A Short History of Nearly Everything
My main reading material during my trip to Bangkok was Bill Bryson's �A Short History of Nearly Everything�. A wonderful book that covers a lot of ground but helps fill in gaps from what you learned in school while updating you on research and offering plenty of chuckles along the way. Before my trip I also started Edward O. Wilson's �The Future of Life� for the Boston Museum of Science's book club. Between the two I must conclude that we humans are on the way out. Mind you neither of these books makes that mention, but that's a conclusion I draw. A few tidbits that I managed to jot down while read Bryson include:
It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. ... Life, in short, just wants to be. But-and here's an interesting point-for the most part it doesn't want to be much. [336]
It cannot be said too often: all life is one. That is, and I suspect will forever prove to be, the most profound true statement there is. [415]
I mention all this to make the point that if you were designing an organism to look after life in our lonely cosmos, to monitor where it is going and keep a record of where it has been, you wouldn't choose humans beings for the job.
But here's an extremely salient point: we have been chosen, by fate or Providence or whatever you wish to call it. As far as we can tell, we are the best there is. [477]
It is this last statement which under scores my thought that we are deluding ourselves to justify our existence. Life does just want to me. The problem is humans have the ability to �evolve� outside the confines of nature's scale. That leads to thinking we are the �best� since we can't think that nature might produce a mutation that given 10,000 years would be better and could maybe live in equilibrium with nature instead of constantly destroying it.