Biology and Spirituality
I know, I should follow along with the herd and discuss cloning, but I
don't want to do that. First there are profound implications for our legal system,
for our theology and for ethics in general. I'm just not ready to deal with
that;Besides my students have an assignment on these issues. One unfortunate
aspect of this and related break throughs in biotechnology is that people use
sight of the fact that science is to a fair degree a spiritual exercise and
this spiritual aspect of science seeps all through the scientist's work and
being.
By spirituality I do not mean the religiousity that most of society equates
with spirituality but rather that set of experiences and practices which provide
us with a sense of interconnectedness to the rest of the planet and universe.
One example comes from today. My son brought home a salamander. Unremarkable
perhaps. But to me it brought forth a whole flood of memories of hunting frogs
and salamanders and watching them mate in the cold late rains of New England,
listening to the frog choruses, and feeling connected again to the cycles of
seasons.
More recently, one of the first trips I took from Kansas was a trip to
South East Texas to collect ants. I was driving through the flint hills when
suddenly it hit me in one spot that this was a mile stone: my first visit to
an area(OK excluding South Bronx) where I could look all around and see no trees.)
Here was a milestone, a total shift in perception. I grew up in Western Massachusetts
where the word for the world might be, as suggested by Urusula LeGuin for a
world in one of her short stories, "forest". I began to see the prairies(of
which only 1% remain today) and hills of Kansas as having their own special
beauty which tugs at me profoundly.
Is it just me or more do other biologists have a spiritual side? I'm sure
most do. A collegue of mine at Washburn is an atheist, not one you would expect
to have a spiritual side. But he does and has admitted as much to me....in fact
he really surprised me when he said he doesn't like organised religion because
it gets in the way of spirituality.