5
" In his translation, Yan Fu rendered the word ‘evolution’ as tian yan. Chinese characters can be read in several ways, and one way of reading these characters is as ‘heavens’ performance’—the heavens in this instance meaning all of creation.10 Yan Fu’s phrase is now obscure and defunct, but heavens’ performance strikes me as a beautiful and illuminating way of describing Darwin’s discovery, for evolution is indeed a sort of performance, one whose theme is the electrochemical process we call life and whose stage is the entire Earth. Funded by the Sun, heavens’ performance has been running for at least 3.5 billion years, and barring cosmic catastrophe will probably run for a billion more. It’s an odd sort of performance, though, for there are no seats but on the stage itself, and the audience are also the players. Darwin’s genius was to elucidate, with elegant simplicity, the rules by which the performance has unfolded. "
― Tim Flannery , Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope
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" It’s often said that there are two fundamental sentiments that decide an election—hope for the future, and fear of it. If hope prevails, we’re likely to elect more generous governments and reach out to the world, but if fear prevails, we elect inward-looking, nationalistic ones. Factors determining the successful spread of mnemes are clearly extremely complex, but at the broadest level it does seem that we, collectively and as individuals, gravitate towards one of these two tendencies. If we believe that we live in a dog-eat-dog world where only the fittest survive, we’re likely to propagate very different mnemes from those that arise from an understanding of the fundamental interconnectedness of things. In large part, our future as a species will be determined by which of these mnemes prevails. "
― Tim Flannery , Here On Earth: An Argument For Hope
