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Re: darwin cliff notes
Mike/Damon or Peni R. Griffin (griffin@txdirect.com)
7 Nov 1995 21:08:59 GMT
hubey@pegasus.montclair.edu (H. M. Hubey) wrote:
>Alex Duncan <aduncan@mail.utexas.edu> writes:
> >And the last novel I read I can't remember, I gave up reading
>stories around 15.
>There's the story of the man who offered some
>stupid fruit known as St. John's bread or something
>to the hero of our story.I think it's called carob.
>It's like an animal horn; hard as wood but has sugar.
>
>Naturally our hero refused. But the man insisted. After
>a while our hero got upset: "Look" he said "I have no
>desire to chew on a kilogram of wood for a gram of sugar."
>
>That's evolution.
No. That's a story. Human beings tell each other stories all the time.
It's one way we organize our data. I read stories on this newsgroup
every day -- they're called models, but it's all the same. In some
stories, the content is what matters. In some, the sparks it strikes in
the listening brain are what matter. And in others (notably the
Shakespeare brushed off in Hubey's original post), *everything* matters
-- the words, the language, the rhythm, the characters, the events, the
context...
Not everyone, of course, requires Shakespeare. That doesn't mean
Shakespeare is unnecessary -- only that one person can get along without
him. That one person should, however, be able to recognize the
importance of Shakespeare when he sees how it affects others. I don't
need to know how to use statistics, directly, myself; but I'm glad so
many people do know how!
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