TaaL : Human history is replete with quite intelligent and otherwise successful cultures which simply got one (or more) things crucially wrong. Your Easter Islanders believed that resources flowed from the good will of their ancestors, and that their ancestors really liked giant stone heads. With that as their paradigm, it was only logical to cut down all the trees to aid in the construction of ever-bigger stone heads. The stone heads are still there; the island ecosystems not so much. Nor am I trying to single out the Rapa Nui for scorn, because one way or another, pretty much all 21 st century human cultures on Earth are industriously making giant stone heads in one guise or another, depending on which fragments of the picture they treat as their cultural reality. You’ve clearly arrived at this page with a pre -existing set of knowledge and beliefs. If you, dear young human, take anything from this book — and you well may — it may be an appreciation for how the aspects of your reality fit together . These days, the very nature of human expertise is highly specialized, but a reasonably intelligent generalist has a better chance of making good decisions about the future. The Bottom Line: Reductionism is quite useful, but both dangerous and insufficient. A science-based worldview which looks at all the puzzle pieces at once can make sense of things. The important knowledge now resides between the disciplines.
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