Field of Science

Dennett just made my day...

Fragment of Dan Dennett's priceless musings during a Templeton-funded session at the Darwin Festival, via Pharyngula:
"I had an epiphany at the end of the session, but I kept it to myself: The Eucharist is actually a Recapitulation of the Eukaryotic Revolution. When Christians ingest the Body of Christ, without digesting it, but keep it whole (holistier-than-thou whole), they are re-enacting the miracle of endosymbiosis that paved the way for eventual multi-cellularity. And so, dearly beloved brethren, we can see that by keeping Christ intact in our bodies we are keeping His Power intact in our embodied Minds, or Souls, just the way the first Eukaryote was vouchsafed a double blessing of earthly competence that enabled its descendants to join forces in Higher Organizations. Evolutionary theology. . . . I think I get it! I can do it! It truly is intellectual tennis without a net." - Dennett


(although, a very minor correction: Prokaryotes too have achieved multicellularity; eukaryogenesis is merely a likely prerequisite to our type of multicellularity. If that. But we can still honour the event by eating crackers and reading Tom Cavalier-Smith's massive 2002 review of Eukaryogenesis and the Neomuran Hypothesis...)

1 comment:

  1. So the choice is between reading Matthew and John, or reading Tom I and Tom II? That's a damned-either-way option if ever I heard one.

    ReplyDelete

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