Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Romance is All That is True


Silvestre

"One thing that never gets emphasised enough in science, or in schools, or anywhere else, is that no matter how fancy-schmancy your statistical technique, the output is always a probability level (a P-value), the 'significance' of which is left for you to judge - based on nothing more concrete or substantive than a feeling, based on the imponderables of personal or shared experience.  Statistics, and therefore science, can only advise on probability - they cannot determine The Truth.  And Truth, with a capital T, is forever just beyond one's grasp." 
--Henry Gee

"To a child all the different colours are a romance, and romance is all that is true." 
--Robert Henri

Somewhere between these quotes from Henry Gee (senior editor for the scientific journal Nature) and painter Robert Henri (1856-1929) persists the most important essence of what it has meant and continues to mean to live my life among Sorraia horses.  

As we enter the 9th spring of our involvement with the preservation of the "Iberian Tarpan", what gallops across the landscape "here and now" is what is much more worthy of my energies, than attempting to piece together inherently unreliable historic and scientific research.

Fidalgo and Ousado


"It is not a matter of 'going back' to an earlier way of life, but of aligning ourselves with the full depth of the present." --David Abrams



Altamiro