Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Philosophy Wire: The apple, old texts and the ancient Greeks' notion of "regression"


Philosophy Wire by Spiros Kakos [2011-01-04]: Apples have more genomes than any other fruit [1]. Apple also seems to be the link between ancient fruits and modern fruits: after a catastrophic event that took place about 60 million years ago, the genes of ancient apple fruit seem to have been evolved increased greatly in number in some kind of evolutionary response [2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. So now apples seem to have even more genes than humans do. I have reported the fact that humans are not the species with the largest genome in other Philosophy Wires. Some ancient religious texts refer to the apples as the "first fruit", while many other ancient myths (e.g. Greek myths) have apples as their very central theme. The interesting comment here is something contradicting the common sense: how come that ancient texts (religious or not, that does not matter) refer to knowledge that "should not" (according to mainstream history science) be part of the knowledge of their era, in agreement with very recent science findings? Ancient Greeks thought that humanity regresses, rather than progressing: they believed that their ancestors were more wise than they were and that their children will be less wise than they came to be. Could that be the case? In the old days we thought we were alive and part of nature but now we think we are mere molecules and something different than the nature we observe. Who is more wise? Which "model" is more scientific if we are to see truly the facts?

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