Friday, January 06, 2023
Shoddy and Overblown
Erwin Chargaff (1905-2002), Voices in the Labyrinth: Nature, Man, and Science (New York: The Seabury Press, 1977), p. 61:
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Our period, just because it is so intellectually weak, is given to extraordinarily strong assertions. Many of the great constructions of our time — existentialism, structuralism, transformational grammar, the central dogma and some other sloganized tenets of molecular biology, etc. — have all looked, from their very beginning, somehow shoddy and overblown. There was about them a flavor of not being entirely earned, as of trick images viewed in a mirror. As the mirror clouded over, the images vanished. Much of what they claimed may actually have been true; but they looked like packages much too large for what they contained. One got the impression that it often was the wrapping that produced the particular content; just as there are now packaging artists who wrap entire mountains in plastic flimsy.
