Rethinking What it Means We Evolved A New Framework for Universal Moral Values Shaun Johnston 9780977947089 Books
Download As PDF : Rethinking What it Means We Evolved A New Framework for Universal Moral Values Shaun Johnston 9780977947089 Books
Scientists are puzzled. “Why won’t the public embrace our scientific theory of evolution?” This book is my answer, written in terms of my own experience and my own way of looking at the world. But it may speak for you too. It may tell those scientists why the rest of us think we’re better off without their theory. Evolution matters. It’s much too important to leave to scientists. It matters because evolution has become our new origin story. Aren’t we bound to look to our origin story to find out who and what we are? But when we do that with today’s scientific theory—“the modern synthesis”—the answers we get aren’t satisfying. So I've come up with a theory of evolution of my own that gives me answers I’m happier with, answers to do with meaning and values. When it’s meaning and values you’re after you have to look beyond science. In this book you’ll find me supplementing what we know about the human genome with the history of the Ancient World. Chapters of rational argument alternate with stories, flights of imagination through which I explore what evolution must mean. The result is a new natural philosophy—the world isn’t the way we thought it was—and a new framework for moral values, values inherent in the process of evolution itself.
Rethinking What it Means We Evolved A New Framework for Universal Moral Values Shaun Johnston 9780977947089 Books
Shaun Johnston is obsessed with the topic of evolution. He’s not a scientist. He’s not a Creationist. He’s an eccentric of his own particular flavour.What is evolution? Johnston is not prepared to buy any explanation which reduces it to random mutations and natural selection. If we are conscious, creative beings and we are a product of evolution, then evolution must also be a conscious, creative process - like us, a product of choices made. But choices made by who or what? Johnston doesn’t believe in a supernatural deity.
Could the genome itself, with all that complexity, be a kind of intelligent brain, choosing to undergo changes and thus form new species the way an artist paints new canvases? Is there some kind of telepathy allowing the DNA in each cell to communicate with all others?
It all sounds crazy, but Johnston finds it more believable than any of the variations on the more widely-accepted theory. He doesn’t insist on it. He admits he can’t provide evidence for it. But he wants to persuade us that we needn’t feel stuck with the model founded on the work of Darwin.
To believe that we are the product of a random physical process, he fears, is liable to have a dehumanising effect on us. If creativity by conscious free will is absent from our origin story, perhaps our ability to behave creatively will atrophy. He believes that putting this quality back into our origin story on the basis that it must be there, even if we can’t explain the process, will, over the next couple of hundred years, re-invigorate our culture, our education system and our economy.
I wasn’t convinced.
Why read this book? I was intrigued. Johnston is a unique thinker, even if I find fault with his reasoning. He mixes his enthusiastic presentation of his argument with a sprinkling of short stories, some of them very entertaining, and autobiographical snippets.
I’m not in a position to defend mainstream evolutionary thinking against a critic like Johnston. I just don’t know enough about it. I always have found it a little hard to believe that random mutations and natural selection alone could account for the increase in complexity from an amoeba to a human being, but that doesn’t worry me enough to be persuaded I need to start believing in telepathic intelligent genomes. I’m happy to leave science up to the scientists.
I do share Johnston’s passionate humanism, however. I don’t have much time for the idea that the meaning of our lives is shaped by the need to rise up the dominance hierarchy and pass on our genes, as if we were not creative beings who can find our own meaning through intelligent enquiry and artistic creation. And we shouldn’t lose sight of what marvellous creatures we are - assemblages of cells so well-orchestrated that we can not just live for a century, but unravel the mysteries of the universe and write a symphony that is its own form of divinity.
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Rethinking What it Means We Evolved A New Framework for Universal Moral Values Shaun Johnston 9780977947089 Books Reviews
Definitely a conversation piece, this off-beat thesis will be a challenge to what you have been taught about Darwinism by an author learned in the arts as well as the sciences. I recommend it to anyone interested in examining the attitudes and values that have emerged from the most widely applied theory in biology.
Shaun Johnston is obsessed with the topic of evolution. He’s not a scientist. He’s not a Creationist. He’s an eccentric of his own particular flavour.
What is evolution? Johnston is not prepared to buy any explanation which reduces it to random mutations and natural selection. If we are conscious, creative beings and we are a product of evolution, then evolution must also be a conscious, creative process - like us, a product of choices made. But choices made by who or what? Johnston doesn’t believe in a supernatural deity.
Could the genome itself, with all that complexity, be a kind of intelligent brain, choosing to undergo changes and thus form new species the way an artist paints new canvases? Is there some kind of telepathy allowing the DNA in each cell to communicate with all others?
It all sounds crazy, but Johnston finds it more believable than any of the variations on the more widely-accepted theory. He doesn’t insist on it. He admits he can’t provide evidence for it. But he wants to persuade us that we needn’t feel stuck with the model founded on the work of Darwin.
To believe that we are the product of a random physical process, he fears, is liable to have a dehumanising effect on us. If creativity by conscious free will is absent from our origin story, perhaps our ability to behave creatively will atrophy. He believes that putting this quality back into our origin story on the basis that it must be there, even if we can’t explain the process, will, over the next couple of hundred years, re-invigorate our culture, our education system and our economy.
I wasn’t convinced.
Why read this book? I was intrigued. Johnston is a unique thinker, even if I find fault with his reasoning. He mixes his enthusiastic presentation of his argument with a sprinkling of short stories, some of them very entertaining, and autobiographical snippets.
I’m not in a position to defend mainstream evolutionary thinking against a critic like Johnston. I just don’t know enough about it. I always have found it a little hard to believe that random mutations and natural selection alone could account for the increase in complexity from an amoeba to a human being, but that doesn’t worry me enough to be persuaded I need to start believing in telepathic intelligent genomes. I’m happy to leave science up to the scientists.
I do share Johnston’s passionate humanism, however. I don’t have much time for the idea that the meaning of our lives is shaped by the need to rise up the dominance hierarchy and pass on our genes, as if we were not creative beings who can find our own meaning through intelligent enquiry and artistic creation. And we shouldn’t lose sight of what marvellous creatures we are - assemblages of cells so well-orchestrated that we can not just live for a century, but unravel the mysteries of the universe and write a symphony that is its own form of divinity.
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