ABSTRACT
Science, like the proverbial activity of travel, is meant to broaden the mind. The scientific enterprise can be likened to a journey, as it provides a renewed invitation to reflect on the strangeness of our world. In such a manner we may ask deceptively simple questions such as: “How did we come to be here?” and “Are humans unique?” Both of these questions can be answered in various ways, but it would be strange if the respondent failed to make some mention of organic evolution. So far as the second question is concerned, the notion of human uniqueness has taken many hard knocks, irrespective of such achievements as landing a rover vehicle on the surface of Mars, or scanning the cosmos with telescopes, let alone performing Robert Wylkynson’s mysteriously beautiful Jesus autem transiens—a work, in the words of John Milsom, of “harmonious chaos...through [which] the medieval listener could more vividly imagine part of the divine order that rested on those pillars of eternity.” Despite our obsession with technologies, for many it is music such as Wylkynson’s, master of the choristers at Eton College in the early sixteenth century, which serves to define our place in the natural order.
