The Ascent of Man...

Is science de-humanising ?? Does it rob the beauty of nature by rationalising and hypothising ??
Does it make robots out of humans and convert them into numbers ??

Watch what Jacob Bronowski has to say on it. A powerful clip from Bronowski's The Ascent of Man series. Duration: 2.28 mins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mIfatdNqBA&NR=1

Note:

1. The video is taped besides a pond in Auschwitz which contains the ashes of about 4 million people (that is 40 lakhs !!) sintered alive by Nazi barbarism.

2. Jacob Bronowski (January 18, 1908 - August 22, 1974) was a British mathematician of Polish-Jewish origin, best remembered as the presenter and writer of the BBC television documentary series, The Ascent of Man. (From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Bronowski)

The Ascent of Man was a groundbreaking 13-part series commisioned by BBC in 1973.The title alludes to The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin.

Transcript of the video above:

It is said that science will dehumanise people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. In the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz, that is where people were turned into numbers. Into its pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.

Teaching Evolution

The Complete guide to Evolution...
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evohome.html

The Pale Blue Dot....Carl Sagan

Source: http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/voyager/pale_blue_dot.html

This excerpt from A Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

You can listen to the excerpt narrated by Carl Sagan here:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=p86BPM1GV8M

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Carl Sagan on anti-thiesm, Hinduism et al in his famous series "Cosmos"

Carl Sagan talks about "the gods." This clip is from Carl Sagan's Cosmos episode 10, "The Edge of Forever.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4E-_DdX8Ke0&eurl=http://www.orkut.com/FavoriteVideoView.aspx?uid=10210963859066702291&ad=1203006112