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The survival of delicate wonders

Just a small argument against what Han  said...butterflies.

Cost

People keep talking about not being able to do things because of the money it costs. But considering all the things we do in spite of being trillions of dollars in debt, seems like a lack of money is no real obstacle so long as there's a will to do it.

Devolution

In the beginning
We were smarter
And flame was heaven-sent

Through the ages
We got stupid
Now we must repent

- excerpt from "I burn", by Toadies

The creatures that live in the dark

I remember learning in one of my biology classes that ecological niches are not preferred by the organisms that live in them. It just turns out that that's the environment that they are best adapted for after physical attributes and competition are accounted for. But most would rather be in a different niche. 

God's motive

Just out of curiosity, why did God create beings so far beneath Himself? If He was lonely  and needed friends, why not create beings closer to being His equals? 

Perhaps it’s because if He’d created equals, they wouldn’t really appreciate Him and wouldn’t see much point in worshiping Him, since they would be, after all, equals. 

But did He need to feel so much bigger and more important than His creation? Did He feel a need to be worshiped? Wouldn’t that be vain? And wouldn’t it also be vain for us lowly humans to believe that God needed us? 

Surely, He doesn’t need us. We are a constant disappointment to Him. We can’t live up to His expectations and standards, and we’re constantly reminded of this fact. And why would we want to be in a relationship with Him if we aren’t good enough for Him? As if that situation isn’t bad enough within human relationships, it’s even worse in this case as it’s a disappointment He set Himself up for, since He did create us. 

So from His angle, why create us (or anything) at all?

On the other hand, from our angle, many of us would feel that we do need Him, which would be a motive for us to create Him.

Generalizations

Jerry Mander wrote about a situation in his book, In the Absence of the Sacred, about the difference between our scientific methods of hunting deer as a part of wildlife management versus the native Americans’ methods. In our scientific method, after crunching numbers, we’d say that it’s ok only to hunt male deer. But no considerations are made as to which male deer are killed.

Native Americans, on the other hand, would have intimate first hand knowledge of the deer in their periphery and would know not to kill an older male deer that the younger ones depended on, as killing it would result in the others dying as well. 

When I told my friend about this situation, he said that the data collection was sloppy and needed to be improved upon. But how? And wouldn’t that still be more complicated than what the natives were doing?

In another situation, my vice principal at my last school wanted to conduct a research project on two of my sixth grade classes. Having a large subsample, she assumed homogeny between the classes and that the only significant differences would be a result of her different teaching methods that she was testing. 

But I knew the students in each class well and could see right away that her methods did not account for or accommodate the differences between those two classes. 

And it’s dawned on me just now (as obvious as this will sound) that if we know the individuals, we don’t need to make generalizations about everyone else.