Hi Tweeters,

This is kinda long, sorry, but it does get around to birds eventually. Promise.


Steve Hallstrom says:

>Not being a scientist my thinking is a) not necessarily rational, b)
>often intuitive, and c) sympathetic to the beauty and wonder of the
>natural world bereft of science in any sense.

Steve, intuition and ratiocination are just two tools in the box; neither is
antithetical to the beauty of nature, but appreciation of that beauty can be
kinda irrelevant to certain questions, like using the score of 'Don
Giovanni' to try to design a high efficiency hypersonic wing or the floor
plan of the Parthenon to develop a vaccine for leprosy. Not to say it's
impossible that a pattern within the music or architecture couldn't trigger
an intuitive insight. Besides, to the critters and vegetation that make up
nature, there's nothing beautiful about it: it is struggle, unremitting and
eternal, filled with hunger and terror. It is we who subjectively impose
concepts of beauty on it because we are not part of that struggle to survive
and have that luxury of esthetic removal.

>It is not that science as a methodology of learning is wrong or bad. The
>knowledge arrived at by thinking rationally about facts is one set of
>knowledge. The problem that I percieve is the claim of the scientific
>community that it is the only knowledge with credence.

Let some scientists make that claim: talk's cheap. It's as patently absurd
as the community of oil painters or of plumbers saying they have a corner on
knowledge. The smart ones wouldn't and don't claim to a have a direct line
to The True Knowledge. What I've noted is that folks with the greatest minds
almost invariably exhibit a humility which would preclude such a
preposterous claim. As a really cool Zen abbot said, "The fool who pretends
to wisdom will *soon* attain it." Heh, heh, heh.

>With this we have lost the knowledge and wisdom that was everywhere
>around us and known to us in different cultures and environs. The
>indigenious understanding of medicinal powers of medicine, the
>connectivity of the electric centers of nerves to health, the many
>kinds of snows in the Artic and the ability to travel without
>compass over vast regions.

Yes, we've lost, though we have gained far more, and--I'd submit--we're
better off in net terms. But, dang, I miss that ability to cover vast areas
of the Arctic without a compass :-) Besides, the above is not entirely true:
the drug companies have made a pile of money exploiting indigenous medicine.

>Science is under attack for reasons similiar to medicine being under
>attack. In my opinion, and there is nothing scientific about its
>basis, the people are realizing the impacts of science at the alter
>not being satisfying to the soul,

If people insist on seeking salvation in any other place but their own
beings, they will eventually be betrayed by their own expectations. If
people seek spiritual fulfilment in science-as-religion, they're shopping in
the wrong store. I remember once reading a by-now deservedly obscure science
fiction novel in which there was one striking, and analagous, bit of
dialogue: a character, talking about patriotism, says something to the
effect that it's like falling in love with a woman who isn't there; since
you can't get what you want from her, you eventually feel she's betrayed
you, and end up hating her. So it has been with science and technology.

See too the current issue of Harper's Magazine and the article on American
class warfare by Michael Someone-or-other; check the section on the
diversion of popular anger onto other targets such as environmentalists, for
example.

>just as they question giving their
>lives savings and their childrens inheritance to sustain a life for
>another 2 weeks or days. Science and the technology it has praised
>as the saviour of society is clearly not.

Neither Science nor technology is responsible for the American mechanisms of
health care delivery any more than the car that transported Oswald to Dallas
was responsible for Kennedy's assassination: that's a political issue, a
human problem needing human decisions.


>I gringe each time an environmentalist yells for science as the
>basis for decisions. Too often the science that wins is that bought
>and paid for by the developers or corporations. And so the
>forest is lost, the fish gone, the birds depleted while the
>scientific knowledge is debated by those with the resources to
>fund the research.

Yes, it very painful to see this environmental degradation, but science
itself is value-neutral and what wins is political influence based on money.
The American corporate oligarchy which increasingly dictates social policy
in your country has no interest in funding science which is not directly
related to the maintenance or increase of its power and wealth, and is
certainly hostile to that which would limit its power and wealth. The Golden
Rule is, in the old joke, that he who has the gold makes the rule.

>Wasn't it science that brought us the green revolution of the 60's
>allowing the world population to double in decades? Isn't it science
>that creates the toxics that promote cancer (of course other science
>happily takes large grants to find cures)? Isn't it science that
>rejects homepathic medicine and the healing power of "faith" - a
>mental state of health?

And isn't it science which is helping establish genetic relationships
between bird species, and isn't it science that enables us to have such
high-toned discussion on this list, and isn't it science that will take us,
one day, to the stars?

>This concept of thinking rationally about facts is likened to early
>computer scientists discussions about artificial intelligence (which
>these folks clearly demonstrated). With a leap of rational logic
>that was never questioned they went from the concept that the ability
>to accumulate massive amounts of data and develop statistical and
>neural modelling would lead to a knowledge base unparalleled in
>history. Independent, self learning machines that rivaled man in
>thinking.

But they're not even close to beating us in rationalising ;-)

>The concept of wisdom never entered the discussion. It
>still doesn't, but one doesn't read much about the artificial systems
>any more. Seems the biological mechanisms are a hundred fold more
>efficient at storage of and retrieval of information and capable of
>concieving of it in patterns not represented by rational thinking of
>facts - sort of a right brain exercise.

Yes, and I'm very proud of my brain, both sides, but not feeling
particularly superior to computers that aren't quite there yet. I don't need
to be a computer nerd to see that this is just a matter of time, though.

Wisdom? Hm. There's a Latin expression I know only partially, 'something
nocent docent', maybe a another Tweet will know the whole thing, but
basically it means 'Pain Teaches': that's the price of experience, and
experience is the basis of wisdom. No wisdom without pain, pal, ain't it the
sad truth. So when you bemoan the lack of wisdom, be *careful* what you're
really asking for...

>Kind of like enjoying the butterflies and flowers while listening to
>the birds sing and not giving a damn if its a Wilson's Warbler or
>a White Crowned Sparrow, it's pretty.

Yup, nice to relax, especially to let go of the compulsive 'Naming of Names'
to which we birders so often fall prey. But then, I find giving a damn adds
a dimension or five. What a Wilson's Warbler is and does is different to a
White-crowned Sparrow. By noticing and appreciating that difference between
the two species (and what, in the final analysis, is capital-S Science but
just another way of noticing, of seeing the world?) I see two facets in the
Great Jewel of life (sorry to use such an overblown metaphor), and I see
their astounding *presence* and impermanence as individuals and as species
as metaphor for our own. Then feel ineffable gratitude and pity, even in
such a hard world as we have made of this one. Has the science of warblers
and sparrows made me less human? No: it's helped me become more so.


Cheers,

Michael Price
Vancouver BC Canada
michael_price at mindlink.bc.ca

PS: Boy, thought I'd *never* be able to steer this back to birds before
signoff! Had to go around Robin Hood's Barn to do it though :-)