This evening I came home from work, wandered over to Metafilter, which I had been too busy to check for most of the day, and learned that evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould had died of cancer in his home earlier today. A little while later, I wandered into the bedroom and dug out my copy of Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, which like most of the nonfiction on my bookshelf has gone largely unread since first purchased. Thumbing through it now, two passages in particular stand out, and I offer them here without comment — not because they seem especially prescient or connected to Gould’s death, but simply because they are interesting ideas, and I do not wish to forget them:
We are driven to view evolution’s thrust as predictable and progressive in order to place a positive spin upon geology’s most frightening fact — the restriction of human existence to the last sliver of earthly time. With such a spin, our limited time no longer threatens our universal importance. We may have occupied only the most recent moment as Homo sapiens, but if several billion preceding years displayed an overarching trend that sensibly culminated in our mental evolution, then our eventual origin has been implicit from the beginning of time. In one important sense, we have been around from the start. In principio erat verbum.
God bless ignorance! If we were much smarter, or had been at it much longer, we might actually be approaching a right wall of complete (or at least adequate) knowledge, thus leaving scientists with little of interest to do. We are in no danger whatever of any such limitation over the next several generations. In other words, our current storehouse of knowledge lies so far from the right wall of what we might learn that science need not fear any obolescence.