Stuart Kauffman, Ron Brown and Larry Moran at the Center For Inquiry - Ontario, Feb. 8 2008 (click to inflate)
Event synopsis:
REINVENTING THE SACRED: How the Paradigm of Emergence Offers New Scientific Views on the Origin of Life and Biodiversity, Economics, Ethics, and Spirituality
Stuart Kauffman, Institute for Biochemplexity and Informatics, University of Calgary
“I would like to begin a discussion about the first glimmerings of a new scientific world view - beyond reductionism to emergence and radical creativity in the biosphere and human world. This emerging view finds a natural scientific place for value and ethics, and places us as co-creators of the enormous web of emerging complexity that is the evolving biosphere and human economics and culture. In this scientific world view, we can ask: Is it more astonishing that a God created all that exists in six days, or that the natural processes of the creative universe have yielded galaxies, chemistry, life, agency, meaning, value, consciousness, culture without a Creator. In my mind and heart, the overwhelming answer is that the truth as best we know it, that all arose with no Creator agent, all on its wondrous own, is so awesome and stunning that it is God enough for me and I hope much of humankind.”
I was excited for this one! Really, I was… I had the option of leaving slightly early and catching a bus to get home at a decent time, or catching the 11:30 bus and getting home super late and getting no sleep. I was going to catch the late bus… because I wanted to hear this speaker sooo badly.
I left early. …And Pamela followed me out.
Alright, the guy is a great public speaker. His voice is fantastic, he is very eloquent and over all really well spoken. But his talk was just flat out bad and boring. He was so redundant. His main point that went on for over an hour - “biology can not be reduced by physics” … Well no. shit.
He went on with a million and a half examples about why biology couldn’t be reduced by physics… Why physics can’t explain life, basically. He went on. and on. and on. and on about it. And all I could think was “well, no shit buddy - that’s why they are totally different departments.” Physics doesn’t explain why we socialize, or why we decide to get together to have discussion, or why we decide to have complex relationships that ruin our lives or why boys blow up at you and go crazy when you can’t keep plans because you have a life that doesn’t involve them. It just doesn’t explain those things. Because that’s not what physics is the study of.
It would be like me getting up and giving an hour and a half lecture about how photography can’t be reduced by urban planning. Well no shit! Photography has nothing to do with urban planning! (alright, sometimes you take pictures of urban areas to compare, but you get what I’m saying…)
To make matters worse the guy’s ego was taking up all the extra space in the room. Every chance he got he’d drop one of his books or a name like Richard Dawkins, Al Gore or whoever. He was telling a “joke” that involved him saying his “best line” to “Mr. Vice President” … and no one laughed. It was clearly an attempt to show who he had conversed with in his time. The worst part was when he claimed to have found the biological definition for life…… okay.
Kate and I are pretty good at paying attention during these lectures at CFI. No matter how boring everyone else (aka Allen) thinks they are we always pay attention and have a comment or two to share at the end. …But we ended up text messaging each other back and forth through the talk. Pamela and I spent the entire walk to the bus station talking about how horrible the talk had been.
Seriously. I rarely give a bad review of lectures. I think anyone with the intelligence to talk to a room of extremely intelligent people deserves my respect, for sure. I think that most lectures have an ounce of reason to them and I can usually find one or two things to take away from it. But this guy. Oh, this guy. Nothing, I got absolutely nothing.
It wasn’t all horrible. I saw Ron, Kate, Joe, Pamela, Justin… etc, all the CFI people who I wish I got to see more often. Next time I’ll look a little more into the speaker and make sure he isn’t going to be totally horrible.
