(October 8, 2014 at 7:35 pm)Deidre32 Wrote: I manage to always follow the 'right' herd.I think that's actually an accurate assessment. We are social creatures, and our minds are wired for both that social instinct and a very strong survival instinct. Stand outside of the herd, and we are at risk. We also want to be liked or admired, even by people we happen to dislike. And then there is also our desire to stand out from the herd, yet be welcomed by it.
I think that we wage a constant inner battle between the part of us that wants to belong, and the part that wants to stand out from the crowd, and the part that values our identity as an individual. We will readily accept certain people and certain groups, and just as readily reject others, and we will tell ourselves that we are doing this deliberately and for specific reasons that we enumerate. And we're mostly very, very wrong.
"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
