Pantology: The Science of Everything

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Dec 6, 2009      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Pantology: The Science of Everything

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  Pantology is the lost and new-found art of studying the science of everything.  I was introduced to it more than forty years ago in my studies as the world’s leading authority on the paleo-ecology of the Arctic sleddog.  To become authoritative on this arcane subject was easy because no-one else knew or knows anything about it or even wants to. This line of study was instructive because it required awareness of converging disciplines in revealing what no single discipline can discover on its own about human nature, natural law, and natural language. 

  One of the new disciplines is the study of peace, prosperity, and freedom through compassionate justice, which in Islam is the science of ultimate ends, known as the maqasid al shari’ah.  This is based on the common purpose of all human beings, which, in turn, is based on study of their common origins.

  One of the most revealing of the new related disciplines is DNA genetics, which is now linked to findings in the leading scientific journal, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.  This journal now reports on results from explorations of the pioneering theories of Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois, which pinpoint the near wipe-out of all humans on earth to only 73,000 years ago.  The best DNA studies have dated the reduction of human life to not more than 2,000 persons on earth, with a time frame merely of “no more than 150,000 years ago”.  The new estimate is that a repetition today of the Toba eruption on Sumatra of 73,000 years ago, which wiped out much of life on planet earth, could blanket the earth in deep ash and cause a global cooling lasting a thousand years.

  This is important for studying the related science of glottochronology or the transformation of languages over time.  As I wrote about it in my articles forty years ago, this science suggests that when two peoples or tribes separate they lose half their common words every thousand years.  The exception is when survival is precarious, as in the Arctic, where this can extend to every five-thousand years due to the phenomenon of time-lag, because any experimental adaptation to even minor climatic change in such an environment can wipe out the experimenters.

  Since it is now theorized that the only surviving humans 73,000 years ago were a single tribe who survived by a stroke of luck or creative brilliance, this leaves just enough time for the evolution (or devolution) of languages to the many hundreds of seemingly unrelated languages today.  Only linguists, with their knowledge of the normal changes in languages over time, can recognize the commonality of a single language, namely the Nostratic, which is named after the Latin nostra, meaning “Ours.” 

  A linguist at the University of Princeton, Dr. Hebatalla Elkhateeb-Musharraf has contributed to the 550-page textbook, Islam and Muslims, including a lengthy chapter entitled “A Common Language for Faith-Based Dialogue,” in which she reveals the amazing universality of sentinel words in the Qur’an.  These are words with a moral meaning that are universal because they are found in every modern language.  What I call “Heba’s Third Theory of Relativity” does not address any innate human capability for symbolic language, because the various theories on innateness are based only on circumstantial evidence, whereas the theory of a common human language, perhaps first introduced in the Old Testament and the Tower of Babel, is based on scientific study of the evolution of word and syntax in human communication.  The study of human nature and natural law and natural language in the science or art of pantology has reached some counter-intuitive conclusions, which suggest that the end of everything is not necessarily nigh.

  One of the most profound students of pantology, though he may not have ever heard of the word, is the former President William Clinton, who was listed in the December issue of Foreign Policy as one of the “100 Top Global Thinkers of 2009.” He was interviewed for the lead article, entitled “Bill Clinton’s World: The Former President tells Foreign Policy What to Read, Whom to Watch, and Why There Really is a Chance of Middle East Peace in 2010.”

  He identified Robert Wright as the most penetrating thinker, based on his three most recent books, Nonzero, The Moral Animal, and The Evolution of God.  In Non-Zero Wright argues, according to Clinton, “ever since people came out of caves and formed clans, they have been bumping up against each other, requiring expansion of identity, sub-conscious identity, [so that one] moves from conflict to cooperation in some form or fashion.”  In Wright’s book, The Evolution of God, according to Clinton, he carries this further to address the artificial conflict between science and God and to present the thesis that at all levels of reality the world is growing together, not apart, [so that] you have wider and wider circles interconnection - that is, wider geographically, encompassing more people, and wider in bandwidth, encompassing more subject areas - you begin with conflict and you end with some resolution, some merging.”

  Clinton advises, “You should look at big thinkers on the question of identity.  Samuel Huntington wrote the famous book The Clash of Civilizations.  But we need an effort to explain and, if possible, merge, theories of identity that are biological, psychological, social, and political, because it’s obvious that in an age of interdependence, you want Wright’s thesis, you want there to be more nonzero solutions. ... You hope the president’s speech in Cairo turns out to be right.”

    The three core elements of being fully human are recognition of Absolute Truth, the corresponding awareness that no-one has access to it in any fullness, and doubt about one’s own or anyone else’s prescriptions for turning truth into action.  Clinton writes, “I gave a bunch of speeches on this after 9/11.  What I always said was that if you are religious it meant by definition there was such a thing as Truth, capital T.  So to make it work in a world of differences, you had to recognize that there was a big distinction between the existence of Truth, capital T, and the ability of any one human being to understand it completely and to translate it into political actions that were 100 percent consistent with it.  That’s what you had to do; all you had to do was accept human frailty.  You can’t tell people of faith to be relative about their faith.  They believe there is a truth.  But the question of whether they can know it and turn it into a political program is a very different thing.  That is an act of arrogance.”  In other words, whoever says he knows the truth, does not.

  Another important aspect of William Clinton’s thinking is his distinction between personal morality and social morality, because without solidarity in perfecting society’s institutions no-one’s personal morality will have much impact on making the world a better place.  He says, “Another person I think has written some very interesting books on the ultimate imperative of cooperation in the human and other species is Matt Ridley.  The one that had a pretty good influence on me is The Origin of Virtue.  And by virtue he doesn’t mean, I never take a drink, even on Saturday night.  He means civic virtue.  How do we treat one another in ways that are constructive, and work together?  I think that these are some of the many people [who are shaping the world].  They are thinking about how the world works and how it might be at the same time.  At this moment in history, we need people who have a unique understanding of both how the world works and how it might be better, might be more harmonious.”

  In a word of warning, Clinton answers the question, “The Cold War lasted 40 years.  Do you see this current struggle we are having with extremism, whatever you want to call it, the war on terror, do you see that lasting as long, or do you see that changing in some way over the next decade?” 

  Clinton replies, “Robert Kaplan has written tons of books about what’s going on in the modern world, and if you read The Ends of the Earth and these books that say we are defacto, no matter what the laws say, becoming nations of mega-city-states full of really poor, angry, uneducated, and highly vulnerable people, all over the world ... then terror - meaning killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond borders - could be around for a very long time.”  On a hopeful note he concludes that we can promote a world of justice and make a constructive difference, because in his words: “Terrorism needs both anxiety and opportunity to flourish.”

  Thank God for the new discipline of pantology, the science of everything..

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