大象传媒

I have been reading academic treatises on Ecology for thirty-five years or more.

Furthermore, I have paid attention to Planetary Science as it has developed from all the data collected from our sister planets and their moons.

In addition, I have astutely zoned in on scientific equipment used to collect data on our planet and other planets.

The observational evidence produced by these engineering tools for a lucid grasp of our climatic weather conditions for the last 400,000 years and anecdotal evidence for the last 200 million years on this Planet Earth can only be described as the supreme triumph of humankind.

As with any great paradigm shift in mental culture, it requires decades, if not centuries, for these concepts to filter down into the consciousness of the vast majority of ignorant, superstitious minds.

It should never be forgotten how rudimentary most human primate brains really are. As Sir James Frazer asserted in the early part of the last century, mankind's mental culture evolved from magic to religion, and from religion to science [based on observing, measuring & understanding, which in turn is based on the simple intuition of causality].

This whole debate of ecological climate shifting must factor in human de-population. Our modern religious systems have forgotten the ancient, most sacred duty of all religious systems---killing of the young to ensure survivability of the tribe within their natural resource systems.

It was the Cassite Babylonian astronomical-mathematical priesthood between 1600 BCE to 1100 BCE who figured out the relationship between the population density of the urban city states, their rural countryside and its natural resources for on-going sustainability of its culture and civilization. This was the chief responsibility of the great Babylonian god Marduk.

When Babylon fell to Parthia in 125 BCE, all hard scientific knowledge came to an end. The female savant Hypatia was writing commentaries on Babylonian mathematical-astronomical learning when the misogynist St. Ambrose had her body butchered by a mob.

It was these commentaries in a Syriac translation from the Greek, that Sir Edmund Halley translated into neo-Latin, which Sir Isaac Newton read when Cambridge University was closed because of a plague, that gave us Calculus or his Theory of Fluxions.

I mention this trivial historical detail to remind this audience that it took Europe 1700 years to start where Hypatia had stopped. I hope our present brilliant scientific ecological savants do not incur the same fate as Hypatia.

Respectfully,

John E.D.P. Malin, Esq. M.A.
Cecilia, Louisiana, U.S.A.

Addendum:

My apology to my fellow contributors. I falsely attributed Hypatia's murder to the wrong Church Father.

It was not St. Ambrose, it was the Church Father, the Patriarch St. Cyril of Alexandria.

This famour woman savant, daughter of the great scholar Theon was murdered in the month of March during Lent in the fourth year of St. Cyril's episcopate, under the tenth consulate of Honorius and the sixth of Theodosius in A.D. 415.

It was her commentaries on Diophantus "Arithmetica" and Apollonius "Conics" which stimulated Seventeenth Century French mathematics and Sir Isaac Newton's mathematical scholarship.

Respectfully,

John E.D.P. Malin, Esq. M.A.
Cecilia, Louisiana, U.S.A.

To the Group:

I observed when I was arranging an order of books from the Spring Sale of Oxford University Press, that there is a new edition of the extant Letters of St. Cyril of Alexandria published by Oxford University Press under their Early Christian Texts.

It was, of course, his fanatical monks who actually did the barbarous atrocity against the person of Hypatia. Naturally, I hold responsible the one who inflamed the passions of the ignorant Christian mob, not the fools who executed the criminal act.

Respectfully,

John E.D.P. Malin, Esq., M.A.
Cecilia, Louisiana, U.S.A.