Learning from Volvox

By Terry Morgan

Learning from Volvox - Terry Morgan
  • Release Date: 2023-08-23
  • Genre: Science & Nature Essays

Description

A question:
Which is best? Five billlion years of evolution by natural selection and survival of the fittest or evolution by a few years of cultural and social change?
A warning:
Refusing to accept well established scientific facts is not social or cultural evolution. It is backward evolution. It’s devolution. It means a species can, over time, revert back to a more primitive form.
A theory:
Led by the shortsighted, overconfident and incompetent has human evolution moved to survival of the richest?
And a quotation from Carl Sagan
“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don’t know anything about it? …
“Science is more than a body of knowledge, it’s a way of thinking. A way of sceptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask sceptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be sceptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.”
Carl Sagan 1996