I still say the Lord's Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world.
To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn't seem to give a very full picture of the world.
When people see one of these new forms of art for the first time, often they can't make sense of it. Then, if it's around long enough, a lot of people get used to it and it becomes assimilated into culture. So there's a morphic field both for the kind of art and for the appreciation of it.
Most of nature is inherently chaotic. It's not rigidly determined in the old sense. It's not rigidly predictable.
In both religion and science, some people are dishonest, exploitative, incompetent and exhibit other human failings.
So there’s a kind of resurgence of the sense of freedom and spontaneity in nature. From nature being bound into a rigid, deterministic model, freedom, spontaneity and openness are emerging once again. It’s now recognized the future is open, not determined by the past. And this is true in many realms, the astronomical realm, the human realm, the meteorological realm in many ways.
I have been a scientist for more than 40 years, having studied at Cambridge and Harvard. I researched and taught at Cambridge University, was a research fellow of the Royal Society, and have more than 80 publications in peer-reviewed journals. I am strongly pro-science.
Unfortunately, at present, practically no one under thirty goes to workshops. It's a system of education entirely for the middle aged.
Of the seven experiments, the ones that have been most investigated so far have been the pets. The dogs who know when their masters for coming home, and the sense of being stared at.
Not every good idea survives. Not every new form of art is repeated. Not every new potential instinct is successful. Only the successful ones get repeated. By natural selection and then through repetition they become probable, more habitual.
I'm talking about science on the leading edge, where it's not clear which way things are going be cause we don't know, and I'm dealing with areas which we don't know about.
Because a truly skeptical position would be a very uncertain one.
The fact that you can forge a twenty dollar bill doesn't prove that all twenty dollar bills are forgeries.
Over the course of fifteen years of research on plant development, I came to the conclusion that for understanding the development of plants, their morphogenesis, genes and gene products are not enough.
Machines are designed not to be random. When you call up a word processing program on your computer, you don't want it to be different every time you call it up. You want it to stay the same.
Right now, any opinion anyone has about whether dogs can or cannot really tell when their owner is coming home by some unknown means... nobody knows. The weight of evi dence suggests they can.
A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.
