687
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_75
Chapter 75
The Natural Selection of Indeterminacy
75.1 Natural Selection Anew
No explanation yet exists for selection; neither who or what is behind it, or why.
That is a marvelous thing. An Arabian leopard, almost extinct by human machinations, remains vivid proof that by our own conservation reckonings we are becoming aware of a solid truth, the linkages between ourselves and the Others. Of course,
any number of selective pressures, and in our species’ case, motives have been
preached, but none can persuade in the total absence of credible real predicates or
identities. We know nothing against a backdrop of other multitudinous verbs, transitive, intransitive, intermediary. We lack the nominative, in spite of every natural
object being the target of such actions. This absence of credible human accounting
renders all perception and accretion suspect. In so flimsy an environmental continuum, our communities at once decry their unrealities in the sense that their sum total
of individual behaviors defy ecological gravity. In Robert Kaplan’s discussion of
logician Willard van Orman Quine’s suggestion “that ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ are
false substantives, behaving like nouns grammatically but not logically,” he points
to that chemical conundrum in which the sum of all inputs must equal the sum of
reactants, no matter what has transpired by way of a perceived equation: the Law of
the Conservation of Matter.
1
The leopard is a leopard is a leopard. No single action
accounts for a truth or even a glimpse. Whatever windows on substance may have
teased the history of science are merely the glimmers of seasons gone, songs imagined, pictures annoyingly cloyed in the manner of mud on a grave without a stone to
indicate the slightest testament. Indeed, there is no telling anyone or anything, and
hence, the environment of which we are so fond of speaking gives nothing away.
Reasoning powers are actually powerless, and this is quickly established by any
etymology, so short-lived a legacy of vowels, consonants, the aboriginal guttural
1 See Robert Kaplan’s book, The Nothing That Is – A Natural History of Zero, Illustrations by Ellen
Kaplan, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 59.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
M. C. Tobias, J. G. Morrison, On the Nature of Ecological Paradox,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64526-7_75
Chapter 75
The Natural Selection of Indeterminacy
75.1 Natural Selection Anew
No explanation yet exists for selection; neither who or what is behind it, or why.
That is a marvelous thing. An Arabian leopard, almost extinct by human machinations, remains vivid proof that by our own conservation reckonings we are becoming aware of a solid truth, the linkages between ourselves and the Others. Of course,
any number of selective pressures, and in our species’ case, motives have been
preached, but none can persuade in the total absence of credible real predicates or
identities. We know nothing against a backdrop of other multitudinous verbs, transitive, intransitive, intermediary. We lack the nominative, in spite of every natural
object being the target of such actions. This absence of credible human accounting
renders all perception and accretion suspect. In so flimsy an environmental continuum, our communities at once decry their unrealities in the sense that their sum total
of individual behaviors defy ecological gravity. In Robert Kaplan’s discussion of
logician Willard van Orman Quine’s suggestion “that ‘nothing’ and ‘something’ are
false substantives, behaving like nouns grammatically but not logically,” he points
to that chemical conundrum in which the sum of all inputs must equal the sum of
reactants, no matter what has transpired by way of a perceived equation: the Law of
the Conservation of Matter.
1
The leopard is a leopard is a leopard. No single action
accounts for a truth or even a glimpse. Whatever windows on substance may have
teased the history of science are merely the glimmers of seasons gone, songs imagined, pictures annoyingly cloyed in the manner of mud on a grave without a stone to
indicate the slightest testament. Indeed, there is no telling anyone or anything, and
hence, the environment of which we are so fond of speaking gives nothing away.
Reasoning powers are actually powerless, and this is quickly established by any
etymology, so short-lived a legacy of vowels, consonants, the aboriginal guttural
1 See Robert Kaplan’s book, The Nothing That Is – A Natural History of Zero, Illustrations by Ellen
Kaplan, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 59.