The use of the "font" spelling variant rather than "fount" is any case a clearer indication of etymology.
After all, a "fount" of types refers not to its role as a fountain of printing (fons fontis L -> fontaine OF -> fountain) but the pouring out, melting and casting of lead (fundo fundere fudu fusum [fused!] L -> fondre / fonte F).
Fraternal societies (everything from "greek" societies in universities to the Masons and elk lodges) did this quite well until recently, collapsing membership along with other communal organizations.
I think we still have rituals. Rituals are often invisible to the participants, so it wouldn't surprise me if ours were invisible to us. I can't think of strong ones off the top of my head. Perhaps social media rituals, like posting certain content to "appeal to the algorithm".
From an anthropological perspective, ritual just means "repeated behavior with some significance". So yes they aren't going anywhere; you can describe most behavior that isn't strictly biologically necessary as a ritual.
There is an argument to be made that the current loss of a sense of community and the meaninglessness epidemic can (at least in part) be attributed to a lack of shared rituals. S. Junger (https://amzn.to/4nSaxfY) and M. P. Some (https://amzn.to/4eB5sUW) do a great job of making this point from somewhat different (and non-eastern) perspectives.
"There is an argument to be made that the current loss of a sense of community and the meaninglessness epidemic can (at least in part) be attributed to a lack of shared rituals"
Or that in the older days, people lived and worked mostly closely together. Now people live isolated, don't interact with their neighbor at all (I don't even know most of the names of them after 1 year) bring their kids to one place away, then go to work on even another place with again another set of people. So lost rituals maybe play a part as well - but mostly I see it just as a very uncommunal livestyle.
(but thanks for the book recommendations, they look interesting)
After virtue is definitely going on my reading list. The idea that we use moral language vacuously because we don’t share the same worldview as the people who invented it is fascinating.
I’m concerned about theories that state that a larger society-wide effort has to be made to bring ethics back to life though. This is because I’m gay and historically societies haven’t always had a great outlook on me. Maybe I could live in a world that had a coherent telos for gay men that didn’t involve them being stoned to death.
"We Chinese have lost the ritualistic practices that undergirded society 2500 years ago. Let us therefore just come up with a new set?
That sounds sensible to me.
"Who have been the most successful at inventing new rituals for our age? The Axis Powers starting with the 1936 Olympics. Hmm."
I don't know where that train of thought is going but the 1936 Olympics is generally considered a fact but not a happy one. Jesse Owens was a shining light there ...
I think the author handles this by pointing out the constant in change: human nature which does not change plus change itself.
In that context ritual symbology has a half life in human nature. It needs to be periodically made anew.
Ritual becomes form without substance or becomes corrupted eg.Martin Luther's grievances to the church.
As another writer (I believe Joyce) once analogized, periodically there's nothing left but to pick up the broken shards of colored glass from the cathedral and reassemble it making anew partly connected to past but mostly reconfigured to now.
Whence the 64 million dollar question here: why broken?
I am not sure that Tolkien was a supporter of "Deontology" (ethical systems like Kant's). He was more probably a fan of virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas. There is a large gulf between them. Wikipedia does a decent job of summarising the differences. We can not lump together into one category everyone who disagrees for many different reasons why we can sum up future consequences almost mathematically to come up with an "optimal" ethical choice. I am not sure that Tolkien is particularly interested in "greatness" either.
Some of your points are very curious. Biologists did not reject horizontal gene transfer. Or at any rate it has been part of the canon for pretty much the last 60 years which is essentially forever in biology. (The mechanisms for heredity, i.e. DNA were only discovered in the early 1950s). Besides, scientists are always "tweaking" theories as you put it. More precisely, a fruitful and productive scientific program leads to more and more discovers and elaborations that have to be accomodated. Look at the changes in the Standard Model in particle physics. The current controversy is whether and why the Standard Model is no longer being "tweaked". In other words, some physicist wonder whether current research is no longer yielding discoveries that allow advances and hences changes or elaborations to the Standard Model.
I find the efforts of the archeologists not to apply cultural norms particularly interesting:
In other circumstances, a caste system might be seen in a less favourable light:
> I like the egg myth because it suggests that the Chimú understood that social and political inequality is ‘baked in’ to humanity from the beginning,” says anthropologist Robyn Cutright of Centre College.
Similarly the discussion of preferring other people's children for child sacrifices. This is ascribed to their support desire for cultural diversity and laying new cultural roots.
> “The Chimú had the ability to draw on a large terrain, and I think they were reaching out to diverse regions to find children for the sacrifices”
> By sacrificing the children and burying them, they were, in a way, planting new ancestors.”
I hope the original archeologists have not been quoted out of context or that I have not misinterpreted them.
Either way it is quite amusing. I do not think I would regard child sacrifices in entirely the same positive light or even neutrally ...
Often the ribbons (alpha-helices and beta=sheets) form "protein domains". Canonically, these are stable, folded structures with conserved shapes and functions that serve as the building blocks of proteins, like lego pieces. These protein domains can be assembled in different ways to form proteins of different function. Different protein domains that have the same evolutionary origin have conserved structure even when the underlying amino acid sequence, or DNA sequence has changed beyond recognition over millions of years of evolution.
In other words, molecular biologists use structure as a proxy for function.
Looking at how the same protein domains works in different proteins in different species can give us clues as to how a protein might work in human biology or disease.
Numbers in the UK suggest higher death rates. There seem to have been something in the order of 150,000 excess deaths with fewer than 20 million positives (with a free and extensive testing programme). Both estimates come with caveats but this still suggest that pre Omicron strains had higher mortality rates.
The key is using excess deaths statistics which seem much less subjective.
You don't really need to only break on punctuation. There is no convention to do so and so long as you so not break any logograms in half, the resulting text reads perfectly fine. In fact, the convention is to have left and right justified text with equal numbers of monospaced logograms, including punctuation, on each line (on the equivalent for vertical text).
Classical Chinese before the 20 th century was seldom punctuated.
Nah. Primate studies are too expensive, impractical and ethically difficult to justify. Think about the number of subjects you would need for statistical significance ...
