{"id":58877,"date":"2021-08-03T10:14:22","date_gmt":"2021-08-03T15:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58877"},"modified":"2021-08-03T10:14:22","modified_gmt":"2021-08-03T15:14:22","slug":"nature-is-a-jazz-band-not-a-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=58877","title":{"rendered":"Nature is a jazz band, not a machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nature is a jazz band, not a machine<\/a><\/h3>\n

We treat it so at our peril<\/strong><\/p>\n

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From genetic engineering to geoengineering, we treat nature as though it\u2019s a machine. This view of nature has deep roots in Western thought, all the way to Descartes and Hobbs, but it\u2019s a fundamental misconception with potentially disastrous consequences, argues Jeremy Lent.<\/em><\/p>\n

Climate change, avers Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil and erstwhile US Secretary of State, \u00a0\u201cis an engineering problem, and it has engineering solutions.\u201d This brief statement encapsulates how the metaphor of the machine underlies the way our mainstream culture views the natural world. It also hints at the grievous dangers involved in perceiving nature in this way.<\/p>\n

This mechanistic worldview has deep roots in Western thought. The great pioneers of the Scientific Revolution, such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, believed they were decoding \u201cGod\u2019s book,\u201d which was written in the language of mathematics. God was conceived as a great clockmaker, the \u201cartificer\u201d who constructed the intricate machine of nature so flawlessly that, once it was set in motion, there was nothing more to do (bar the occasional miracle) than let it run its course. \u201cWhat is the heart, but a spring,\u201d wrote Thomas Hobbes, \u201cand the nerves but so many strings?\u201d Descartes flatly declared: \u201cI do not recognize any difference between the machines made by craftsmen and the various bodies that nature alone composes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In recent decades, the mechanistic conception of nature has been updated for the computer age, with popularizers of science such as Richard Dawkins arguing that \u201clife is just bytes and bytes and bytes of digital information\u201d and as a result, an animal such as a bat \u201cis a machine, whose internal electronics are so wired up that its wing muscles cause it to home in on insects, as an unconscious guided missile homes in on an aeroplane.\u201d…<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nature is a jazz band, not a machine We treat it so at our peril From genetic engineering to geoengineering, we treat nature as though it\u2019s a machine. This view of nature has deep roots in Western thought, all the way to Descartes and Hobbs, but it\u2019s a fundamental misconception with potentially disastrous consequences, argues […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,180,31578,16819,6927,31577,1789],"class_list":["post-58877","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-crises","tag-iai-news","tag-jeremy-lent","tag-machines","tag-mechanisms","tag-nature"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58877","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=58877"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58877\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58878,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58877\/revisions\/58878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=58877"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=58877"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=58877"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}