You Don't Know Diddly-Squat.
Excellent article.
trof
"Ignorance has afflicted humanity in all eras, but – and this is an important point – its nature and causes have changed. Early on, in the infancy and childhood of our species, ignorance was pervasive and inescapable. It was genuine, full-fledged ignorance: our ancestors literally couldn’t know shit, other than what they instinctively had to know to survive in a hostile, natural environment. About the bigger questions that were totally out of their ken – e.g., Where do storms come from? – they just made shit up, mostly out of fear stemming from lack of control. So they invoked powerful, invisible agents, an “explanation” and coping strategy now recognized by enlightened people as the god-of-the-gaps explanation. Only, in those prehistoric times, it was all gaps, all the way down. The result was what we call human nature, with all its tattered and obsolete baggage, including superstition, gods and religion, animal and human(!) sacrifice, soothsayers, shamans, faith healing, tribalism . . . and I could go on.
We have clearly come a long way since those dark times, thanks to a reality-based mindset that overcame formidable odds to give us science and scholarship. No thanks to religion and political ideologies that erected obstacles to progress at every turn. And the obstruction continues: the frightened, the ignorant, and the superstitious are still with us in droves – no longer out of necessity but due to that pesky old human nature that still tends to default to conservative, collective ideology. Only these days the ideologues have to deal with a challenge their primitive ancestors didn’t face: verifiable scientific evidence. In order to maintain their Medieval world views, they now rely on stratagems our ancestors didn’t need – denial and rationalization."
Much more here: http://tpjmagazine.us/20120422scijunkie
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Hi, babe.
