boddhisatva <kbevans at panix.com>
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Rakesh (?),
You should think more seriously about claims that scientists and sciences are uneffected by their embedding in psyche, society, and culture. When I say seriously, I mean take a more critical attitude about the people, institutions, and fields of study, all of which claim to be objective, altruistic, and only interested in the pursuit of pure knowledge.
I spent several years working in science labs (cell biology, bio-physics) and can tell you first hand they are just as neurotic, power crazed, petty, egotistical, competitive, and subservient as any nut house day room, peer group counseling session, AA meeting, or political underground. The separation between what is known and understood in the labs, and what is published is so extreme that it is almost ludicrous. Everybody is guessing all the time, and praying that some other idiot doesn't find out how shakey the results really are. What ends up as established fact is a crap shoot. It is a miracle we haven't killed each other off with some bogus vaccine or giant explosion.
So, the point is that from my view, the certified, hard core sciences and their sloppy, trailor trash cousins in the bio-sciences do not constitute a castle of purity, from which it is allowed to trumpet on about truth, objectivity or clear thinking.
Well, okay, sure so what? I think you are quite wrong about Einstein and Ramanujan. I do not mean one was Jewish and the other Hindu. I mean that both men were deeply effected by their own sense of a spiritual world in different ways. In some very traditional sense they were mystics. In Einstein's case, this took the form of seeking an intellectual unity in physics that mirrored his own spiritual sense of unity about the natural world. In Ramanujan case (judging from Harty's descriptions), it was a search for the barely perceived patterns within numbers that seem to echo the underlying patterns and cycles of a spiritual world. I don't know enough about Hindu thought or number theory to point to anything more specific than that.
You have to take these guys at their words. When Ramanujan said his thoughts were gifts, he meant it. Gifts from nowhere, to help him trace out the ciphers of the world in number. And Einstein's almost fundamentalist rejection of the probabilistic mechanics of quantum theory was certainly real enough--considering he came close to becoming one of its founding members--and stopped himself, on principle--mystical principles at that!
As for the inheritance of mitochondrial DNA (via ovular cytoplasm), you can bet hard money, there was a coffee clatch of girls, snickering in the bathroom and kissing each other silly at the thought--yes, the dicks don't get it by half, do they honey?--right on! It was a victory for feminism. Why shouldn't it be?
Doctrine, dogma, prejudice, racism, sexism, homophobia, conceit, egotism, arrogance, power, and absolutist commitments--all of these and more interpenetrate everything we do, say, think and feel and certainly the sciences are not exempt. Certainly the sciences will never overcome any of these, but in fact reproduce them just as any other field does through the people, social institutions and cultural matrix of which they are a part.
In my opinion, the only way to keep any of this in check is to be aware of it and exercise a sort of sloppy and ad hoc aesthetic judgment about it all. I mean we all live hand to mouth here, picking and choosing, seeing and judging, and need to be reminded constantly there are no saints in the world.
Chuck Grimes,
there is also no peace.