--don't pretend to
have much to say about daily life, and certainly little about morality.

Yet it seems to me that by nature we still want to understand the world we
live in, that we seek some over-riding paradigm that explains/contains our
experience. Besides cooking ;) every culture seems to have "religion" even
if it is in the form of a philosophy (Buddhism, etc) which is supposed to
tie it all together, supposed to deal with the whole pie. But now we seem
to be overloading any paradigm we can invent with the information glut,
like a bucket which was full of water decades ago but is still being
filled/overflowing with water.

At least _I_ find myself wanting to make some sense of it all (there seems
to be some gray matter left over after I have found my food and tried to
procreate ;)), perhaps even neurotically so. In any case, this is probably
why evolutionary psychology, Darwinian medicine, even the paleo-diets
(including instincto) are currently so fascinating to me. They are
_generalist_ disciplines which span many other disciplines and time scales
and have great explanatory powers even in their infantile forms. Whatever
they produce will necessarily be too simplistic to be True, but to the
degree that they may offer a working paradigm during these strange decades,
they might be extremely useful.

>You know, this reminds me, I may come across as someone who is atheistic or
>something, but actually I am very keenly interested in psychological
>metaphysical questions, as much or more so than scientific ones.

Where science and religion (or doubt and faith) meet is an interesting
place indeed. Anyway, you don't come across that way to _me_ ;)

>I axed an entire additional section out of the treatise that went into why it is that
>it's only western religions that seems to have a problem with evolution.
>Eastern religions by and large don't seem it as much of a problem, at least
>from what I can tell. It seems to be primarily Christianity that has a big
>beef with evolution (and of these, more the fundamentalists, since others
>have slowly over the decades been giving gradual assent to evolution as
>explaining the physical side of creation. I dunno really about other
>western religions' possible problems with it, such as Islam, but here in
>America it's a Christian phenomenon.

It would be an interesting study. My guess is that it is that the "daddy
religions" (fundamentalist Christian and Islam esp.) have similar problems
with evolution, whereas Buddhism, Taoism, etc (more philosophies than
religions really) would tolerate, even welcome it. I wonder more about
archaic or "primitive" religions (reportedly usually "mommy" based). I'd
like to try the basics of evolution out on a Cro-Magnon from 30,00 YA and
see how it sits with whatever religion s/he is into. =:O I suspect
instincto might not make much of an impression on them though ;) Now
there's an image, eh? Ray Audette explaining the basics of paleo-diet to a
Cro-Magnon--ah, Neanderthal would be best, eh?

>Although many of the eastern religions (primarily Buddhist and Hindu ones)
>suffer from the psychological motivation of wanting to avoid this world
>entirely and "get off the wheel of existence"

This I think is where the new-agey (for lack of a better word) rawists have
such a problem with the paleo-diet arguments. Even if they grant that they
are true the whole idea in much of the "neo-eastern-new-agey" rap is that
we need to rise above that terrible animal nature. In that sense, the "rise
above the physical plane" bit is almost antithetical to evolutionary
arguments. The unspoken reaction seems to be, "It doesn't matter where
we've come from, because I have a spiritual vision which rises above any
such mundane _physical_ considerations."

IMO, however, this borders on denial of biological reality. I _love_ my
animal nature, especially my mammalian nature, and even more especially my
human nature. I don't want to rise above any of it--I want to revel in it!
Pleasures of the flesh--including the cranial flesh. ;)

If I'm flunking Karma 101, that's OK with me since I'd love to come back
around and give it a whole nother go (though I suspect the best I could do
would be to push up some daisies ;)).

Cheers,
Kirt