¶ Twenty Questions (1)
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Index Entry
Many humans alive today are old enough to realize what has happened and can recall many things that have happened contradicted by popular thought.
"In the game of twenty questions as played in my childhood, the first question to be asked was, Is it animate or inanimate? The words animate and inanimate had been invented by man long before chemistry and biology started. Early humans apparently assumed there was obviously a fundamental difference between warm soft flesh and cold hard stone; ergo the quickest way to narrow the field of potential answers was first to ask, Is it animate or inanimate?
“As humans learned more and more about self and environment, they identified various species by names. At this late 20th century-- with Darwin’s work only 100 years old-- humanity has acquired a great deal of knowledge about biological phenomena. A contemporary of Darwin, Dalton, was the leading physicist of the time. Dalton wrongly assumed that the hydrogen atom was the ‘building block’ of all the 60-other then-known chemical elements. Looking for the building block, or the ‘key’, to any subject seemed popularly logical.”
