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I found the different kinds of stories explaining biological evolution interesting, particularly the part about how Darwin started off the idea of explaining why things (or animals) are the way they are with a narrative, rather than the unifying, universal pattern like the Chain of Being. The thing about explaining it through a hierarchy like that is that what if one of the links in the chain breaks? Or disappears? According to wikipedia, the Dodo bird (for example) went extinct in the 17th century. Did it not have a place in the chain of being? Shouldn't something have changed? I'm wondering why people didn't see too many flaws in their theory. I mean, obviously people did but this system lasted for a while, didn't it?

I just found it very interesting about the revolution in ways of thinking to change from the universal pattern to the narrative.  The universal pattern would be more optimistic because it would be stable and unshakable even by humans (ex. if global warming had occurred under this way of thinking, it would just be God's doing and not the fault of humans). The narrative takes away our ability to transfer our responsibility onto something else, saying "that's just how things are" instead of taking care of business like we should.  The narrative also takes away the hierarchy, so that we could rethink the ladder-like form and move about in it, so that we could, if circumstances provided, place ourselves closer on the spectrum to God and do things like genetics and cloning, while also widening the distance between humans and everything else, like animals and plants (justifying things like animal testing and experimentation etc.) A stray thought i had when contemplating this idea is contrasting it to (well, what we imagine would be) the way of thinking of some Native Americans, valuing animals and plants at the same level as humans.

A thought I had during class but didn't get an opening to say was that there's a difference when someone (like a scientist) tells what they believe based on fact and observation to be truth, even though it's incorrect, and when somebody makes something up that they know to be incorrect and tell it to be truth, but it works. For the first, I was thinking of somebody's (I can't remember who at the moment) heliocentric view of the galaxy. He believed it to be true, and told it to be true, but eventually it didn't work (because the planets were all moving on the same path around the sun or something like that). That doesn't discredit his explanation (story) just because it wasn't true. On the other hand, in this situation, the Church made up the geocentric theory and told it to be true, and it worked for a while, even though it wasn't correct.