According to Daniel Dennett (From Bacteria to Bach and Back, p. 309):
We are indeed living in the age of intelligent design, and it goes back several millennia—as ar back as we have documentation. The builders of the pyramids knew what they were doing and had articulated goals and plans, which they understood and executed with precision, organizing thousands of human workers in a process not at all like termite castle construction: it relied on top-down control and an impressive level of comprehension. That is not to say that the pyramid builders didn't rely on a massive amount of know-how—memes—that had been refined and optimized by relatively mindless differential replication over earlier millennia. Every generation has a legacy of accumulated knowledge most of which has, by now, been practically confirmed in thousands of applications, including memorable failures by rebels who decided to buck tradition and try other methods and standards. While much of this hard-won knowledge has also been expressed, explained, analyzed, and rationalized in treatises on every imaginable topic, we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking that the authoers of those treatises were often the inventors or designers of the principles and practices they teach. In general, from Aristotle's day to the present, the explanations and justifications of our storehouse of general knowledge are a kind of Whig history, written by the victors, triumphantly explaining the discoveries and passing over the costly mistakes and misguided searches.
In Retrospection:
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario