The Bottom Turtle

One of my plans for the new year is to write more on why a biological understanding is needed for making sense of the world. I think that's been a weakness of Teardrop Souffle so far. For me, biology's insights into eternal questions such as "Who am I?" and "Why am I here?" are obviously significant and profound, yet to others, apparently biology seems about on the level of significance as last night's Mets game. (Actually, the sports game probably feels more profound to a lot of people.) Why biology (evolution) matters is, I suppose, not so apparent.

So, in 2006, I'm going to try to better explain the relevance of biological viewpoints, by relating them to various real life situations. (I'm also going to try to do shorter posts, though that somehow seems a little more challenging.)

In understanding life on earth, I consider evolution via of natural selection to be pretty much "the bottom turtle". This is a phrase I use that references a story you might have heard. Here's Wikipedia's version of the tale, from a very nice entry about the story:

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy.

At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise."

The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?"

"You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down.

I've heard the meaning of the story explained in a couple of ways. For me, the first came from the anthropological theorist Clifford Geertz. He was using it to explain that in understanding culture, there are always more layers of interpretation to peel away. The second explanation has to do with the idea of conflicts between versions of "truth", - my story versus yours, folk story versus expert analysis.

There are lessons in the tale to be learned, regarding perspective and humility. But I consider the fact of evolution via natural selection to be the "bottom turtle" for understanding life and culture, consciousness, and morality. Love, fear, death, experience- for me, it's NOT turtles all the way down! Evolution is the bottom turtle for all of these concerns, and more. I think we come much closer to getting things right once we start cleaning out the intellectual closets that are our brains, and start reorganizing our thinking starting with this fundamental, rudimentary fact. Even if how this is so is not yet clear, please stay tuned to hear more!