Biology of Wonder_ Aliveness, Feeling and the Metamorphosis of Science ( PDFDrive.com )

needs. I had a home here, but what it offered was not forgetful salvation.
It gave me some wordless understanding of the bigger drama I was part
of. It did not console me about Mara, but it did situate that emotion
within a larger constellation of feelings. I started to learn then that
nature is not a place that shields us from feeling; rather, it is a refuge
where we can experience our true emotions. Plants and animals help us
discover significant things about ourselves. In them, we find our own
inwardness.
With an indulgent laugh, we have always allowed dreamers and
poets to experience nature in this way. But we never took it too
seriously. Since my own adolescent experiences, however, I have
encountered many serious people — not just romantics and dreamy
children — who regard such feelings as the center of gravity for life
itself. Science itself has come to the paradoxical realization that it can no
longer reject emotions and values if it wants to understand life. In this
new light, I can now explain my experiences from those distant summer
days. But it has taken some time.
For centuries, philosophers and scientists have been working in the
opposite direction. Historically, science’s goal had been to decode the
cosmos made by God, to discover the universal laws which keep the
particles of matter in their appointed circuits, like the idea of gravity
explained the stars’ trajectories. The first biologists in the 18th and 19th
centuries zealously approached nature as I did in that year at the pond:
enthusiastically lusting for novelty, for fresh impressions, for
exuberance. Within a few decades, those early scientists discovered and
described hundreds of thousands of species, classified dozens of habitats
and gave birth to the sciences of morphology, biochemistry and
physiology.
In this first biological research boom, physical science established the
benchmark standards according to which the young science of biology
was to be measured. The living world was to be experienced with all
senses. Empirical inquiry required nothing less. But the conceptual
framework presupposed a mechanical system. The French philosopher
René Descartes had declared that living beings were nothing but more or
less complicated machines, and so the task of the naturalists swarming
out into nature was simply to make an inventory of the sheer diversity of
these mechanical devices. Still, many biologists did not give up what