Our human understanding likes a balance, things to fit together. We like a talk to be all of a piece, the segments joining together to form a whole. The ‘balance of nature’, unity in diversity, the harmony of the Cosmos. To me this preference for coherence is a significant characteristic of the human mind and to my mind a manifestation of primate neural hardware operating in conjunction with its sensory input to somehow produce concepts with names, such as ‘Civilisation’, ‘Nature’, ‘Species’, and awareness of the natural environment and also the feelings we have for it. This will shape the nature of the talk.
