BY DAVID ZEIGLER

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin.” —Oscar Wilde

“Only the scientific view of the world corresponds closely to reality; the anthropocentric worldview is mostly just fantasy: piety in the sky.” —S. Jonathan Singer

COPERNICUS AND GALILEO STARTED THE unintentional scientific assault on humanity’s arrogant sense of self-importance in the universe by showing that the Sun was the center of our solar system, not the Earth, and that all the planets orbit it. We are not the center of movement of these neighboring bodies, as religious dogma held. Later, the stars were shown to be separate suns, most smaller, but some much larger than our own, and existing at distances beyond human imagining. With observations using more powerful telescopes, the known size of our galaxy grew, along with the understanding that our meager star system was far from the center of our Milky Way Galaxy. Later still, Edwin Hubble made the even more startling and humbling discovery that our galaxy was not “the universe”, but was instead only one of countless other galaxies, each consisting of hundreds of billions of suns.

As Bill Nye said during a presentation I attended a few years ago: “I now realize that I am a speck, standing on another speck, orbiting yet another speck.” Another recent assault from astronomy on our inflated sense of importance in the universe came with the Hubble space telescope photo known as the Hubble Deep Field. This photo was made over 10 days using 342 exposures for a total of 100 hours of exposure time on a dark area of sky just above the base of the “handle” of the Big Dipper. The area focused on was an area of sky covered by a dime held at 75 feet from the viewer. This spot was chosen because there are no visible stars in this spot of sky, even when viewed by medium-sized land based telescopes. The finished photo, however, was filled with some 3,000 very distant galaxies, each one containing hundreds of billions of stars. And now, the Kepler space telescope has discovered that most of the stars in our galaxy have planets. In short, the number of suns and planets in the universe is far beyond human comprehension, as is the size of the universe we inhabit. We are indeed specks in this vast expanse of space and matter. I can now no longer view the Big Dipper without being reminded of this fact.

In biology, Darwin likewise showed that we are but one of many millions of species that evolved over immense spans of time, with survival and reproduction the only goals of this process (though many both then and now believe there is purpose and destiny in evolution, with humans of course being a central focus of these beliefs). Yes, we are related to the great apes and can actually be referred to as a type of ape (the “third chimpanzee” in Jared Diamond’s classification), and we are truly related to all living things. This conclusion continues to trouble a great many people even today, who want to believe that humans are a distinct and elevated class of beings “above” apes and other animals. It is this belief that fuels the rejection of Darwin’s great insights by many to this day.