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Scientists have built taxonomies and libraries and private collections and museums and zoos and data banks describing and mapping and modeling and attempting to understand biological systems. A disconnect occurs when a scientists, who has spent a lifetime studying bacteria or plankton or grass or herbs or mushrooms or shrubs or pine trees or fruit trees or roses or vegetables or trout or dolphins or ants or beetles or honey bees or crabs or lobsters or snakes or crocodiles or frogs or turtles or sparrows or cardinals or owls or eagles or mice or elephants or cats or dogs or the duck-billed platypus or kangaroos or horses or zebras or chimpanzees or gorillas or men or women is asked to put aside their lifetime of work in order to be able to agree with someone's interpreted agenda derived from 20 verses from an ancient manuscript. Scientists close their mind in response to closed minds.
The fact we need to have an open mind in order to influence another person towards overcoming their closed minded approaches seems to be yet another paradox.25 And a corollary is, if we have a closed mind, others will respond to us with a closed mind.26 These ideas provide a basis for the power of having a positive mental attitude.
Certainly our roots provide a basis for how open minded we will be later in life. These roots include our family, culture, and especially the environment in which we grew up in. This section by describing how growing up at the southern end of the Great Basis in the Western United States influenced my thinking on biological systems, and how it seems to me biological systems are generally things mankind chooses to act upon.
Considering The Great Basin is a desert, there was a wide variety of life where I grew up. Grandpa Nelson's operation included property at 8,500 foot elevation on Cedar Mountain for grazing sheep during the summers in the Aspen forests, permits at 10,000 foot elevation for logging of Blue Spruce, Ponderosa Pine, and other trees for building material, an associated sawmill in the valley at 5,500 feet, along with irrigated farmland, stockyards, sheep shearing facilities, a meat packing plant and the associated byproducts plant, as well as summer cattle grazing property at 5,000 foot elevations out in the Great Basin desert by Lund, Utah. Grandpa Nelson was electrocuted in a farming accident a few years before I was born. As the oldest son, Dad inherited the farm around the family house, the cattle operation, and the meat packing plant.
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paradoxes