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Forest and sea page 4
Almost inevitably there will come another question, What good is it?
I have never learned how to deal with this question. I am left appalled by the point of view that makes it possible. I don't know where to start explaining the world of nature that the
biologist sees, in which "What good is it?" becomes meaningless. The question is left over from the Middle Ages; from a small, cozy universe in which everything had a purpose in relation to man. The question comes down from the days before Copernicus' theories removed the earth from the center of the
solar system, before Newton provided a mechanism for the movements of the stars, before Hutton discovered the immensity of past time, before Darwin's ideas put man into perspective with the rest of the living world. Faced with astronomical space and geological time, faced with the immense diversity of living forms, how can one ask of one particular kind of butterfly, "What good is it?" Often my reaction is to ask in turn, ""What good are you?
Science has put man in his place; one among the millions of kinds of living things crawling around on the surface of a mini planet circling a trivial star. We can't really face the implications of this, and perhaps it is just as well-though I think humility is in general improving for the human character.
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