week two thoughts

On Thursday we argued about which was more important: a shared societal context, a personal self context, or a static/invariable context. There seemed to be points for and against every different view, which made it difficult for us to come to an agreed conclusion as a group. However I think all of these ideas are really the same thing just in different stages of its development.

Take for example dinosaurs. There is a theory floating around that up to one third of dinosaurs may have never existed and are actually the juveniles of another species. Because they look different physically and there is such little evidence in the fossil record, many dinosaurs we know and love may not have actually existed. New evidence has led scientists to believe that dinosaurs went under much greater morphological change than previously thought and this has led to misidentification. (http://boonsrid.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/c31-montana_v2.pdf). Not too long ago a specific kind of fish was thought to have split into three distinct species (the opposite of the dinosaur issue). (http://news.discovery.com/animals/fish-evolution-conservation.html).

So perhaps these three different approaches are really just different forms of each other. Perhaps a cycle begins with self, then moves to societal, and then ends up as static before the context is scrapped and a new one comes to life. Just a thought.