Thursday, April 18, 2013

Tortoise vs Hare : predicting our world in 1945....

On September 2nd 1939, when the British Empire declared war on the German Empire (thus ensuring we would have another world war), there were two main scientific theories predicting the shape of our world at the war's end.

The far more popular theory at the time was called Modernity, Social Darwinism or simply 'Might is Right'.

 It said Evolution was a vertical affair, with wiser and more mighty entities inevitably and naturally replacing entities that were weaker and more foolish.

The other, far less popular theory, saw Evolution as a horizontal activity, with the weaker and simple-minded entities continuing to co-exist for ever and ever, in global commensality, with the bigger and more complex entities.

It even went further than that.

It claimed that on not-infrequent occasion, the smaller and more simple would even triumph over the larger, more complex and more sophisticated entities in the fundamental effort to survive.

Now it is obviously that these diametrically opposed theories could not both be right.

"the hyssop and The Cedars" will look closely at the course of  WWII to see how accurate each scientific theory was in predicting the twisting course of that awful - and unexpectedly awfully long - war.....

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