When the Homily is about Immunology

There's only so much room

You often hear that we humans are only using 10% of our brain's potential, but I've never heard how this stat was derived thus leading me to wonder if it is simply the wishful thinking and selling point of motivational/human potential speakers.

Thomas Edison is quoted as saying, "We know less than one millionth of one percent about anything." Since Edison's time there have been A LOT of scientific papers published and I would contend that we have been gaining knowledge on a logarithmic scale such that we are perhaps closing in on the full one percent mark, but of course how could one measure such a thing? Suffice to say we do know a lot more now than we did in Edison's time.

But scientific knowledge is not the only knowledge out there. Christ illumined us, but I think to a large degree we are now beginning (or perhaps more accurate to say returning) to better implement on a large societal wide scale the teachings of Christ, even if we no longer recognize them as such. A good example is how we used to torture and/or kill heretics. I don't believe some secularized reduction of religious importance led us to stop doing this - I hope - but rather we more fully implemented the spirit and teachings of our Lord. Anyway, that's a sidebar.

For all the knowledge we have gained, few of us can claim to be possessors of it all, instead we have been unfathomably specialized. So specialized that we are hardly able to do anything for ourselves anymore if it lies remotely outside of our realm of expert knowledge. I picture a molecular biologist who has trouble tying his shoes and thus buys velcro all the time (seriously). I wonder if in all our vast specialized knowledge if we have begun to make room in our heads by throwing out stuff we deem "obsolete" or "not needed"?

Knowledge such as that which has been handed down from simpler times that afforded us the ability to be more self-sufficient? Or even moral knowledge? A more clear picture of right and wrong? Who has time to teach such things when we are so busy teaching each other how to convert wav files to mp3? Or trying desperately to remember the 56 different passwords we must juggle? It's ironic that I know how to detect and identify a single viral particle in a millilter of blood, but I have to struggle to know how to be a good dad.

I often joke about how crappy my memory is, but I suspect our collective memory is equally bad.