D*****r
发帖数: 6791 | 1 “Sigmund Freud often remarked that great revolutions in the history of
science have but one common, and ironic, feature: they knock human arrogance
off one pedestal after another of our previous conviction about our own
self-importance. In Freud's three examples, Copernicus moved our home from
center to periphery, Darwin then relegated us to ‘descent from an animal
world’; and, finally (in one of the least modest statements of intellectual
history), Freud himself discovered the unconscious and exploded the myth of
a fully rational mind. In this wise and crucial sense, the Darwinian
revolution remains woefully incomplete because, even though thinking
humanity accepts the fact of evolution, most of us are still unwilling to
abandon the comforting view that evolution means (or at least embodies a
central principle of) progress defined to render the appearance of something
like human consciousness either virtually inevitable or at least
predictable. The pedestal is not smashed until we abandon progress or
complexification as a central principle and come to entertain the strong
possibility that H. sapiens is but a tiny, late-arising twig on life's
enormously arborescent bush—a small bud that would almost surely not appear
a second time if we could replant the bush from seed and let it grow again.”
— Stephen Jay Gould, "The Evolution of Life On Earth," Scientific American
271 (October 1994): 91. | J*****3
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