The last talk of three, was a great denouement to this very successful series.
43 years after obtaining his doctorate, a number bigger than the age of most people in the room, Dr John Elliott was still visibly too energetic to retire. The topic was built up by the other two sessions the fortnights before, and while the audience was mostly agreeable, some did not attend the other two talks, and they were all keen thinkers.
It was a presentation suitable for many, a touch of biology : of Darwin & Wallace’s Evolution by Natural Selection, and using evidence to arrive at a feel good acceptance of it. The apparent gaps in the evolution theory, and how detractors argue the fallacy of more gaps left & right of newly discovered missing link, were also exposed.
In the natural world, there is a progression of complexity, from physics, to chemistry, to biochem, to biology, and psychology. The further we move along that line, the more uncertainty we get when it comes to predicting ‘behaviours’. No longer are we only restricted to the inanimate, we deal with lifeforms with decisions, made out of free will or apparent free will, in a consciousness defined or ill-defined. The bottomline, that while one hypothesis may not explain all behaviours, there lies an underlying thread, that is built upon a programming code that had been gradually altered over the passage of time – of genes & memes.
The ways religions attempted to monopolise morality, as it tried to with the Creation narrative even with the advancement of science, were also explored, leading Dr Elliott to conclude this at the end : We don’t have morality because we have religion – we have religion because we are naturally moral creatures. When the boundary conditions are almost boundless, we have to begin to look at choices, and how a society wants to live, vis-s-vis the individual needs.
The session was well capped off by the great questions offered by a few from the audience at the end. They ranged from the evolutionary emergence of homosexuality, the psychopathic leaders in societies, and of science versus law.
HSS wishes to thank Dr Tim Bunn, Dr Ronald Ng and Dr John Elliott , for their great contribution to this science series, most definitely the first of many to come. It is clear they were subject matter experts, yet humble in the way of the scientific method.
We also thank NLB, for their sponsorship of the great facility. We had a few library walk in participants , and they were able to tune into the session without cost. We hope to bring more such talks to the public, more frequently, and at more accessible time slots.
