When I was a teenager thinking about life and death and my place in the cosmos, I did not trust science at all. I had the early 19^th century Romantic, Mary Shelly’s Dr. Frankenstein and his ungodly creation, view of science and progress as being out of control, aberrations not worth the few baubles they provided. Science led to atomic weapons and to pollution, serving as the tool of soulless greed and reveling in intellectual arrogance. Progress was a cancer, uncontrolled and uncontrollable. Science and progress had become what we would now call “too big to fail,” and I wanted no part of them, at least not as a source for answers to the questions that mattered. Of course, the real question that mattered was when I was going to get laid, and when that happened, when I would again, but still, it seemed to me that we had likely taken a wrong turn somewhere around fourteen thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture. Continue reading →