"Why did it take so long for science to gain hold as a ay of understanding the natural world? It must be because our brain isn't wired to scientifically, or else it would have been the first way we've ever imagined to understand the world rather than inventing goblins and demons. Just look at the history of human culture, and the stuff we invented just to account for what's around us."
There is something truly eloquent about that observation.
When humankind was just starting out it saw the world through the eyes of a child, but as it grew older, it searched for a deeper truth.
Good stuff; that’s a very likable man. I admire anyone who thinks for themself, even if I don’t always agree. Too many are natural followers, but I guess it’s how we evolved. There must have been benefits, cooperation and reduced strife. Luckily, there were always outliers. Mother Nature must have planned that, lol.
ReplyDeleteI disagree.
ReplyDeleteWe have turned that part of our brain off, or had it turned off for us, somehow. I truly believe we do not use 75% of the gifts our brains are capable of. Little quirks that happen to me have led me to this conclusion. For example, I don't need a watch or alarm clock. My brain can track time, even when asleep and wake me up at the appropriate time. Is this a gift? No, we probably all could do this, but for some reason I still can. People who are in tune with psychic energy may have those parts of their brain active. I get flashes of faces of patients or the name of a person flashes in my brain out of the blue....sure enough that week at work that patients relapses or dies unexpectedly.
Again, I think we all had/have psychic abilities, they just go turned off.
Going fuether, I believe at one point human brains/consciousness could astral project or teleport, but it got turned off.
There is a guy who theorizes that humans are from another planet, and we escaped some war on our planet and because of the trauma , lost all our powers and parts of our brain are now untapped.I can't remember his name. He is a little weird but his theory does speak to me on some level.It doesn't fit with evolution though.Ubless he is going waaaaaaaay back
It makes sense to me though that we have capabilities tht have been thwarted.
Sometimes I wonder if there was an historical jesus, he could use all those parts of his brain, he wasn't divine, just really using his capabilities. This freaked out the powers that be so they co-opted his name but changed it to control the message they wanted.
I in no way consider myself special, gifted or highly intelligent. On several occasions a person from my past,not a close friend, has flashed in my mind out of nowhere. Only to find out that person died at the same time I "thought" of them. The first one was a daughter of my high school English teacher. I had only met her 2-3 times when she was in grade school. This was several years later, after she had been married and had a child. Just appeared to me out of the blue. I was married and had 4 children. My hometown paper had arrived in the mail and there on an inside page was her obituary. It was the date that stuck out. I contacted her mother, my teacher, who I had no contact with since the day I graduated about 10 years before. It turns out, it was the exact same time her face had appeared to me. We continued our relationship by mail more many years. I never saw her husbands face when he died, just read about it in our hometown paper. I tried to contact her son as I knew she had gone into a nursing home with Alzheimers. I assume she is gone now, but I have never had her face appear to me.
DeleteAnother old man, who lived in our town, that I knew because it was a small town and he was a customer of my fathers. His face appeared to me out of blue one day. Sure enough, he had died the day he appeared to me. He was in his late 80's. I knew his son and wife as I had babysat for them. There were 2-3 others, but I just called it coincidences.
I was a nurse, but none of them were ever my patients. Now if someone appears out of the blue, I make some calls to see if they are OK!
Due to cancer and chemo, much of my memory was erased (short term) so maybe I have been disconnected to people who are dying. I have a deep faith in God, but I'm not one of these religious nuts that preaches my faith to anyone who walks into my life. Religion to me is very private. It helped me through my bout with cancer and gave me strength with my husbands struggle with it. I keep praying for the strength to care for him as he is dying one cell at a time with dementia.
I have always found the strength and I thank God for it and another day dawns every morning. I have always been blessed with a memory that blows most people way. Age and disease is slowly erasing that gift. I have never forgotten a face, but at my best, I could never remember a name! I'm artistic and see detail. People always said I had "gray hair on green shoulders" as a child. I have always seen things in 3-demention. It was great for thinking before doing and I loved science....what makes things tick! It was wonderful for nursing and raising children. My children really believed I had eyes on the back of my head! ESP?
Those with higher intelligence are less likely to believe in God claims new review of 63 scientific studies stretching back decades
ReplyDeleteBy JAMES NYE
PUBLISHED: 17:17 EST, 12 August 2013 | UPDATED: 11:03 EST, 13 August 2013
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A new study claims to have conclusively proved that the more intelligent a person is the less likely they are to believe in God.
Psychologists Miron Zuckerman and Jordan Silberman of the University of Rochester and Judith Hall of Northeastern University have published their review of 63 studies conducted between 1928 and 2012 in this months Personality and Social Psychology Review.
While they admit their findings are 'not new', the psychologists embarked on a systematic analysis of almost one hundred years of studies into the correlation between intelligence and religiosity and found that atheism is rife among clever people.
Untested: A new review of 63 scientific studies stretching back over decades has concluded that religious people are less intelligent than non-believers
Defining intelligence as the 'ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly, and learn from experience,' the three psychologists defined these skills as analytical, reasoned forms of intelligence.
On the other hand, religiosity was defined as a belief in the supernatural, offering gifts to this supernatural and performing rituals affirming their beliefs according to an article in Arstechnica.com.
Backing up their findings, Zuckerman, Silberman and Hall, examined the 1921 study by Lewis Terman, a psychologist at Stanford Univeristy who named his review, the Terman cohort of the gifted.
In the study, Terman recruited 1,500 children whose IQ exceeded 135 at at the age of 10.
This data was re-examined by Robin Sears at Columbia University in 1995 and by Michael McCullough at the University of Miami in 2005.
The overall conclusion of both these reviewers was that the children were less religious when compared to the general public.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2390774/Those-higher-intelligence-likely-believe-God-claims-new-review-63-scientific-studies-stretching-decades.html#ixzz2cKKFiVDw
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Thank you, Gryph, for finding that and sharing it with us.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much insanity and nonsense in the world its nice to hear reason once in a while.
Just for you, Gryph!:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFWA1A9XFi8
I haven't had the chance to listen to the video above, but based solely on the quote you give I have to say that is an arrogant and ignorant statement.
ReplyDeleteAncient humans had their own version of the sciences. From the hundreds of ancient stone circles and monuments they left behind -- aligned to certain stars and solstice and equinox points -- we can see that they accurately tracked star movements, seasonal changes, migratory animal movements and god/dess only knows what else. They built amazing earthworks, monuments, temples; they healed themselves with plants.
The original deities were but a later anthropomorphization of the natural forces of both sky and earth. Some forces were beneficial to human survival; others were not. Thus deities both good and bad were born. Human imagination led to further development of this idea, and mythologies were born. These were not necessarily bad; but were ways of trying to explain happenings -- something we still do.
Things really fell apart only with the rise in power of the Catholic Church that gave them the ability to control knowledge, and outlaw as forbidden things (i.e. pagan!) that did not conform to Church teachings. That was a real backward step for most of the sciences, which took centuries to recover from.
And now human stupidity is rearing its ugly head again in the form of fundamentalist religions that would create a new Dark Age for us! :(
I suggest you listen to the video and then comment again. Neil deGrasse Tyson is, if anything, not arrogant, nor ignorant. Nor is he professing any kind of religion.
DeleteYes, I agree he left out much of what you wrote about, the “monuments” that are actually aligned with stars, healing with plants, mythology, etc. Being trained as a scientist, I’m sure his education did not focus much on those things, especially since they exist very little to not at all in most textbooks and school curriculum. Sad, but true.
What I like about him is that when I hear him speak I hear a deeply spiritual man, a man who is deeply connected to the wonderment of this world, and who’s main goal seems to be to find out as much as possible about it all and convey his love and passion and excitement for it to the rest of us so that we, too, open up our eyes to it all. I think he is the perfect antidote to the fundamentalists, and I welcome any chance I get to listen to him speak.
CathleenD
Yes, I'm looking forward to listening to the entire video when the sound on my computer is working again. I do like Tyson, and perhaps I should not have reacted to an out-of-context quote, but it always pains me greatly when I hear people dissing the intelligence of ancient peoples as if they were all mentally-limited, ignorant and superstitious.
DeleteYou think for yourself, but you don't proofread before you post.
ReplyDelete"wired to scientifically"
WTF?
Not exactly consistent is he?
ReplyDeleteNeil deGrasse Tyson on Why We’re Wired for Science & How Originality Differs in Science vs. Art
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/05/16/neil-degrasse-tyson-on-science/
Thanks Griffin. I liked his "I am not an ism" statement. Maybe scientists SHOULD picket schools that don't teach science in favor of creationism.
ReplyDeleteNeil is one of my favorite astrophysicists, scientists and skeptics of my generation.