Raises issues also about science, human life, literature ...

"evolution implies that we are the meaningless result of a meaningless process" ... Evan Stiegel "a story that is inconsistent with my long=term observations of my place within my family, friends, and college? Or am I just futilely searching for meaning where there can never be any?" ... kaleigh

• Human evolution
  • Humans part of ongoing larger exploration
  • Lose specialness, gain connectedness, better understanding of humanness
  • Appreciation of importance of human diversity (no "errors")
• Human life, culture ... literature?
  • In the beginning was the word ... (John 1:1) ("logos" -> intent, reason, design, cause)
  • Possibility that that is not so, that intent/reason/words were not present at the beginning, leading to ...
  • "fears that the wrong answer [to whether evolution is the explanation] would have intolerable moral [and other] implications [no purpose, meaning, personal responsibility, goodness, comfort]" (Dennett, p20], ie that things important to us would prove to be shams/illusions

A story of emergence

• From epsilon to alpha?
  • strong/weak anthropic principle and modern cosmology
  • biological evolution is about much more than "survival of the fittest"
    • PG and others who don't reproduce play significan role in biological evolution
  • humans not independent of biological evolution in past/present/future
    • continue to reproduce with variance/die
• Bipartite brain as recent evolutionary invention
• Lose fixed "purpose/meaning"; gives room to create purpose/meaning ourselves
• and new questions ...
  • What can we get from "random" exploration? (Game of Life)
  • What do we mean by "purpose"? (Langton's Ant)
  • What are words for? ("I wonder ... whether we have forced our literature into a more non-narrative state by printing it" - Caitlin; I wonder if ... this idea of specialization versus potential ... could be extended to the development of literature" - Elise)

Linear science	Seriously loopy science
Science as successive approximations to Truth Science as authority about "natural world" Non-narrative?	Science as ongoing story telling and story revision: repeated making of observations, interpreting and summarizing observations, making new observations, making new summaries ... individually and collectively Science as skepticism, a style of inquiry that can be used for anything, one which everybody is equipped to to/can get better at/be further empowered by, and contribute to - a way of making sense of what is but even more of exploring what might yet be Narrative? (see The Nature of Science)

"Science" vs "science as story telling and ... "science" can be/is done without words, intent, meaning (biological evolution is "science") "story telling" an add on .... increases rate and scope of exploration? the narrative/non-narrative distinction as a story telling exploration ... in general?(things just are versus things have patterns/meanings)

Culture as an emergent ... ?

Meaning, words, story telling, literature as an emergent ... ?

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