Word: scientists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...mystery of creation, as every real scientist is quick to admit, is not one that science is capable of solving. To some extent, we may learn how it happened, when it happened, but never why, any more than we can bound infinity or clock eternity. Neither scientists nor religious folk can know why the miracle we call life happened, how it acquired such characteristics as thought, a sense of beauty, hope, conscience, love, piety and speculation about itself...
Church's desire to go south was sparked by his reading the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who had traveled in Central and South America at the turn of the century. Humboldt was not only a scientist but a great popularizer. As Stephen Jay Gould points out in an excellent catalog essay, the first two volumes of his work Cosmos were seen by their 19th century public as the last word on nature and its origins. Humboldt's ideas were what Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species overthrew. For Humboldt, like Linnaeus before...