Ignorance as a commodity
Counterclockwise
Yuri Bogomolov, Rossiyskaya Gazeta, 17.02.2009
Dostoevsky has a remarkably accurate observation: "Give a Russian schoolboy who knows nothing about astronomy a map of the sky, and he will bring it to you corrected on the second day."
Russian TV is very reminiscent of such a schoolboy.
The accused DarwinNot so long ago, a high school student Masha Schreiber disagreed with Charles Darwin on the question of the origin of man.
It was a gift from heaven for domestic TV. How many stories were devoted to the girl's duel with the world-famous scientist... On the program "Let them talk" Mr. Malakhov choked with delight and admiration...
...The other day it was 200 years since the birth of Charles Darwin, and the Rossiya TV channel took advantage of the information occasion to continue the scientific dispute with Darwin's theory at a higher level.
The channel showed the documentary "Darwin is Accused" directed by Yulia Ageeva. (It is not necessary to see the subversives of fundamental theories in person, but perhaps they should be known by their surnames.)
Among the witnesses for the prosecution, the philosopher and patriot Alexander Dugin, who wished all Darwinists to burn in hell, seemed particularly convincing to me. Father Andrey Kuraev turned out to be more merciful, who simply expressed regret that there were those who doubted the divine origin of man and continues to persist in ideas about his base nature.
By the way, the film casually makes it clear that God may have punished Darwin during his lifetime: after all, three of his children died, family troubles, etc.
Are monkeys our ancestors or descendants?..There was an "expert" who put forward his deeply scientific version of the development and formation of life on Earth, according to which, presumably, not man descended from a monkey, but rather the opposite – a monkey from a man.
In general, life goes on a downward path: from higher and more complex forms to more primitive and base forms. A dolphin, for example, hundreds of millions of years ago had legs and could not only swim, but also walk. Then it is possible that he also had hands. In the course of the involution, the fingers turned into nails, the forehead transformed into a nose. But there are some vestiges of his former intellectual greatness. The scientist-involutionist estimated that the average dolphin has a vocabulary of 16 thousand words, and in the brains of our average contemporary, this crown of nature, there is only one thing. Further – more.
Already from another opera (from the program "Postscript" by Alexei Pushkov) it became known that in ancient times there was a fashion for elongated skulls. And not only in Egypt during the time of the Pharaohs, but also in South America. In addition, such a sensational detail was discovered: in the skulls of the ancient Egyptians, archaeologists began to find holes more and more often, and not made after the death of a person, but during his lifetime.
It turns out that our distant ancestors already owned such a complex craft as skull trepanation. And God knows what else they possessed in terms of experiments on human and any other nature...
The picture of the universe is now completely confusing for the viewer of Russian TV. Everything has either turned upside down, or from head to foot. In any case, such a flip cannot go in vain for the vestibular apparatus of a person of the XXI century.
But if we assume that the theory of involution is correct, everything will fall into place, and the picture of the world will regain its former harmony and the necessary stability.
The "corrected sky map" will be like this. Once upon a time, highly organized creatures similar to us, but with elongated skulls, flew to the planet Earth. From them came the human race. And it was then that the countdown began for him – both physiologically and mentally.
As for other organic life, all kinds of fauna-flora, it started from dampness. That is, from mold, which may have been brought to the planet by the same aliens with oblong cranial boxes. The same mold that we have heard so much about thanks to the sensation film "Mold".
The picture is clear, the prospect, however, may not seem optimistic enough for a person who imagines a lot about himself. Masha Schreiber, together with the philosopher Dugin and Father Kuraev, will not be happy with her. To imagine to such educated and civilized citizens that their satin skin of distant descendants will become overgrown with gray fur, arms will lengthen, well-groomed nails will turn into claws, legs will bend backwards at the knees so that it is more convenient to walk on all fours, is just as unpleasant as to admit that our ancestors once lived in trees, walked without pants and itched a lot at the same time.
Ignorance as a commodityI must say that humanity has received clicks on its self-esteem more than once in the course of civilization.
Then from Copernicus, then from Galileo. Then from Darwin, then from Freud. But like it or not, he, humanity, had to gradually come to terms with the immutable fact that the Earth is not the navel of the universe. That it circles around the Sun, and not vice versa, and that man is the result of natural selection, that the subconscious mind plays a very important role in human life, etc.
It is especially difficult to accept the immutable facts presented by Charles Darwin at the level of ordinary consciousness.
It, ordinary consciousness, prefers intelligible ignorance to complex knowledge.
Therefore, the latter is in high demand.
Therefore, ignorance becomes a good-selling commodity. No worse than the amorous and alcove secrets of our and foreign stars of show business.
That's why such documentary sensations as "The Secret of Water", "Mold" are stamped... Now here – "Darwin is accused."
I don't doubt for a second that the channel managers know the scientific value of the documentary filmmakers' revelations. You can vouch for at least Konstantin Lvovich Ernst, a biologist by education, a scientist with a degree who defended his dissertation on the topic "Dynamics of messenger RNA maturation during maturation of mammalian oocytes in vitro."
But that's the point: in the TV business, "when oocytes mature," other laws apply. One of them reads: "Everything that is well bought is for sale."
***
In the course of writing this column, I had my own guess about how life flows on Earth? What is its mechanism?
Maybe Charles Darwin is right, and Masha Schreiber is right?.. Maybe we should supplement the theory of evolution with the theory of involution? And we will assume that both are happening simultaneously, although in different directions.
Imagine a clock face on which the minute hand runs counterclockwise. It will look absurd, but it will symbolize something.
Portal "Eternal youth" www.vechnayamolodost.ru17.02.2009