blue fancies: curiosity

we drove the mazda to seattle yesterday afternoon. it was the mazda's first time on the highway and it acquitted itself admirably. there are now almost 700 miles on it. it's a good car.

anyway. we went to see michael shermer, phd, chat a bit. that's michael there on the left. he's an energetic speaker, veering from topic to topic, example to example, talking clearly yet rapidly clearly, though the overall picture he created was quite coherent.

essentially he introduced several common arguments for the creationists, the believers in intelligent design. he used to be a creationist; he was born again, but then he discovered the scientific method and things changed for him. he refuted the creationist arguments with darwinian arguments, and although i'm already with him on the evolution thing, his arguments were compelling.

it's hard for me to imagine an illuminated refutation of evolution.

funny things about dr shermer: he laughs the way john stewart mimics george bush laughing, with a little "heh heh heh." he also uses the dubious contraction "all's" regularly, as in "all's i know is ..."

i like going to lectures like this. it feels worthwhile. it was good just sitting in the audience, among people, strangers, of course, who were moved to see an evolution scientist lecture on a tuesday evening. kara and i were taking in the car on the way home about how we don't understand the creationist point of view. i don't care if a person believes in god or not, but it seems that creationists shut themselves off from new knowledge.

i'm sure i don't have the whole creationist picture so maybe i shouldn't talk so much about it. but our conversation turned to people in general who don't go about attempting to learn things, who are content with their current base of knowledge. i'm not very interested in going back to school for further formal education (i'm still thinking about the coding thing), but i do read a lot. i like learning things. i learn things every day at work (even if i rarely retain my new knowledge out of context long enough to share it with kara!).

a main characteristic i saw in dr shermer is curiosity. he wants to know how things work, why things happen. this is what drew him to science. it's the lack of curiosity that creationists appear to affect that i do not understand.