A CLASS APART
By the time I was
twelve, I was already an ardent ‘believer’ in science. On being shown it one
day, my neighbour turned up her nose and declared that my pet Lizard wasn’t an
animal.
‘What is it then?’ I asked her, ‘A plant?’
She went on to explain that animals are cuddly things and
a lizard is a creepy-crawly, so is classified with other creepy-crawlies, such
as spiders and beetles.
Affronted by her ignorance, I reeled off a catalogue of
stuff about orders, phyla, species, the family lacertidae and other
kinds of learnèd hogwash.
All these years on, I see how ignorant I was to
believe these officially constructed classifications had any more truth in them
than hers.
The lizard was the
most ignorant of all, being party to neither system of taxonomy, but it alone
was possessed of full understanding of its role and duties, not as a
representative of other ‘lacertidae’, but specifically as itself.
Its successors continue with identical expertise,
regardless of classification and consensus science, and all unwitting of the
changes in their motives, place in the scheme of things, history and the
evolutionary back-stories spun about them to suit the notions and fashions of
humanoid myth.
Good or bad, right or wrong, ‘science’ has not touched
them.
From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository
From BLINDED WITH SCIENCE available from The Book Depository
No comments:
Post a Comment