A Week With Nikos Salingaros

"2 Blowhards: You've compared the ideology of modernism to a virus. While we could say that a virus is, from our point of view, a bad thing, couldn't we also say that from a Darwinian point of view the virus is brilliant?Nikos Salingaros: You cannot discuss architecture with me without coming back to value. Scientists like to put value on things. We spend all our time verifying things. Only when you go out to the wilder ranges of cosmology, for example, where there is no way to verify things, can you maintain parallel theories. But anything you can get your hands on here you want to verify. So the idea of right and wrong is a central pinnacle of the scientific method. Also within science there is the question of moral and ethical values, with just a slight stretching of the term. Because we know what is good and what is bad as far as promoting human health, the health of human beings, of society, of ecosystems. And we classify what destroys that as harmful. So in that sense a virus is harmful. At the same time we recognize that it's highly successful in its biological nature."

Thanks to Ray Sawhill 'Michael' at 2blowhards