Professor Provine’s outstanding scholarly works make untrue his words, “I will die and soon be forgotten.” He has built for himself the kind of immortality that is the envy of those of us for whom his words will be the truth.
This error about himself possibly derives from his failure to explicitly recognize that every theory has boundaries and only as the boundaries are discovered do we begin to fully understand the theory. In his second paragraph, Provine states the postulates of his theory of the human condition. Do we at present know enough to accept these postulates as universal truths? If we do accept them, have we not left the world of science and moved into the world of the fundamentalists?
RALPH W. LEWIS
Professor Emeritus, Department
of Natural Science
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Mich. 48824