wnyc public radio, i love you.

I'm listening right now to one of the most inspiring things I've heard in a while. I'm listening to Robert Krulwich's commencement speech at Cal Tech this year. He's talking about the importance of approachable narrative for the masses in high-level intellectual discourse.

His manner or speaking is just that. It's approachable, beautiful, poetic, funny, and intelligent.

We live in a time where information is easily created and distributed. It's wonderful, but it's also frightening. False information can be sensationalized. It can be turned into compelling stories that hook the masses. Krulwich spoke of cheaply produced, beautifully, skillfully written text books in Turkey that are providing high school students with a creationist view of the world. There are chapters on "The Darwin Conceit." He said that 25 percent of Turkish people believe in evolution and 40 percent of Americans believe in it.

Though I really do trust science, I'll admit that I think it's possible that evolution could be wrong. I believe in it, and at the risk of sounding ignorant, I will say that science has been wrong before. BUT...and this is a huge but, I think it is absolutely horrifying to literally interpret a book that has been translated over thousands of years by cultures much more primitive than ours. I can only imagine that amount of errors that exist in those books. The number must be huge.

I also think it's horrible to condemn people to hell for not believing this information. I'm not sure I believe in hell, but who knows? Exists or not, I think it is plain mean to poison our collective conscience with these ideas.

Back to Krulwich, he spoke of the importance of sharing information that is tested, studied and true in ways that the masses can understand. To make it a compelling story. Don't be like Sir Isaac Newton (in his typical British snobbery) who did not care for common people to hear his scholarly idea. Be like Galileo, who published is information in ways that people can understand.

We don't have the answers and we probably never will. But why not keep trying. What else do we have to do while we're here on this earth.