The Davey Dialogues - An Exploration of the Scientific Foundations of Human Culture. John C. Madden

      PREFACE

      The aim of science is not to open the door to everlasting wisdom but to set a limit on everlasting error.

      BERTOLT BRECHT, The Life of Galileo

      This book is an exploration of some of the science that has altered our world view and that may reasonably influence our assessment of ourselves and the place of humanity in the universe we inhabit.

      At least since the time that the fabled Adam bit into the apple, knowledge has proven to be both a blessing and a curse. Life is, on the whole, much longer and pleasanter for most of us than it was for our hunter-gatherer forebears. But our huge advances in knowledge bring with them new challenges, some of which will put in question the existence of our species in ways much more complex and difficult than the invention of the hydrogen bomb has ever been able to do.

      Our survival as a species, not to mention the happiness of our grandchildren and succeeding generations, will likely depend on enough of us understanding enough about ourselves and our environment to sort out which, if any, of the inevitable opposing views on vital issues is most likely to be correct.

      In this endeavour, quite appropriately, most of us are influenced by the thinking of ancient philosophers, literary greats and religious thinkers. It is often challenging to sort out which parts of this cornucopia of imparted wisdom are truly timeless and which should be modified or even ignored in the light of our current understanding of the universe we live in. This book is intended to provide the reader with a tool set to help in this endeavour.

      In some ways, therefore, the book deals as much in the history of science as in science itself, for, by and large, the savants of old were as influenced by the then current state of knowledge as we are. Some of their conclusions would clearly have been different had they known what we know today.

      We humans are notoriously bad at choosing options that will make us happier, a fact discussed entertainingly and at some length by Dan Gilbert in his book, Stumbling on Happiness. This fault is at least partially attributable to the rather quixotic way in which our brains have evolved over the past 500 million years and the rather different lifestyles led by ourselves as opposed to our hunter-gatherer ancestors of only a few thousand years ago from whom our inherited set of instincts have come, with little time for species evolution to bring about material alteration adequate to match our very different circumstances.

      Our conscious decisions are clearly influenced by our instincts, as well as by unconsciously acquired behaviour modification brought about by our experiences in life, especially experiences from early childhood when our brains were still actively developing. In the circumstances, the concept of “free will” seems ill-fitted to the triage process that apparently takes place in an ancient part of our brain called the amygdala, where instinctual and adapted behavioural biases mingle (unbeknownst to us) with conscious thought to determine action.

      As unconscious as these biases may be to us, we can be sure that advertisers, politicians, producers of electronic games, movies and TV programs, casino owners, drug dealers, not to mention preachers and novelists, are all, to a degree, cognisant of what drives us and shape their pitches to resonate with the instinctual desires and needs of their audience. Because the merry band of persuaders listed above is much more likely to be aware of the instincts that drive us than are we, I have attempted to redress some of the imbalance in this book. Nevertheless most of us are at least vaguely aware that our conscious inputs are operating in prevailing winds and currents that are capable of overpowering our conscious desires and sending our frail vessel off in unintended directions. It is my hope that this book will help the reader to better understand this process amongst others. The discourse is intended to be intelligible to my grandchildren when they reach their late teens or early twenties. It does not require a background in science.

      Some of the questions addressed by philosophy and religion over the ages, and which are also addressed in the dialogues include:

      Are humans different in essence from animals or merely one of many species?

      How old is Earth? How big and how old is the universe?

      How did life come about?

      How do our brains work? Is this very different from the way other animal brains work?

      What is happiness? What makes us happy?

      Do we have a free will?

      What is the scientific basis for morality?

      Science certainly does not yet have all the answers to such questions, but especially in the last fifty years or so hundreds of thousands of motivated and intelligent people have together furnished us with a mutually re-enforcing array of facts that together provide us with a framework out of which new answers to old questions are emerging. This dialogue draws primarily on the scientific developments I believe are most relevant to those who want to develop their own answers to such questions.

      In order to keep the book to a reasonable length, it was necessary to select topics with care and to summarize unmercifully, while still maintaining interest by occasional excursions into greater detail. The general layout is as follows:

      Part 1: Introduction.

      Part 2: How our understanding of space and time evolved, along with our theories of the universe.

      Part 3: Darwin, evolution and early lessons from the study of animals and human societies.

      Part 4: The workings of cellular life and the coding of it in DNA. How might life have emerged?

      Part 5: How does the brain remember, learn and associate seemingly disparate thoughts? Is there a hidden agenda?

      Part 6: How do the real drivers of human happiness differ from what we might think they are? Why might this be so?

      Part 7: Some concluding advice from Davey – the cool outside participant in the dialogues, who is pessimistic about the future of humanity but who has a challenging problem of his own to address.

      Early readers of this book varied substantially in what they wanted to know about the way in which important new scientific discoveries came about. One or two