Quote of the Week
(June 27, 2022)

It would be well for biologists to pull back a little from the religious wars and realize that the truly fundamental problem most people have with much of the biological and evolutionary literature is rather simple and needs respectful addressing. We read stories of organisms whose activity, from the molecular level on up, displays meaningful intricacies and coherent, eloquent plot lines that never cease to surprise us, far outshining the highest literary achievements of a Shakespeare or Goethe or Pushkin.

And then we hear that all this meaningful activity is, somehow, meaningless or a product of meaninglessness. This, I believe, is the real issue troubling the majority of the American populace when they are asked about their belief in evolution. They see one thing and then are told, more or less directly, that they are really seeing its denial. Yet no one has ever explained to them how you get meaning from meaninglessness — a difficult enough task once you realize that we cannot articulate any knowledge of the world at all except in the language of meaning.

(from “How Biologists Lost Sight of the Meaning of Life”)

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