ghostsofevolution | Time and Death - The Secrets of Evolution with Sagan, Cuvier, Darwin, Eiseley, and Barlow @ghostsofevolution | Uploaded January 2010 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
In Symphony of Science video no. 4 ("Unbroken Thread"), Carl Sagan sings a profound biological truth: "The secrets of evolution are time and death." In this video, Connie Barlow provides the historical roots of that claim, beginning with the 1796 insight of Georges Cuvier that species have indeed gone extinct in the past; thus the world was apparently not created in perfection, as both theists and deists assumed. The remainder of Connie's death program delivered in Ashland in 2009 can be accessed on YouTube under the title "Stardust and Death" (in 4 parts) and "Why Is There Death?"
President Thomas Jefferson, a great naturalist in his own right, launches the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1801, hoping to find living mastodons and thus proving Cuvier wrong. By 1822, whole skeletons of dinosaurs were turning up, and thus reputable naturalists/scientists could no longer deny the fact of extinction. But how can one accommodate that fact philosophically and still find the world to be good?
In 1859 Charles Darwin offers a solution to the world: species transmutation by way of "natural selection." Thus death serves a creative role: it makes possible the complexification of life over vast spans of time. Loren Eiseley, in his 1962 book "Firmament of Time", muses on the history of discovery, asserting that Darwin could not have envisioned biological species change were it not for the prior discovery that death of species (extinction) is real.
Barlow's on-stage, illustrated program describing this sequence is excerpted from her longer "Death Through Deep-Time Eyes" program, presented at the Unitarian Center of Ashland, Oregon, in July 2009.
The video image of the fluffy seed being released, the footage of Carl Sagan by the ocean, and Carl's head in a bright light were drawn from Symphony of Science vid No. 1: "Glorious Dawn". The final scene of Carl walking out the door comes from the final scene of Symphony of Science vid 2: "We Are All Connected." Original footage of those scenes is from the 1980 Cosmos series, which can be viewed freely online at Hulu.com
In Symphony of Science video no. 4 ("Unbroken Thread"), Carl Sagan sings a profound biological truth: "The secrets of evolution are time and death." In this video, Connie Barlow provides the historical roots of that claim, beginning with the 1796 insight of Georges Cuvier that species have indeed gone extinct in the past; thus the world was apparently not created in perfection, as both theists and deists assumed. The remainder of Connie's death program delivered in Ashland in 2009 can be accessed on YouTube under the title "Stardust and Death" (in 4 parts) and "Why Is There Death?"
President Thomas Jefferson, a great naturalist in his own right, launches the Lewis and Clark Expedition in 1801, hoping to find living mastodons and thus proving Cuvier wrong. By 1822, whole skeletons of dinosaurs were turning up, and thus reputable naturalists/scientists could no longer deny the fact of extinction. But how can one accommodate that fact philosophically and still find the world to be good?
In 1859 Charles Darwin offers a solution to the world: species transmutation by way of "natural selection." Thus death serves a creative role: it makes possible the complexification of life over vast spans of time. Loren Eiseley, in his 1962 book "Firmament of Time", muses on the history of discovery, asserting that Darwin could not have envisioned biological species change were it not for the prior discovery that death of species (extinction) is real.
Barlow's on-stage, illustrated program describing this sequence is excerpted from her longer "Death Through Deep-Time Eyes" program, presented at the Unitarian Center of Ashland, Oregon, in July 2009.
The video image of the fluffy seed being released, the footage of Carl Sagan by the ocean, and Carl's head in a bright light were drawn from Symphony of Science vid No. 1: "Glorious Dawn". The final scene of Carl walking out the door comes from the final scene of Symphony of Science vid 2: "We Are All Connected." Original footage of those scenes is from the 1980 Cosmos series, which can be viewed freely online at Hulu.com
