28 Feb 2000 
 
Body Fat and Birth Control... they're cops! 
 
So I cleaned out my office... well the top and inside of my desk (but not 
underneath... is that for today?) and I pulled out all the mags that I 
didn't want to hold on to -- namely, Natural History and Mother Jones.  So 
I've been using them for subway reading material before I recycle them. 
 
In any case, there were a couple of quotes, words, ideas, etc. that I 
liked and as I don't have my commonplace book with me, I'll type them up 
here: 
 
From "Holy Wars", by Neil de Grasse Tyson, 10/99 issue of Natural History: 
 
	My personal views are entirely pragmatic -- resonating in part 
	with those of Galileo, who is credited with having said during his 
	trial "The Bible tells you how to go to heaven, not how the 
	heavens go." [Smartass remark - Wow! Galileo spoke modern English?   
	He =was= talented and visionary, wasn't he?] Galileo further 
	noted, in a 1615 letter to the grand duchess of Tuscany, "In my 
	mind, God wrote two books.  The first book is the Bible, where 
	humans can find the answers to their questions on values and 
	morals.  The second book of God is the book of nature, which 
	allows humans to use observation and experiment to answer our own 
	questions about the universe." 
 
Some other quotes, in no particular order from the same article: 
 
	In a recent survey of religious beliefs among the nation's math 
	and science professionals, 65 percent of the mathematicians (the 
	highest rate) declared themselves to be religious, as did 22 
	percent of the physicists and astronomers (the lowest rate). 
 
	In the thirteenth century, Alfonso X (also known as Alfonso the 
	Wise), king of Castile and Leon and an accomplished scholar, was 
	frustrated by the complexity of Ptolemy's epicycles.  Being less 
	humble than Ptolemy, Alfonso once mused, "Had I been around at the 
	creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better 
	ordering of the universe." 
 
	Einstein noted in a letter to a colleague, "If God created the 
	world, his primary worry was certainly not to make its 
	understanding easy for us." 
 
 
Let's see, I found some interesting things in another article, where did I 
put it (I got to read a bit more last night due to the crapping out of my 
deadbolt (again?!) and its replacement with a Mul-T-Lock.  All I need now 
is a fire while I'm on my cruise in June and the cycle shall be 
complete.  Except this time all people will have to steal is my yarn.) 
 
Oooh, new word: "panjandrum" 
 
The following is from "What does the dreaded 'E' word =mean=, anyway?" by 
Stephen Jay Gould, 2/00 Natural History: 
 
	Herbert Spencer's progressivist view of natural change probably 
	exerted the greatest influence in establishing "evolution" as the 
	general name for Darwin's process, for Spencer held a dominating 
	status as Victorian pundit and grand panjandrum of nearly 
	everything conceptual. 
 
So, looking up this term in Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 
(1894, and now online of course): 
 
	Panjandrum The Grand Panjandrum. A village boss, who imagines 
	himself the "Magnus Apollo" of his neighbours. The word occurs in 
	Foote's farrago of nonsense which he composed to test the memory 
	of old Macklin, who said he had brought his memory to such 
	perfection that he could remember anything by reading it over 
	once. 
    	I myself knew a man at college who could do the same. He would repeat 
	accurately one hundred lines of Greek by reading them twice over, 
	although he could not accurately translate them. His memory was 
	marvellous, but its uselessness was still more so. 
 
 
Interestingly, "pundit" can be found in the same reference: 
 
	Pundit An East Indian scholar, skilled in Sanskrit, and learned in 
	law, divinity, and science. We use the word for a porcus 
	literarum, one more stocked with book lore than deep erudition. 
 
 
 
So truthfully, both terms seem to have a negative connotation - or at 
least it did in 1894. 
 
In the same Natural History article, Gould mentions recent findings that 
certain parasites actually descended from what we like to think of higher 
life forms.  The whole thrust of the article is that "evolution" with its 
original connotations of an unfolding of a progressive sequence 
(specifically in which the past and future can be seen as part of a 
predictable plan) has shaded our thinking on biological descent.  That 
even today people like to think of us humans as the grand end product of 
evolution - a recasting of the idea of the Great Chain of Being - as 
opposed to just one of many species that took just as long and as much 
natural selection to get here.  Recent findings show that some 
"mesozoans" - creatures considered "between" us higher multicellular life 
and the seemingly primitive protozoic life - seem to be descended from 
more complicated animals which lost this complication in becoming 
particularly suited to the parasitic life on a squid's kidneys. 
 
Makes ya think, doesn't it? 
 
and to leave with a bang, one last quote from Gould that I thought lovely: 
 
	The contingency of our evolution offers no guarantees against the 
	certainties of the Sun's evolution [more specifically, it turning 
	into a red giant and boiling away the inner solar system].  We 
	shall probably be long gone by then, perhaps taking a good deal of 
	life with us and perhaps leaving those previously indestructible 
	bacteria as the highest mute witnesses to a stellar expansion 
	that will finally unleash a unicellular Armegeddon.