In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the "shalt nots" of the Ten Commandments, I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. A Wrinkle in Time described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.
[---]
Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds...I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books...It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.
"On another occasion, Bill and I were discussing racial prejudice and the possible biological components thereof, and he said to me, "Bob, once you've learned to think of a herring gull as an equal, the rest is easy." What a welcome approach to the problem, especially from within biology. Bill was down to the level he taught me to be at. We are all living organisms - make discriminatory comments about others at your own risk. In Bill's view, it was always better to try to see the world from the view of the other creature.
One of the Bill's deepest lessons was in how to view other organisms in a way that took into account that very act of viewing has its own effects. This was Heisenberg uncertainty principle applied to biology.
[---]
No one has bothered, after all these years, to come up with a coherent account of the various conditions under which species prosper and generate new species, or fail and go extinct. This in part because Stephen Gould expropriated the subject for his own uses and set back the development of a science by some twenty years. I am trying to help develop the underlying logic he failed to.
The British abolitionists didn't invent most of the arguments against slavery. But they refined them, backed them with masses of evidence, increased their creditability by relying on trustworthy witnesses, and made them more accessible by allowing people to see life through a slave's eyes. Debates, public meetings, and newspapers brought these strengthened arguments to a booming urban population. And it worked. People were convinced not only of the evils of slavery but also of the necessity of doing something about it. They petitioned, gave money, and - with the help of other factors, from economy to international politics - had first the slave trade and then slavery itself banned.
[---]
Yet we do not quite share the pessimism regarding the ability of reason to change people's minds. People do not just provide their own justification and arguments; they also evaluate those of others. As evaluators, people should be able to recognize strong arguments and be swayed by them in all domains, including the moral realm. Clearly, arguments that challenge the moral values of one's community can be met with disbelief, distrust of motives, even down right hostility. Still, on many moral issues, people have been influenced by good arguments, from local politics - for example, how to organize the local school curriculums - to major societal issues - such as abolition of the slave trade.
