Hello again. I suppose this is too much posting, but in the same issue of The Atlantic (a mag that has declined somewhat but still has good content) is an article about Freeman Dyson, a scientist whom the article's author anoints as the heir to Einstein. I can't resist mentioning it because of the interesting take on religion (oh, have I posted in the wrong place?) The religious conflict in this case concerns environmentalism vs. technology, or the "indomitable ingenuity of man." Dyson is the apostle of the latter, the author, Kenneth Brower, the advocate of the former. Dyson is known currently as perhaps the highest-profile doubter of global warming. Doubter might not be the best word, because Dyson appears to simply think it doesn't matter whether the earth is warming. The change could do us good, he thinks, and anyway we have the ability to counter any effect that our carbon-making may cause.
Dyson is so extreme (in Brower's view and mine) that he looks forward to a time when biotech becomes the creative province of the common person:
"Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures … New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture. Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora.
We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes."
Dyson's view is cosmic, way beyond the scope of what almost any other human is thinking. But for us terrestrials, this thinking might do us in. Brower concludes:
"But the operative word for me is cosmic. The word terrestrial would not apply. In taking the measure of the universe, Dyson fails only in his appraisal of the small, spherical piece of the cosmos under his feet. Or so it seems to me. For whatever reason, he is emotionally incapable of seeing the true colors of the rampant ingenuity of our species and calculating where our cleverness, as opposed to our wisdom, is taking us."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/arc ... us/8306/3/
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