Science solitary

IN the state of nature - a fictitious state much discussed by phOosophers and somewhat reminiscent of the island in Wil liam Golding s Lard of the Flies - people live in the present and care only about themselves. As a result, their lives, in Hobbes s memorable phrase, are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." No known societies are quite like that. The Ik of Uganda, as described by a social anthropologist who stayed with them for some time, are probably as close to the state of nature as any human group on record, but even they display minimal forms of self-restraint. A major task of the social sciences is to explain why we are not in the state of nature. Here I shall consider foresight - the ability to be motivated by long-term consequences of action - as a possible explanation of self-restraint. Other explanations are discussed later. ... 

Earlier I said that the social sciences have to explain why we are not in the state of nature. Another challenge is to explain why societies have a modicum of ar /er-why they do not offer "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." This phrase from facbeth evokes a different kind of anarchy than that suggested by Hobbes s description of life in the state of nature, as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." It conveys a lack of coordination rather than a lack of cooperation, chaos rather than nastiness. In the preceding chapter we looked at some ways in which people s plans can be thwarted. But no society could work if everybody s plans were thwarted all the time. Universal frustration of plans would be chaos. 

Finger TE, Morita Y (1985) Two gustatory systems facial and vagal gustatory nuclei have different brainstem connections. Science 227 776-778 Finger TE, Bottger B, Hansen A, Anderson KT, Alimohammadi H, Silver WL (2003) Solitary chemoreceptor cells in the nasal cavity serve as sentinels of respiration. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 100 8981-8986... 

Western science is now delineating a new concept of man, not as a solitary ego within a wall of flesh, but as an organism which is what it is by virtue of its inseparability from the rest of the world... medicines which science has discovered... may prove to be the sacraments of this new religion. The Joyous Cosmology, by Watts, A. 1970... 

Samuels GJ. Notes on isolation of solitary ascospores—a field guide. In Kendrick B, ed. The Whole Fungus. Vol. 2. Ottawa National Museum of Natural Sciences, 1979, pp 636-645. 

Abrol, D.P. Kapil, R.P. (1991). Foraging strategies of honeybees and solitary bees as determined by nectar sugar components. Proceedings of the Indian National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 57-B, p. 127-132, ISSN 0019-5588... 

We shall show how even the sciences in which discovery is the fruit of solitary meditation would benefit from being studied by a greater number of people, in the matter of those improvements in detail which do not demand the intellectual energy of an inventor, but suggest themselves to mere reflection. 

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