"been teaching literature for over 35 years"

David Stockhoff · 09 Sep 2013, 12:13 · from 2013-September.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 09 Sep 2013 08:13:04 -0400
Subject: (urth) "been teaching literature for over 35 years"
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On 9/9/2013 12:47 AM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Very interesting thoughts.  Incidentally, they remind me of Severian's example of the hawk's nest.  In the first place, it's fallacious.  (Nest-building evolved in ground-living or even aquatic species before anyone got to the trees where one stick is useless.)  In the second, it seems that evolution by natural selection is the theory that Severian was taught.  Does Wolfe see that as in the same category as other misconceptions he was taught?

Actually, I think his logic is not bad, given his lack of information:

... the first hawk to build one cannot have inherited its instinct to 
build from its parents, since they did not possess it. Nor could such an 
instinct have developed slowly, a thousand generations of hawks fetching 
one stick before some hawk

fetched two; because neither one stick nor two could be of the slightest 
use to the nesting hawks.


His conclusions are correct: neither hypothesis works. He seems to have 
a grade-school understanding of natural selection, but I think more to 
the point he is using logic to guess at an unguessable truth. He asks 
good questions but simply doesn't know how hawks evolved, and thus even 
these intelligent questions will not get him there:

The wheeling birds traced their hieroglyphics in the air, but they were 
not for me to read.


>> >Also, "death" is perhaps a relative term on a geologic time scale.
>      In our time, small volcanic islands are created before our eyes. In
>      Severian's, this may no longer occur, but the plates could
>      experience settling for quite some time after the primary tectonic
>      activity has either ceased or simply decreased enough that most
>      people assume Urth is dead, because all the volcanoes are. Thus the
>      earthquakes in Typhon's time.
>
> Seems possible.
>
> By the way, supposedly curative hot springs were important in ancient times.  Are they mentioned anywhere in BotNS?

Not that I can recall.
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