New Skeptical Poster
Let them Plagiarize! (Poster-Quote #5)
I came across this quote the other day by Howard Aiken, and knew it had to become my next poster. Aiken is someone I'd never heard of before, but apparently he was a pioneer in computing. Given that, I have no idea in which context his quote was given, nor what he meant by it specifically. Nevertheless, it made immediate sense to me.
“Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats.”-Howard Aiken
Even though I'm not sure how they were intended, the words immediately made me think of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection, and how large swaths of mankind choose to ignore it. Even though much of our understanding of biology is built upon it, many discount evolution as just one theory amongst many, or even a wholly incorrect one. Beyond biology, could we have ever dreamed of flying into space without valuing evidence the way that Darwin did, and many people choose not to? This poster was my own interpretation of that idea; that even a discovery as explanatory and evidenced as natural selection can somehow be considered an 'alternate' possibility.
The quote gets at why this might be the case. It makes sense that the greatest answers come from the greatest questions, and man has wondered about his genesis since the dawn of thought. Yet it took investigation to find the answer, as the mechanisms of evolution occur at a time scale so slow as to be unobservable by any one person. The idea that species evolve from simpler forms is not an intuitive one, at least without a grasp of how long the process takes to play out.
Quantum theory seems to be another example of that which can be verified from evidence, yet cannot be intuitively grasped. When you start talking about ideas like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and quantum entanglement, it sounds to the layman like a big bunch of hooey. Yet the accuracy of the predictions that can be made using quantum mechanics is spookily precise. It may sound strange to creatures who evolved at a scale in which there is no interaction with the quantum world, but that has absolutely no bearing on whether or not it's true.
It just makes sense that the greatest answers must not be intuitive, or else people would have come up with them long ago. There's simply no amount of armchair contemplation that could get us to such discoveries. Sure, things like fundamental mathematics were born as a result of smart people just thinking about things, but in order to answer more complex questions one must get their hands dirty a bit. Darwin had to sail the H.M.S. Beagle to the Galapagos, dig around for earthworms, and compare endless specimens of dead birds before his theory could begin to take shape. Through investigation, experimentation, and a valuing of evidence, light can be shone on the real mechanisms that built our world.
The effort to help people understand and accept evolution goes on to this day, yet current educators don't have it anywhere near as tough as Darwin himself did. That's because over time new ideas become middle-aged ones, and at least to the science-minded amongst us, evolution has become an intuitive idea. Perhaps one day we'll be able to say the same thing about quantum theory, or four-dimensional space. The best lesson we can learn from Howard Aiken's quote, Charles Darwin's theory, or even Einstein's physics of relativity is simply this: nature wasn't formed with our intuition in mind.
Could we have gone to the moon without the discovery of natural selection? While biology and rocket science are certainly different things, man's scientific progression is woven together with countless interdependent threads. One good idea spawns another, and I'm banking that without a solid understanding of our natural world, we couldn't have dreamed about visiting others.
In any case, here's the poster! It's all hand drawn in Photoshop, except for the font. Click on the image to see larger. And also take note that I've finally compiled the skeptical posters completed so far into a new page. You'll see it on the left column from now on, or you can just click here.
