Diagram Of Clam

How Clams Destroyed My Faith in Science « Millicent and Carla Fran

Whenever we were out of the country for extended periods of time, I had to be home-schooled so I wouldn’t fall too far behind while I was away. This was one of the things we did. My feelings about it were complex. I loved that it made coloring do double-work as learning. I felt like it was sort of cheating, both on the coloring side of things (no imagination) and on the science side of things. And I hated having to color in the letters because I always ended up accidentally going outside the lines. The pictures always looked nicer before I colored them than after. (Look at that frog to the left–isn’t it the ugliest thing now that it’s all filled in?) There was no esthetic pride in the work. I liked it, though, in a virtuous way, and I hoped that somehow it was making me understand things a little better. Even then, though, the ones I got obsessed with were the ones that didn’t look like sad blotchy animals, but were marvelous creatures in their own right. Protista was where it was at. VOLVOX. Plasmodium. All the weird floating flagellated ciliated things that looked like the aliens in my then-favorite book: National Geographic’s Our Universe I don’t know how National Geographic got away with publishing it, because it WAS FULL OF LIES. But I believed it. I mean, I knew that an artist had done the drawings, but I had every hope that just like the artist had painted Venus, which really existed, it had also drawn the real exploding blimp creatures whose blood the predatory half-birds craved.   had started. It occasioned a giant crisis of faith that’s still with me. The crisis is that I don’t believe in schematics. Or maps. Anything that’s a stylized version of the actual thing in nature but expects you to take it seriously as science? I distrust it. This is why I hated “frictionless inclined planes” in physics. THERE IS NO SUCH THING. WHY PRETEND.