(In the context of #Trump and #Brexit) How significant are we humans?
Published by David Terrar,
I’ve just been listening to Donald Trump’s latest press conference on Radio 5 Live, shortly followed by an audience debate around Brexit remain and leave. Every time I hear Trump speak as the president it’s a jolt, as I remember the new post-truth reality in which we now live, and the consequence of the decisions he will make over the next 4 years. The polarised sides of the Brexit debate around immigration and how we handle it, in a similar way, make me wonder about Darwin, humanity, and where we stand on the evolutionary scale of development. Which made me think of this extract (that I've seen Christopher Hitchens quote) from the wonderful and Right Honourable, The Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS FREng FMedSci from his 2006 Dark Material lecture:
"For me, a 'cosmic perspective' actually strengthens my concerns about what happens here and now: I'll conclude by explaining why. The stupendous timespans of the evolutionary past are now part of common culture. We and the biosphere are the outcome of more than four billion years of evolution, but most people still somehow think we humans are necessarily the culmination of the evolutionary tree. That's not so. Our Sun is less than half way through its life. We're maybe only the half way stage. Any creatures witnessing the Sun's demise 6 billion years hence won't be human — they'll be as different from us as we are from bacteria."
More than anything in 2017 we need a grounded (cosmic) perspective, and leaders with vision and thinking who will take us forward to new place.
