Dumbing Down Sherlock

Dumbing Down Sherlock

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called Sherlock a calculating machine. But Watson, the narrator of the adventures and Sir Arthur's alter-ego, thought much closer to the truth; "He was....the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen."

The most interesting thing about Sherlock is not his ability to follow fact to conclusion, but what he finds interesting.

For all of us only really observe things that we find interesting, or unusual, or different.

And Sherlock finds that the most mundane facts can be a source of interest and enlightenment. Whilst we, that is the rest of us, carp over the bigger fish, he uses those smaller fishes to land him the bigger fish.

In fact Sherlock is like our seven or eight year old selves. Except that he's given up searching for the answers, that he knows are out there, by asking our now grown, and in un-inquisitive, selves the most irritating of questions "Why?". And whilst he can no longer verbalise those sentiments, without the risk of bringing ridicule, he therefore resorts to deduction, and is the better for it.

Sherlock is like a good scientist; he takes nothing for granted. Scientists observe things that most of us would put down as being simply natural, or of no consequence. They observe these things and then they choose to observe them and then they make them interesting. An outlier for them is not just a blip off the map, but a reason, a what for, and a why.

I would by now have hoped that you would have questioned my use of the word observe twice in the pre-previous sentence.
Didn't you find it in the least interesting?

The first use is in the sense of "saw". I wonder how many of you saw the second usage in the sense of observe, in the sense of thinking "that's unusual" or "that's interesting" or "what's going on here? That'll be worth some effort"?

Well that's what Sherlock does almost instinctively.
And that's what Science teaches.

And great Scientists go one step further, for them they make even the usual matter. For them even the usual is interesting.

Once we realise that it's that matter of astonishment that powered the Scientific Revolution, we should then be at a loss as to what popular Science tells us is otherwise.

Popular Science would have us believe that there is nothing unusual about life.
That life is natural.
That there is nothing there worth being astonished over it since we've explained it all.

Maybe we can credit those bastions of the now Science with its dumbing down.
After all most of Science nowadays is about the statistical number crunching of machines. Newton, Mendel and the rest might just be turning in their graves.

But Sherlock he would have deduced long ago that the likes of Dawkins are poor scientists, if at that.




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