The Fainting Goats of Tennessee

Here is a news clip to let y'all know what's new in Tennessee.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/faintinggoats.html

Thank you to Jens Hopfer for the tip!

Our Last Moves?

"All past civilizations...have been localized and have had, therefore, the divergent mutative quality to which we have referred. They have offered choices to men. Ideas have been exchanged, along with technological innovations, but never on so vast, overwhelming, and single-directed a scale as in the present. Increasingly, there is but one way into the future: the technological way. The frightening aspect of this situation lies in the consriction of human choice. Western technology has released irrevocable forces, and the "one world" that has been talked about so glibly is frequently a distraught conformity produced by the centripetal forces of Western society. So great is its power over men that any other solution, any other philosophy, is silenced. Men, unknowingly, and whether for good or ill, appear to be making their last decisions about human destiny. To pursue the biological analogy, it is as though, instead of many adaptive organisms, a single gigantic animal embodied the only organic future of the world."
Loren Eisely, The Unexpted Universe, pp. 38

In my narrow world of research and courses, I am not qualified to comment on such a vast intellectual statement as that above. Elsewhere in his book Dr. Eisely says "science has not prevented war it has perfected it". There is so much I could say about this passage, but that might drown out your voice in your head, which is more important to you than mine anyway. All I will say is that I love this Archeologist's writings on natural history and it's implications for humans. It's not all doom and gloom, he also brings out the wonder in fossils, rocks and our humanity.