"Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars—mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is "mere". I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more?
"The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination—stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern—of which I am a part—perhaps my stuff was belched from some forgotten star, as one is belching there. Or see them with the greater eye of Palomar, rushing all apart from some common starting point when they were perhaps all together. What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it.
"For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined! Why do the poets of the present not speak of it?
"What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
—Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol I, p. 3-6 (line breaks added)
That's a real question, there on the last line—what kind of poet can write about Jupiter the god, but not Jupiter the immense sphere? Whether or not Feynman meant the question rhetorically, it has a real answer:
If Jupiter is like us, he can fall in love, and lose love, and regain love.
If Jupiter is like us, he can strive, and rise, and be cast down.
If Jupiter is like us, he can laugh or weep or dance.
If Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, it is more difficult for the poet to make us feel.
There are poets and storytellers who say that the Great Stories are timeless, and they never change, they only ever retold. They say, with pride, that Shakespeare and Sophocles are bound by ties of craft stronger than mere centuries; that the two playwrights could have swapped times without a jolt.
Donald Brown once compiled a list of over two hundred "human universals", found in all (or a vast supermajority of) studied human cultures, from San Francisco to the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert. Marriage is on the list, and incest avoidance, and motherly love, and sibling rivalry, and music and envy and dance and storytelling and aesthetics, and ritual magic to heal the sick, and poetry in spoken lines separated by pauses—
No one who knows anything about evolutionary psychology could be expected to deny it: The strongest emotions we have are deeply engraved, blood and bone, brain and DNA.
It might take a bit of tweaking, but you probably could tell "Hamlet" sitting around a campfire on the ancestral savanna.
So one can see why John "Unweave a rainbow" Keats might feel something had been lost, on being told that the rainbow was sunlight scattered from raindrops. Raindrops don't dance.
In the Old Testament, it is written that God once destroyed the world with a flood that covered all the land, drowning all the horribly guilty men and women of the world along with their horribly guilty babies, but Noah built a gigantic wooden ark, etc., and after most of the human species was wiped out, God put rainbows in the sky as a sign that he wouldn't do it again. At least not with water.
You can see how Keats would be shocked that this beautiful story was contradicted by modern science. Especially if (as I described yesterday) Keats had no real understanding of rainbows, no "Aha!" insight that could be fascinating in its own right, to replace the drama subtracted—
Ah, but maybe Keats would be right to be disappointed even if he knew the math. The Biblical story of the rainbow is a tale of bloodthirsty murder and smiling insanity. How could anything about raindrops and refraction properly replace that? Raindrops don't scream when they die.
So science takes the romance away (says the Romantic poet), and what you are given back, never matches the drama of the original—
(that is, the original delusion)
—even if you do know the equations, because the equations are not about strong emotions.
That is the strongest rejoinder I can think of, that any Romantic poet could have said to Feynman—though I can't remember ever hearing it said.
You can guess that I don't agree with the Romantic poets. So my own stance is this:
It is not necessary for Jupiter to be like a human, because humans are like humans. If Jupiter is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, that doesn't mean that love and hate are emptied from the universe. There are still loving and hating minds in the universe. Us.
With more than six billion of us at the last count, does Jupiter really need to be on the list of potential protagonists?
It is not necessary to tell the Great Stories about planets or rainbows. They play out all over our world, every day. Every day, someone kills for revenge; every day, someone kills a friend by mistake; every day, upward of a hundred thousand people fall in love. And even if this were not so, you could write fiction about humans—not about Jupiter.
Earth is old, and has played out the same stories many times beneath the Sun. I do wonder if it might not be time for some of the Great Stories to change. For me, at least, the story called "Goodbye" has lost its charm.
The Great Stories are not timeless, because the human species is not timeless. Go far enough back in hominid evolution, and no one will understand Hamlet. Go far enough back in time, and you won't find any brains.
The Great Stories are not eternal, because the human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, is not eternal. I most sincerely doubt that we have another thousand years to go in our current form. I do not say this in sadness: I think we can do better.
I would not like to see all the Great Stories lost completely, in our future. I see very little difference between that outcome, and the Sun falling into a black hole.
But the Great Stories in their current forms have already been told, over and over. I do not think it ill if some of them should change their forms, or diversify their endings.
"And they lived happily ever after" seems worth trying at least once.
The Great Stories can and should diversify, as humankind grows up. Part of that ethic is the idea that when we find strangeness, we should respect it enough to tell its story truly. Even if it makes writing poetry a little more difficult.
If you are a good enough poet to write an ode to an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia, you are writing something original, about a newly discovered part of the real universe. It may not be as dramatic, or as gripping, as Hamlet. But the tale of Hamlet has already been told! If you write of Jupiter as though it were a human, then you are making our map of the universe just a little more impoverished of complexity; you are forcing Jupiter into the mold of all the stories that have already been told of Earth.
James Thomson's "A Poem Sacred to the Memory of Sir Isaac Newton", which praises the rainbow for what it really is—you can argue whether or not Thomson's poem is as gripping as John Keats's Lamia who was loved and lost. But tales of love and loss and cynicism had already been told, far away in ancient Greece, and no doubt many times before. Until we understood the rainbow as a thing different from tales of human-shaped magic, the true story of the rainbow could not be poeticized.
The border between science fiction and space opera was once drawn as follows: If you can take the plot of a story and put it back in the Old West, or the Middle Ages, without changing it, then it is not real science fiction. In real science fiction, the science is intrinsically part of the plot—you can't move the story from space to the savanna, not without losing something.
Richard Feynman asked: "What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were like a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
They are savanna poets, who can only tell stories that would have made sense around a campfire ten thousand years ago. Savanna poets, who can tell only the Great Stories in their classic forms, and nothing more.
Since I've committed to this thread, I might raise another (tangential?) issue. Are you (Elezier) entirely certain of your understanding of evolutionary biology? I'm by no means an expert, but look at what you wrote here: "Anger exists in Homo sapiens because angry ancestors had more kids. There's no other way it could have gotten there."
The first sentence is true only in the most trivial sense. Noam Chomsky explained this well: "While it is true in a very vague sense (it's correct to say that systems we now have developed through evolution, through natural selection), it's important to recognize how little we're saying when we say that. For example, it is certainly not necessarily the case that every particular trait that we have is the result of specific selection, that is, that we were selected for having that trait."
Thus, taken together, your second statement strongly implies two things
As Chomsky points out, implication #2 is simply untenable and untrue. Implication #1 is an empirical matter that must be proved, if, indeed, it even can be proved.
There's another statement of yours that I recently read which strikes me as patently, fundamentally wrong: "But if faith is a true religious adaptation, I don't see why it's even puzzling what the selection pressure could have been.
Heretics were routinely burned alive just a few centuries ago. Or stoned to death, or executed by whatever method local fashion demands. Questioning the local gods is the notional crime for which Socrates was made to drink hemlock."
Setting aside the flawed assumptions of your argument (namely, that religion is a human universal), here you seem to disregard the crucial warning issued by G.C. William against misuse of the concept of "adaptation" (even as you rightly call attention to his criticisms of "group selection"): "Evolutionary adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should not be used unnecessarily, and an effect should not be called a function unless it is clearly produced by design and not by chance. When recognized, adaptation should be attributed to no higher a level of organization than is demanded by the evidence." (Williams 1966)
It is simply wrong to base an argument of human function on evidence for which natural selection cannot act. First, even strong selective pressure acting over mere centuries is generally not sufficient to produce adaptation (natural selection can act fast, but not that fast). This is especially true when that selective pressure arises in an environmental context fundamentally altered from the ancestral environment.
Second, arguments about human adaptations must always be couched in terms of the ancestral environment in which the ancestral traits were "groomed". Our ability to prove an instance of adaptation is directly proportional to our ability to prove certain aspects about the ancestral environment and our ability to prove certain aspects about the ancestral genome. The recent goings on during the Middle Ages have had no statistically significant effect that one may characterize as 'an adaptation'.
In my view, it is far more likely that religion and faith are maladaptive or nonadaptive evolutionary artifacts correlated (genetically or environmentally) to certain other adaptive emotional organs and that the peculiar stimuli of our modern environment elicits these religious emotions quite incidentally, quite accidentally. This is my own intuitive speculation, though. In theory, these matters can be settled empirically, depending upon our capacity to illuminate the vagaries of the ancestral environment.
Let me end with a quote from Donald Symons "The Evolution of Human Sexuality", which has inspired my thinking on these matters and to which I point at as an example of excellent literature:
"The complexity of human interaction and the subtleties of judgment and calculation required to achieve reproductive success in any given society may be sufficient to account for the evolution of learning potentials that make possible--as an incidental effect--human social variability.
I believe that this possibility should receive serious consideration especially since it is in many ways uncongenial. It is uncongenial, for example, because we value creativity and do not value Machiavellian intrigue, and to propose that intrigue is a function of the human brain and creativity is an incidental effect may seem to elevate and justify the former and to denigrate and trivialize the latter; but this is true only to the extent that natural is equated with good. This point of view is also uncongenial because it implies that a great deal of human variability observed today probably is not explicable by any general scheme but is largely a product of historical circumstances. If this is true, it seriously compromises the possibility of finding general explanations for human behavior. But however uncongenial this may be to our satisfaction in intellectual generalization, it may be true nonetheless." (Symons 1979)
I suggest you follow the same advice you offered to (amateur and ancient) philosophers: do not be too eager to offer a generalized answer to all questions of human function. It is possible that some knowledge is simply beyond our scope of knowing. We should therefore confront and internalize the limitations knowledge capacity, so that we might better formulate questions that lie within reachable bounds.
I didn't infer either of those from his statement. He simply stated an undeniable evolutionary fact: anger exists because our angry ancestors had more kids.
Nothing there suggests anger was directly selected for, it's perfectly reasonable to think anger was simply associated with a trait that improved fitness. This is especially true i... (read more)