697
© 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_77
Chapter 77
The Finely Honed Basis of Unknowing
77.1 What We Don’t Know
While each increment of natural selection remains an untold history of biologically
tasked nouns, pronouns, verbs, and integers, there is no geographical compass or
time frame that in isolation can yield useful elucidation of the living objects of the
world we think we know. Even at the most seemingly profound level of classification and philosophizing, E. O. Wilson qualifies his May 30, 1993, essay for The
New York Times Magazine, “Is humanity suicidal?” by re-stating, “no, we aren’t
suicidal, but we are death for much of the rest of life and, hence, in ultimate prospect, unwittingly dangerous to ourselves”.
1
There is no way to mollify the brutality
of our ambiguities. They have transmogrified into unbreachable distances, acute
biochemical compromise, inbreeding depression in the absence of any conspecific
organisms that might, through hybridization or other means, revivify the population
bottleneck headed toward extinction. While polyploid angiosperms might be able to
avoid such population-level fatalities (a redundancy of chromosomes), the human
inflictions are so widespread, affecting every pinch of soil, column of air and of
water as to be far beyond ideal calculations. The destruction afflicts our senses, our
reason, our hopes. But it does much more to other species, and this represents a
profound cause for both utter despair and the vivid perplexities of philosophy.
1 Nature Revealed – Selected Writings 1949–2006, by Edward O. Wilson, The Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 2006, p.656
© 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_77
Chapter 77
The Finely Honed Basis of Unknowing
77.1 What We Don’t Know
While each increment of natural selection remains an untold history of biologically
tasked nouns, pronouns, verbs, and integers, there is no geographical compass or
time frame that in isolation can yield useful elucidation of the living objects of the
world we think we know. Even at the most seemingly profound level of classification and philosophizing, E. O. Wilson qualifies his May 30, 1993, essay for The
New York Times Magazine, “Is humanity suicidal?” by re-stating, “no, we aren’t
suicidal, but we are death for much of the rest of life and, hence, in ultimate prospect, unwittingly dangerous to ourselves”.
1
There is no way to mollify the brutality
of our ambiguities. They have transmogrified into unbreachable distances, acute
biochemical compromise, inbreeding depression in the absence of any conspecific
organisms that might, through hybridization or other means, revivify the population
bottleneck headed toward extinction. While polyploid angiosperms might be able to
avoid such population-level fatalities (a redundancy of chromosomes), the human
inflictions are so widespread, affecting every pinch of soil, column of air and of
water as to be far beyond ideal calculations. The destruction afflicts our senses, our
reason, our hopes. But it does much more to other species, and this represents a
profound cause for both utter despair and the vivid perplexities of philosophy.
1 Nature Revealed – Selected Writings 1949–2006, by Edward O. Wilson, The Johns Hopkins
University Press, Baltimore, Maryland 2006, p.656