(March 27, 2013 at 3:14 pm)junkyardboy Wrote: so your optimism is based on your immediate circumstances
not a very sound foundation for optimism
Isn't it the only valid foundation for optimism? The homeless guy who is sitting on a street corner may be feeling quite pessimistic, even if the headlines on a nearby newspaper say that the economy is booming. Our mood can be lifted and dropped most easily by those around us and by our particular circumstances.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
