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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 21, 2008
Octagonals
We would seem to have a fair chance of a white Christmas this year. I may not be an accredited climatologist, nor an Inuit with 100 words for "snow." But I'm Canadian enough to recognize the stuff as it comes down, or even when it rests unselfconsciously on the ground, waiting for the snow plow. And what I've seen this past week is, unambiguously, snow.(The anthropologist Franz Boas reported four Inuit words, originally. The number became inflated over a century of repetition. Thanks to the Internet, we can now find at least one list of nearly 100 purported "Eskimo words for snow." But as the skeptical Steven Pinker -- who exploded the myth in question in his book, The Language Instinct -- has told a blogger in self-defence, a careful examination of the list reveals such entries as "wa-ter," taken to mean: "melted snow." Numerous other entries confirm a satirical intention.) The ability to distinguish a hawk from a handsaw, or snow from rain, or even snow from sleet, is fairly widely distributed. The ability to believe what is in front of our eyes is less widely distributed, but still, it occurs. I performed the experiment once of arguing, on the back deck of a nice house during a Christmas party (where smokers tend to congregate), that the snow then descending upon me, and upon my three companions -- each in possession of a post-graduate degree -- was not, in fact, snow. Using a selection of erudite terms, some of which I'd made up for the purpose, I argued that it was instead, technically, the more interesting "nivis" that was falling, with a slightly different crystalline structure. The difference, I said, could be established by an expert only by examining the individual flakes. For while a pure-ice snowflake must necessarily have a branching hexagonal or six-sided symmetry, derived ultimately from the hexagonal lattice in the frozen water molecules from which they are formed (so far true), a curious homeopathic effect from chemical interaction with certain airborne pollutants may subtly alter this molecular structure, producing an eight-fold or octagonal branching symmetry in a small proportion of the flakes, which we should then properly call "nivis flakes." "See for yourself," I suggested. I soon had three well-educated people looking almost involuntarily at selections of tiny snowflakes, and declaring some to be octagonal. There could be none; but such is the power of suggestion. The point of this exercise in deceit, this cruel prank or practical joke, was to illustrate a thesis I had earlier propounded at the dinner table. People are capable of believing almost anything. Genuine skepticism, I argued, is an extremely rare human attribute, the equivalent, in its way, of real genius in art. It consists not only of seeing what is there, but what is more difficult, of not seeing what is not there. And sometimes an illusion can be extended through generations. The history of the world is replete with good examples, and the history of science consists largely of strange, difficult, but arguably sane individuals, somehow overriding their own expectations. They notice contradictions between what they've been taught to expect, and what is now in front of their eyes, and they are willing to endure any subsequent persecutions. To my mind, the perfectly grand example is Darwinist "evolution." A powerful and plausible suggestion having been made that the plants and animals of this world have evolved by pure chance through the arbitrary survival principle in nature -- and thus necessarily from simple to complex, from homogenous to diverse, from stupid to smart, from awkward to nimble -- leads almost every paleontologist to seek this trend in all fossil records. Those records being extremely fragmentary, he routinely supplies the "missing links" out of his own carefully coached imagination, until the unfamiliar can be morphed into the familiar and, in effect, explained away. Darwinism remains the great octagonal snowflake of our age, persisting now into a seventh generation. In the coming year, the sesquicentennial of the publication of the Origin of Species, and bicentennial of Charles Darwin's birth, we will be constantly reminded of this "patron saint" of modern atheism and antinomianism. Our liberal political and academic establishments will celebrate the triumph of one of their "great liberators" over the troglodyte religious types. I do not finally condemn the late Darwin himself, a reasonably honest man and fine student of natural history. The authors of so many of the world's governing plausible ideas were likewise reasonably honest, intelligent men -- teased, by some plausible hunch, into forgetfulness of the paradoxical, in a universe where the plausible is often the deadly enemy of the truth. By contrast, the idea that God could not only make this world (by whatever means infinitely beyond our comprehension), but people it with creatures of His love; that He could take upon Himself the garment of human flesh, in the cause of our redemption -- that His angels might appear in the hills by Bethlehem to announce something beyond human comprehension -- this is all quite implausible. Yet, what if it is true? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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