While waiting in my son's Dentist office today, I picked up the 12/3/07 copy of Time Magazine and read the cover article,What Makes us Moral. I found it pretty interesting and thought provoking.

I lifted the following from it:

Sociobiology has been criticized as one of the most reductive of sciences, ascribing the behavior of all living things--humans included--as nothing more than an effort to get as many genes as possible into the next generation....

My response is that the sentence, and the thinking of those who view these efforts at understanding more about life and living as reductionist might be a bit turned around. I see it more as looking backward to try to find the seed(s).   I'm a gardener. Seeds are wondrous, awesome, mysterious, even knowing what I do about how they are formed, what is inside, and about germination and plant growth. I have never looked at a flower and thought of it as nothing but a seed factory. I have never once looked at a large oak and thought it was really nothing but an acorn, though I have marveled that it came from something as small and apparently insignificant as an acorn. The tree is not diminished in any way by my knowledge that it came from that acorn.


Ivor,

You said, "And about knowledge,fwiw, when a client says (or I say)," I'm feeling......., I don't then ask for prof or a scientific demonstration. "

I'm trying to understand your context for that statement. Can you say what prompted that remark?

Janie