WHY DETAILS MATTER FOR CITY AND SCIENCE

Details matter as much to nature boy as they do city boy, but they’ll still fight you about it.

Let’s leave it to plant biologists to break it down, to explain the details of plant life, because isn’t that how we envision nature? Plants?

Then listen to an urban planner share the details of city life.

What do they all have in common? Details matter.

(Disclaimer: the writer is neither biologist, forester, or urban planner, but views them as trusted fields of study.)

We live in a world of details from single cell critters to the most elaborate collection of specialized cells called humans.

You know the drill: things start small and grow.

. . . she’d discovered an unexpected behavior in a protozoan called Paramecium aurelia. This unicellular organism, she claimed, had shown it was capable of learning, a feat generally assumed to be restricted to what were considered higher organisms such as mammals and birds.

Fellow scientists “all thought I was plain crazy when I started,” she told the Tucson Daily Citizen. “But now they think I may have something.”

Doesn’t that explains the Scientific Method to a T?

“Now they think I may have something.”

Nature zealot jumps on “may have something” with both Allbirds and organizes to protect it. Learning is the key.

Let’s stop here and agree that details matter in science, but they are insanely mind boggling to the normal brain? From cells to mitochondria to atoms to protons it seems never ending.

And they all have names impossible to remember. At least that’s what it looks like from non-science.

Ask A New Yorker How To Navigate Manhattan

There are people who see this image and break it down stop by stop for anyplace you’d want to go.

They can do it by bus, subway, or street by street. It’s amazing in ways they don’t get enough credit for.

Any hands up on those who would never see themselves anywhere near this mess?

I lived in two different parts of Brooklyn and got around. How? Subway.

How could I possibly do it? With a map.

I grew up in a town with stop lights for log truck traffic on Hwy 101, yet learned the language of public transportation by living in Philadelphia, New York, and Portland.

For an extra challenge I spent days riding the Paris Metro and London tube with my wife. Somehow we did it together.

We started small, paid attention, and branched out from there to connecting lines.

It looks impossible from non-train people. It’s not.

Details Matter Equally?

My hometown had about 8500 people.

It’s a small town unless you come from a smaller town, like Coquille, Oregon.

“North Bend, huh? City boy.”

“No, Coos Bay is the big city, County Seat.”

I asked my New York pals if they knew where Oregon was. They knew, but didn’t care since they lived in the world’s greatest city.

“This is where everything comes from. We get it all first, and if we like it, the rest of the country gets it. How many years behind is Oregon?”

These were regular guys, office people I worked with in my twenties. It’s what New Yorkers tell themselves every day. How else could they still live there?

One benefit is feeling a sense of superiority for their abilities to exist in a complicated web of survival. And they’ve earned it.

Let’s review:

Scientists know what makes life on earth possible. That’s a confidence builder for the rest of us.

Single cell goo may have the ability to learn, another confidence builder.

City people have learned to navigate public transportation as complicated as a DNA strand without being Mensa members.

Simply acknowledging that details matter at each stop, each level, in town and country, is a unifying factor, which is a good move.

Imagine all of those skills applied in a focused direction.