Say what you will about this Peter Watts guy, he sure has a way with punchy quotes. Just look at some of\u00a0 the one-liners he’s come up with that various folks have pinched for their sigfiles, or stuck on the sidebars of their blogs. Just look at all the pithy wisdom quoted on GoodReads:<\/p>\n
That first one, especially \u2014 that got picked up and used everywhere in the wake of Climategate<\/a>, The Scandal That Wasn’t. The only problem is, I wasn’t the first one to say it; that was a dude named Dan Brooks<\/a>, an evolutionary biologist who used to teach at the University of Toronto (and who now spends his retirement walking the Earth like Kwai Chang Caine, bringing a Darwinian perspective to those places on the planet which need it. Should keep him busy for a while.) Dan and I have hung out for years, and ten years ago that sentiment \u2014 or one very close to it\u2014 slipped out of his mouth while a mixture of rum and Kahlua was slipping into it. I’d shared that basic sentiment for decades, but Dan really nailed it in a way I never had.<\/p>\n I’m not 100% sure where I first heard the brains are survival engines <\/em>line, but I know it’s not mine. I think I read it in a book by either Stephen Pinker or Thomas Metzinger. And Feeling machines that happen to think<\/em> hails from a documentary on brain science I saw back in the early nineties; I have no idea what name to attach to the talking head who first spouted those words. I only know I heard them and thought Wow, that’s concise<\/em>\u2014 and more than a decade later, I put them into the mouth of one of the supporting cast from Blindsight<\/em>.<\/p>\n I doubt that this list is comprehensive. I’m certain of it in fact, because that’s how the writer’s brain works; we pilfer from the real to inform the fictive. And after half a century on this planet, who the hell remembers whether you actually invented something or merely heard<\/em> it while suckling at your nursemaid’s breast?<\/p>\n I’ve been pondering such imponderables in the wake of the grumbles that appeared after my last post<\/a>; specifically, the muttering about “plagiarism” that showed up in the comments after I highlighted a line from “The Island” that resurfaced in “Bowl of Heaven”. I said then \u2014 and I say now \u2014 that I don’t believe there was any intent to appropriate content; Benford & Niven intended the quote as a tribute, that’s how I took it, and truth be told I peed my pants a bit when I encountered my words in their novel. But more to the point, if they’re guilty then I’m more so; because I didn’t port my<\/em> stolen quotes as any kind of explicit homage. I just thought the words were cool and pithy and so I stuck them into other mouths of my own characters. There was no intent to plagiarize. I just wanted to make a point, and these other people had made the point better than I could have, so I used their words. If I’d known that Policy Lass<\/a> and ClimateSight<\/a> and ClimateBites<\/a> were going to borrow those words in turn, and attribute them to me<\/em>\u2014 if I’d known that that particular posting was going to go semiviral and get quoted as often as it did \u2014 I would have taken more care to acknowledge my sources.<\/p>\n