What We Know and Our Time Here

Towards the end of the essay/lecture, Pinker evokes a scene from Annie Hall about a child's realization about the universe and his place in it. Although Pinker doesn't go into too much depth about what this means, this is an idea that is very important to me. Science has led us to a point where we believe strongly in the theory of evolution, and following this strong belief are certain assumptions about the world and how we came to be today. The fact that we can operate on two different time scale, as Pinker suggests, an evolutionary time scale and a human time scale, is something I am struggling to come to terms with. We know so much about our origins and how we came to be, and we couple that knowledge with the idea that the universe itself is ever-expanding. We think of Earth and the human race as just another part of this universe that is of a basically unimaginable proportion. However, Pinker is trying to figure out what really makes us tick on the human time scale. He wants to find what really makes us tick, and why we do the things we do. I guess after reading the piece, I realize that sometimes it is helpful to remember that we are on a single planet in an incredibly vast universe, but it is also helpful to do what Pinker is doing, and study human nature for what it is. I believe that we will never truly understand the entire workings of the universe, and although we can explain a lot of things scientifically, human knowledge may not posses the ability to truly understand everything. However, we can still try to understand ourselves, and hopefully draw some conclusions about who we are.