The other day on my car radio I heard the Secretary of Education say that he foresaw a time not too far in the future when paper and printing ink would disappear and books would no longer be the means of education. I hope he is wrong, and not just because I am a librarian and care about books. Providing information is an inadequate description of what libraries do. That question is at the least ridiculous, and it is ridiculous for the same reasons that I have misgivings about the title of this symposium. Let me try to explain what I mean.
Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive.
On average, offspring that vary most strongly in directions favored by the environment will survive and propagate. Favorable variations will therefore accumulate in populations by natural selection. Everybody here will recognize those three succinct statements as a summation of the Darwinian theory of evolution. But they are of course not the answer to the question. There is a philosophical principle that I was brought up with which says that the meaning of a statement is its method of verification.