Galactic Dancing with the Stars

Related Link » Decline Is a Choice
“There are things to be done. Resist retreat as a matter of strategy and principle. And provide the means to continue our dominant role in the world by keeping our economic house in order. And finally, we can follow the advice of Demosthenes when asked what was to be done about the decline of Athens. His reply? ‘I will give what I believe is the fairest and truest answer: Don't do what you are doing now.’”
— ‘by Charles Krauthammer, The New Liberalism and the end of American ascendancy, 10/19/2009, Volume 015, Issue 05’

Related Link » "Biology Is Just a Dance"
“The ‘new’ biology is biology in the form of an exact science of complex systems concerned with dynamics and emergent order. Then everything in biology changes. Instead of the metaphors of conflict, competition, selfish genes, climbing peaks in fitness landscapes, what you get is evolution as a dance. It has no goal. As Stephen Jay Gould says, it has no purpose, no progress, no sense of direction. It's a dance through morphospace, the space of the forms of organisms. Will biology join up with physics, take on its flavor, have this notion of rules, organization, regularity, order? The new movement is transforming biology from a historical science, which is what it is at the moment, the objective of Darwinism being to reconstruct the history of life on Earth. Well, that's not the style of physics. Physics is about laws, the principles of organization of matter. We're doing the same thing in biology; we're looking for the principles of organization, the dynamics of the living process.”
— ‘by Brian Goodwin, The Third Culture, Chapter 4’

As go physics and biology so go, eventually, sociology and politics. It must be so because sociology and politics are bereft of hereditary memory, which is prerequisite to a semi-monotonic trending toward improvement in socio-political conditions.

The recording of history was a great leap forward toward a possible "historical" track of improving socio-political conditions. But recording of history is insufficient; it must be learned to do any good. So Einstein's "infinite threshold of human stupidity" is the gigantic fly in the ointment. Thus, George Santayana's great insight remains steadfast:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

And, therefore, despite the best efforts of the best and the brightest individuals in all disciplines of human endeavor, we will continue our galactic dance with the stars as in the astrological days of old, because, inevitably, we must bow to the lowest common denominator of ignorance that masquerades as prize-awarding and prize-winning ineptitude.

Post #961 Galactic Dancing with the Stars