Freeman Dyson writes in Edge Magazine
"Here I must confess my own bias. Since I was born and brought up in England, I spent my formative years in a land with great beauty and a rich ecology which is almost entirely man-made. The natural ecology of England was uninterrupted and rather boring forest. Humans replaced the forest with an artificial landscape of grassland and moorland, fields and farms, with a much richer variety of plant and animal species. Quite recently, only about a thousand years ago, we introduced rabbits, a non-native species which had a profound effect on the ecology. Rabbits opened glades in the forest where flowering plants now flourish. There is no wilderness in England, and yet there is plenty of room for wild-flowers and birds and butterflies as well as a high density of humans. Perhaps that is why I am a humanist."
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2 comments:
Humans replaced the forest with an artificial...
This is impossible unless we're not a part of nature. But I know what you meant.
A guy made a comment on my blog:
I find myself nodding in agreement at the concept that any stable, distinct species is a local maximum in a large problem space and that any decent enough pathfinding algorithm will eventually stumble upon some of these maxima.
(I'm a computer scientist so min and max are pretty much synonymous for me. "Minimum/Minima" also works just fine in the above paragraph if you're talking about minimizing energy.)
Dyson explains why he is a humanist, as opposed to a naturalist. Yes we are all part of nature, but he presents that as a bias. He wants us to know more about the person writing that.
If you read the complete piece in "Edge Magazine", you will find that he believes that we have ways out in the current warming Earth predicament that we have.
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