Abstract
Cosmic Perspectives and the Myths We Need to Survive
Highlights
Big history can be defined a s t he a ttempt t o u nderstand t he i ntegrated h istory o f t he c osmos, E arth, l ife and humanity
Cosmic Perspectives and Darwinism Like all organs, our brains have evolved to help us survive. They have evolved to see the world in useful ways that promoted the survival of our ancestors. This presents scientists with a dilemma: we are looking for the truth, but the Darwinian truth about evolution suggests that when useful survivalpromoting fictions conflict with the truth, we can prefer the useful fictions
How can we scientists insist on the truth when the same brains that are searching for truth sometimes prefer useful fictions for perfectly legitimate scientific reasons that Darwin helped us understand
Summary
Perhaps motivated by witnessing the nationalistic delusions that led to the Great War, Bertrand Russell (1919) described the prevalence and usefulness of comforting fictions, Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day. It seems strange for the founder of sociobiology to expect adaptive religious beliefs to be true Brains and their contents have been selected to support useful cosmic perspectives (not necessarily truthful ones). That is why there are so many extant believers On this Darwinian view, we expect our cosmic perspectives (about questions such as “Who are we?”, “What is our place in the universe?”, “What is the origin and meaning of humanity?”) to be useful, comforting, and an aid to survival, but not necessarily truthful. For Gauguin, the monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos is not among the acceptable explanations for the death of his nineteen-year-old daughter Aline At such times, scientific views play second fiddle to myths, because we believe we are important and need input to support this idea that science seems unable to provide
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