Fire and Knowledge

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This is a great commercial:

Every nuclide with a half-life of less than 80 million years is missing from our region of the solar system, and every nuclide with a half-life of greater than 80 million years is present. Every single one. These data are an unbiased atomic sampling of our corner of the known universe. And the results are crystal-clear. There is a reason that the short-lived nuclides are no longer around, and the reason is obvious: The solar system is much older than 80 million years. In the billions of years since its formation, the short-lived nuclides have simply decayed themselves out of existence.

–Kenneth R. Miller, Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (orig. 1999; Harper Perennial, 2002), p. 72

Today about a billion billion insects are alive at any given time around the world. At nearest order of magnitude, this amounts to a trillion kilograms of living matter, somewhat more than the weight of humanity. Their species, most of which lack a scientific name, number into the millions. The human race is a newcomer dwelling among the six-legged masses, less than two million years old, with a tenuous grip on the planet. Insects can thrive without us, but we and most other land organisms would perish without them.

–Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (1992, Harvard University Press), p. 210-211

An earthquake is such fun when it is over. It is so exhilarating to reflect that you are not, as you well might be, lying dead under a heap of ruins.

–George Orwell, Burmese Days (1934), p. 182

Rheobatrachus silus [is] an Australian frog that swallows its fertilized eggs, broods tadpoles in its stomach, and gives birth to young frogs through its mouth.

–Stephen Jay Gould, “Here Goes Nothing” in Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History (1991), p. 294

Greenland has a new island, which has been named “Warming Island.” Here’s an excerpt from the news article:

The map of Greenland will have to be redrawn. A new island has appeared off its coast, suddenly separated from the mainland by the melting of Greenland’s enormous ice sheet, a development that is being seen as the most alarming sign of global warming.

Several miles long, the island was once thought to be the tip of a peninsula halfway up Greenland’s remote east coast but a glacier joining it to the mainland has melted away completely, leaving it surrounded by sea….

As the satellite pictures and the main photo which we publish today make clear, Warming Island has been created by a quite undeniable, rapid and enormous physical transformation and is likely to be seen around the world as a potent symbol of the coming effects of climate change.

But it is only one more example of the disintegration of the Greenland Ice Sheet, that scientists have begun to realise, only very recently, is proceeding far more rapidly than anyone thought.

Whether humans are the “main cause” or not, would it really hurt for us to stop being wasteful and polluting our beautiful home?

It is a curious paradox of science that its empirical knowledge of the material world gives rise to abstractions such as statistical averages which have no materiality and exist only as ideas. There is, empirically speaking, no average and no type. Between the species and the specimen the creature itself, the individual creature, is lost. Having been classified, dissected, and explained, the creature has disappeared into its class, anatomy, and explanation.

–Wendell Berry, Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (2000), 39