When I studied Geography, the discipline was wracked with all sorts of pointless philosophical questions: Did great human inventions, like say, weaving, agriculture, metal-working or pottery-making, arise once and then propagate across the whole world (Diffusionism)? Or were they discovered independently by many different cultures, that their arising was pretty much inevitable everywhere once a certain level of local sophistication was reached. There was a lot of learned debate going on about these questions, but it seemed pretty obvious to me there was no reason why both couldn’t be true, or neither–or maybe even something in between. In other words, there was no reason why these innovations couldn’t arise independently many times, and then propagate from population to population, with variations, across space and through time to fill up the spaces in between.

The geologists wrestled with Gradualism vs Catastrophism, but I can think of examples of both: It took eons to form the Grand Canyon, but Meteor Crater appeared in an instant. Today we realize many geological structures evolve slowly through time, while others are almost instantaneous. Just because the Great Flood isn’t needed to explain the geology we see doesn’t mean floods don’t happen–even Great Ones. The physicists finally resolved particle vs wave duality by simply refusing to argue about it any more, or simply using whichever model was easier to fit into the equations.

We seem to be programmed to seek for the binary question with one yes-or-no answer. But the universe just isn’t built that way. Think of Nature vs Nurture, Free Will vs Determinism, Cause and Effect vs Statistical Probability, Socialism vs Capitalism, all those Great Debates we had in high school, they arise not out of some inherent self-excluding duality in nature, but from our provincial human desire to turn everything into a yes-or-no question.

Far from being direct and opposed opposites, concepts like these are often just separate ends of a continuous spectrum. In fact, it’s probably even more complex than that. A spectrum is a function anchored by a finite one-dimensional line. Nothing is to stop us from adding additional axes to our graph. Recall, in mathematics, coordinates are not limited to one, two or even three ordered tuples. A point in n-space is characterized as {x, y, z, w…i…l, m, n}. You can go up as high as you like. There is even no reason you can’t go up to an infinite number of dimensions, after all, mathematical spaces only exist in the human mind anyway, they are just numbers we come up with to help us calculate the motions of moving objects, they have no independent reality of their own.

Like those weird Escher drawings of impossible buildings that cannot exist in real space, human language is capable of describing objects, events and relationships that cannot exist in nature. Don’t let linguistic, or even mental boundaries parse reality for you.