The Rules of Reality
“Science is true whether you believe it or not.”
- Neil deGrasse Tyson
Quite simply, human minds evolved to be wrong. Wrong in very specific ways that erred heavily on the side of both individual and tribal survival and were built on a scaffolding of verbal narrative (strings of words). These verbal stories, though wildly imperfect, were the best available communications method to tie our tribes together. Yet we are no longer functioning as small tribes comprising a tiny part of the ecosystem. We have taken control of the E arth’s ecosphere— but have done so using the same stone-age thinking, biases, and inborn agenda left to us by the unthinking mechanisms of evolution. We will delve more deeply into this because it highlights our major problem: Humans never evolved to face planetary limits and are running into them at full speed. Fortunately, we have developed techniques for describing and predicting the physical world, and they are spectacularly successful — when used. These techniques are science. Science has described the rules governing our universe with ever-increasing accuracy, and we now understand generally how they work, from the behavior of subatomic particles and forces to the largest scales of the universe, and every day the picture grows slightly more complete. And is already far more complete than is necessary for us to
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