Theoria to Theory

THEORIA TO THEORY VOLUME 10 NUMBER 1 Copied from this pdf at the EP’s web site The original is this pdf at the HathiTrust website For Copyright provisions, see the next page File dated 2017-09-25 15:24:58 Theoria to theory; an international journal of science, philosophy, and contemplative religion. London, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015024591482 Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike http://www.hathitrust.org/access_use#cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 This work is protected by copyright law (which includes certain exceptions to the rights of the copyright holder that users may make, such as fair use where applicable under U.S. law), but made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You must attribute this work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). This work may be copied, distributed, displayed, and performed - and derivative works based upon it - but for non-commercial purposes only (if you are unsure where a use is non-commercial, contact the rights holder for clarification). If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one. Please check the terms of the specific Creative Commons license as indicated at the item level. For details, see the full license deed at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0. THEORIA to theory VOLUME 10, NUMBER 1 CONTENTS Editorial 1 Result of Competition and New £50 Competition 5 DISCUSSION Shardik Richard Adams, author of Watership Down and Shardik, talks to Dorothy Emmet, Zette Barron and Laurence King 7 AMY K. CLARKE From Another Point of View 21 BRIAN GOODWIN Embryogenesis and Cognition 33 EUELL GIBBONS Bread or Stones 45 I. FREDERICK PARKER-RHODES II. HILDA ELLIS DAVIDSON Religion in Iceland 57 WALTER FITCH Three Lapine Communities: A Study of Richard Adams' Watership Down 67 COMMENT An Alternative to Homes for the Aged 71 Tuning the Human Instrument Tony Blake 75 The Morality of Scientists: the DNA Case Leslie Gore 8 1 SENTENCES From Robert Southwell, The Burning Babe 83 From Thomas Trahcrnc, Shadows in the Water 84 Notes on Contributors 87 Editorial In this issue we publish a discussion with Richard Adams on his latest novel Shardik and a short article on Watership Down. In both these novels Richard Adams has invented worlds for the action to take place in; and this form is currently very popular, as evidenced by the success of these novels and also that of Tolkien's works, of Jonathan Livingston Seagull and of the increasing amount of Science Fiction that is being written. This development cannot just be seen as due to an interest of readers in the fantastic, but rather in terms of the freedom it gives writers to create a setting which enables them to charge the events in their novels with contextual significance. Thus, Tolkien is able to draw on our nostalgia for an idyllic rural past in his creation of the Shire in Lord of the Rings; he can affirm the heroic nature of the action in his novel by continual comparison with an acknowledged golden age, but if these techniques had been used in a realistic novel we would merely question the idyllic nature of the rural setting or indeed the notion of the golden age. Further, he can create enormous tension by rnaking the survival of all uncorrupt societies depend upon Frodo's being able to throw a ring down a volcano, whereas a realistic novel in which such a simple action had such enormous consequences would strike us as the most absurd type of thriller. More importantly, Tolkien makes the he the sequence convincing (if does) by imbuing ring with enormous mystic significance; it is the spiritual power that sustains evil. Thus Frodo's destroying it has the force of a religious, almost ritualistic, act. Similarly there are continual suggestions in the novels of deeper spiritual battles that parallel the real ones. The nature of these is it levels is never gone into, and because there no reason why all should relate to what the reader has experienced directly, it is Theoria to Theory Published by 1976, Vol. 10, pp. 1-4 Gordon and Breach Science Publishers Ltd., 1976. EDITORIAL unlikely that he will question the matter; he just slips luxuriously into a world where simple things have unfathomable meaning. Similar statements could be made about Jonathan Livingston Seagull (which after all has sold an enormous number of copies). In this a seagull reaches a Buddhistic heaven by discovering new techniques in flying. Paradoxically unreal worlds are invented to suspend our disbelief, and the pity of it is that in this way a genuine interest in religion is often channelled off into self-indulgent fantasy. So we were particularly interested in Richard Adams' novels when they came out, for instead of using the freedom gained by invented worlds to evoke sentiments by playing upon our ill-thought-out feelings, he uses it to make us take a fresh look at this one. It is universally agreed that Watership Down is one of the best chil dren's stories to have come out in some years; at the same time, it is a political and religious allegory, and indeed on this depends some of its success as a children's story. The convincing way Adams describes the rabbits is not due to some mysterious indescribable quality in the writing, but rather in the understandable nature of the problems the rabbits face; and the difficulties of the rabbits in building up a viable warren is comprehensible only in terms of the various types of human society that may exist. In Shardik Adams is attempting something more serious in that he tackles religion more directly. It is about the reappearance of a cult figure, a bear, and the development of the religion because of its presence. We feel that our discussion is of interest because it reveals the levels of thought behind the book, and also because in it Adams tells us the the sources of his ideas, and about the prologue and epilogue which he originally wrote. Euell Gibbons, the author, among other books, of Stalking the Wild Asparagus (McKay, New York, 1962) and Stalking the Good Life (1966), who was one of our earliest contributors and supporters in the U.S.A., died on 19th December, very suddenly in the middle of making a joke. We published his article "Survival a la Carte" in Theoria to Theory, Vol. 3, No. 1. In his memory we are now pub- EDITORIAL lishing another more edifying, though less fact-filled article "Bread or Stones". The description of extreme hunger in famine conditions is, we believe, genuine; the edifying ending, we equally know, is not. There is, for instance, another version of the story in which the boy, trying to steal food, broke the lock of the door of the cellar, only to find that it was full of nothing but pinto beans. Euell also told us that, in actual fact, his father finally rescued his family by coming back from the city to fetch them in his car; and the moral of the talc was not that if you only know how you can save your life in a famine by gathering and cooking wild food plants, but that, in a dus bowl, whatever else you have to let go, you must hold on to your means of transport, so that if everything fails you can get back into the town out of the famine area. So the story is fiction, and was earlier refused as such. But we now feel that Euell should be allowed, from the grave, to preach at least if one sermon. And quite undoubtedly, he had to preach a sermon, this is the sermon which Euell would want to preach. Another of our contributors has also died, the great theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was one of the founders of quantum mechanics. Ted Bastin of our editorial group had a discussion with him in Theoria to Theory, Vol. 8, No.l on his philosophy of science and of religion. Perhaps the most novel part of that discussion was where he explained his use of the term "complementarity". People somethimes use "complementarity" to suggest that you can say contradictory things so long as you do not say them at the same time. Heisenberg gives it another use, to stand for the right to use intuitive concepts such as "life" and "stability" in combination with mathematically defined concepts in advancing a science such as biology. Here is the relevant passage: 1 cannot avoid introducing my word complementarity again. Let's think of the nice case of the relation of physics and chemistry and thermodynamics. We can say that all chemistry can be understood by means of quantum theory, but if we only speak about quantum mechanics, then in this type of physics we EDITORIAL have no such concept as temperature, for instance, or entropy. Instead we have concepts of wave function and so on. But then we learn through the statistical use of quantum theory that we can somehow attach such concepts as tem perature or entropy to the mechanical scheme of quantum mechanics: the two things fit together and so we can build up a theory which contains both con cepts-thermodynamics and quantum theory. But one point which Bohr always emphasized was this. If we did not know beforehand that such a term as tem perature or entropy was useful, that they have a connection with our immediate experience, then from the mathematical scheme of quantum theory we would never have come to the idea that it was useful to us.

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