I’ve been a little crazy with getting a decent start on a major project, but last night I found at least an hour to catch the last episode (ever?) of the great Canadian tv series, Regenesis. Think of a more intelligent CSI with molecular biologists. The final frame of last nights episode, just before fade to black, was this quote:
“Science has made us gods even before we are worthy of being men”
Jean Rostand – French Biologist (1894-1977)
I’ll go into some of the implications of this at a later date, but it makes me ponder the questions surrounding what cognitive and intellectual skills has humanity picked up that allow us to transcend our biology? Language certainly. The augmented memory and cultural transfer functions of writing. But when it comes to the ability to break apart complex, seemingly disparate sets of information and remodel them so as to understand the system, does anything have the scientific method beat? I’d welcome your comments.
Given the ongoing ID distraction (it’s far too logically decrepit on the part of the IDers to be called a debate) I find the quote pretty ironic; our ability to use the findings of science is probably comparable with the sorts of Gods who would design creatures in the way it’s proposed we’re designed, which is far less than ideal.
Does anything beat science in terms of leveraging our generative abilities for the purpose of understanding the world? No, I’d say nothing comes close in terms of exhaustively matching observations to understanding. Philosophy does well, however I’ve found many philosophers to have a strong tendency to dissociate logical concepts from the thing being conceptualised. I suppose that’s valid when your focus is logic, but that logic doesn’t lead anywhere if it doesn’t incorporate relevant observations (e.g., ignoring the effect of brain damage on the mind when arguing that the mind is a concept distinct from the brain).