Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris writes: If biological evolution is revealing itself to our scientific scrutiny as a holistic and intelligent learning process, what of the universe in which it is embedded? Western science is but a few centuries old — a very new endeavor on the scale of evolution itself, which is counted in billions of years. The concept of biological evolution and the pursuit of its nature came into this science and into the public eye only little more than a single century ago. Yet in that brief moment we came very far: from the first voyages of the Beagle to identify and catalog a handful of our planet’s still countless species in a framework of the first modern theory of their emergence over time to the temporal mapping of an amazing diversity of life, most of it far too small to see with the naked eye, and to the unraveling of the DNA common to them all, the understanding that it is freely traded in a great world wide web, and the capability of shuffling genes among species ourselves, for our own human purposes. Does this indicate that we now know how evolution works? Consider that it is now less than two years ago that we officially revised the entire tree of evolution, displacing the visible species that had made up the bulk of this tree to the tip of a single branch on a new tree made largely of microbes. Consider that the truly detailed study of these microbes and their worlds has only become technologically possible in the past decade and that our newly observable information about them is dramatically changing our views of how DNA works. And consider that the sciences of astronomy and physics, within whose frameworks biological theories exist, are in complex transitions of their own, in both observation and theory. Is it possible to know how biological evolution works without knowing how the physical universe in which it is embedded works? If we believe, as the physicists tell us, that everything in the universe is inseparably interconnected at the most fundamental levels of reality, then I think we can agree that there must be a consistency in the realities of our biological and physical worlds.  (04/11/02)
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Professor Wendell Berry writes: I am talking here about the common experience, the common fate, of rural communities in our country for a long time. It has also been, and it will increasingly be, the common fate of rural communities in other countries. The message is plain enough, and we have ignored it for too long: the great, centralized economic entities of our time do not come into rural places in order to improve them by “creating jobs.” They come to take as much of value as they can take, as cheaply and as quickly as they can take it. They are interested in “job creation” only so long as the jobs can be done more cheaply by humans than by machines. They are not interested in the good health-economic or natural or human-of any place on this earth. And if you should undertake to appeal or complain to one of these great corporations on behalf of your community, you would discover something most remarkable: you would find that these organizations are organized expressly for the evasion of responsibility. They are structures in which, as my brother says, “the buck never stops.” The buck is processed up the hierarchy until finally it is passed to “the shareholders,” who characteristically are too widely dispersed, too poorly informed, and too unconcerned to be responsible for anything. The ideal of the modern corporation is to be (in terms of its own advantage) anywhere and (in terms of local accountability) nowhere. The message to country people, in other words, is this: Don’t expect favors from your enemies. (04/11/02)
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