Have a look here at the lyrics to Don Henley's "In the Garden of Allah" ahead of your upcoming seminar, and the music video here, and the echo of Sorrows of Satan will be clear.I was thinking (and discussing with a classmate) about the passage you read of Darwin's theories on sexual selection and women. At the time I found it difficult to understand just why I didn't have a more violent reaction to such statements that, introduced today, would be quite inflammatory. Considering that I am of the ilk who generally reveres Darwin's theories as truth and that they represent a solid explanation of how nature, and in general, humanity works on a whole. Therefore I should, as you say, accept the truth in Darwin's words regarding women. However, I obviously do not. Which lead me to wonder just why this was.
The closing remarks made on this topic, by the student I cannot recall the name of, touched on part of why I think I don't take Darwin's views regarding women so seriously. That is, Evolutionary theory today, although based on Darwin's theories, do not necessarily take everything Darwin hypothesized into account. One of the main components about scientific theory, if I learned anything from my Psychology classes, is that theories are not fact. They can have a huge amount of evidence or supporting materials regarding the theory, but in order to prove that a theory is truth it needs proof. Although they are the closest we have to the truth regarding the progression of our existence, Darwin's theories are still theories. As such, we are still able to work with these theories, fine-tuning them closer to the truth as we gather more evidence and information.
Clearly (or at least hopefully), the notion that men are superior to women is an obsolete one. But a rejection of feminine inferiority, does not necessarily mean a rejection of Darwin's sexual selection. Perhaps it needs just an adjustment of how the theory of sexual selection is viewed or used. Simply stating that women are supposed to choose their partners, and thus have a passive role in their sexuality, while their suitors compete for their attentions and the opportunity to procreate. This fails to take into account the sheer variety of people out there. If Darwin feared the degeneracy of the human race while admitting there are elite people who value morality and progression. Then he is admitting that there are different calibers of people out there all located at varying points on the physical and moral spectrum. Let's provide an example of a wealthy business man who enjoys a variety of benefits of his age and monetary value. He's attractive, is able to work out often to improve his physique, he is easily able to support himself and is quite intelligent. What will he look for in a partner? Is he going to compete for just any girl out there? No, he's likely to compete for an attractive, perhaps also wealthy, physically fit and if he's really smart he'll also look for intelligence in his future partner. He's improved himself to such a point, that he's not looking to share his genes with someone who might provide inferior genes to their offspring. Thus, the kind of women he is looking for is one who has also improved herself to the best of her ability. Women these days and even in history) use many different tactics to improve themselves to better attract a sexual partner or mate, just as much as men do. A successful man or woman is probably not going to settle down with someone with a severe drug addiction or someone who is clearly not as intelligent. Both women and men will select and compete for a proper mate who will only add to their already superior genes. So is it not feasible that although Darwin's theories regarding sexual selection may be true regarding peacocks, but in the complex world of the human race it needs a certain amount of adjustment? It does not necessarily mean that Darwin was wrong, just means that his theories need to conform to how a specific social structure works.
And this is perhaps why I did not jump up and down with outrage in class and perhaps why no one else did either. We can accept that Darwin's theories are the best explanation, but we can also take his theories and understand them with regard to the complex nature of our social structures and realities.
And these realities do not leave much room at all for the notion that men are superior to women.
We have a guest speaker at Friday's lecture: WHO researcher Dr. Bruce Alexander -- one of the world's leading scholarly authorities on addiction. Dr. Alexander's upcoming book for Oxford University Press, The Globalisation of Addiction, is an explicitly Darwinian account of the epidemic of addiction in first- and second-world countries as being a degenerating consequence of free-market capitalism. Dr. Alexander has also authored a recent study for the Centre for Policy Alternatives, The Roots of Addiction in Free market Society, which is available online in portable document format. You can read about him in Britain's Daily Telegraph and Guardian.
Mr. Hill's expertise: studying facial expressions and eye tracking to find out what consumers genuinely think about a new product.
In other words: People can lie, faces rarely do.
For the past two decades, Mr. Hill has been refining what he calls the art of "brain science" -- finding ways to use technology to tap what is largely undefined. That is the art of examining the 3,000 combinations of eye and muscle movements in the face that say so much more than words do.
Human behavior is a product both of our innate human nature and of our individual experience and environment. In this article, however, we emphasize biological influences on human behavior, because most social scientists explain human behavior as if evolution stops at the neck and as if our behavior is a product almost entirely of environment and socialization. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists see human nature as a collection of psychological adaptations that often operate beneath conscious thinking to solve problems of survival and reproduction by predisposing us to think or feel in certain ways. ....
The implications of some of the ideas in this article may seem immoral, contrary to our ideals, or offensive. We state them because they are true, supported by documented scientific evidence. Like it or not, human nature is simply not politically correct
CONNOISSEURS OF PEEVE-OLOGY, here comes the book you'll love to hate. "She Literally Exploded: The Daily Telegraph Infuriating Phrasebook," a collection of despised English usages, is now available on Amazon in the UK and Canada. More>>>
But recent years have seen a breed of ambitious, twentysomething nesters settling in the city, embracing the comforts of hearth and home with all the fervor of characters in Middlemarch. This prudish pack—call them the New Victorians—appears to have little interest in the prolonged puberty of earlier generations. While their forbears flitted away their 20’s in a haze of booze, Bolivian marching powder, and bed-hopping, New Vics throw dinner parties, tend to pedigreed pets, practice earnest monogamy, and affect an air of complacent careerism. Indeed, at the tender age of 28, 26, even 24, the New Vics have developed such fierce commitments, be they romantic or professional, that angst-ridden cultural productions like the 1994 movie Reality Bites, or Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, simply wouldn’t make sense to them. More>>>
Frankly, I love this news story from today, regarding the recent "Live Earth" event:Rocker Rod Stewart was so unhappy at the colourful language used at Saturday's Live Earth concerts - he pledged to cut out swearing at a recent gig.
Comedian Chris Rock's foul-mouthed appearance at Live Earth London prompted TV host Jonathan Ross to apologise to viewers.
And when Stewart played at Rioch Arena in Coventry on Tuesday, he promised to pay £10 to each member of the crowd if he swore.
He says, "I listened to people effing and blinding during the Live Earth Concert last weekend and it just sounded so cheap.
"If you hear me swear on stage I'll give you all a tenner."
But, if we will make light of what is deepest within us, nothing is left but to pay homage to what is more upon the surface. To seem becomes to be; what looks fair will be good, what causes offence will be evil; virtue will be what pleases, vice what pains. As well may we measure virtue by utility as by such a rule. Nor is this an imaginary apprehension; we all must recollect the celebrated sentiment into which a great and wise man was betrayed, in the glowing eloquence of his valediction to the spirit of chivalry. "It is gone," cries Mr. Burke; "that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound; which inspired courage, while it mitigated ferocity; which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice lost half its evil by losing all its grossness." In the last clause of this beautiful sentence we have too apt an illustration of the ethical temperament of a civilized age. It is detection, not the sin, which is the crime; private life is sacred, and inquiry into it is intolerable; and decency is virtue. Scandals, vulgarities, whatever shocks, whatever disgusts, are offences of the first order. Drinking and swearing, squalid poverty, improvidence, laziness, slovenly disorder, make up the idea of profligacy: poets may say any thing, however wicked, with impunity; works of genius may be read without danger or shame, whatever their principles; fashion, celebrity, the beautiful, the heroic, will suffice to force any evil upon the community.And of course, any number of public persons (Paris Hilton the apotheosis and pure gift to the pedagogue) prove his remarks on celebrity and wicked behavior, the acceptance of.
Giorgio Armani junior ad sparks polemic in Spain
03/12/2007
The advertisement shows a little girl in a bikini. The investigation started a few days after Dolce & Gabbana was forced to pull an image from Spain showing a woman pinned to the ground by a man as other men looked on.
From classfellow L. McC.:The Irony of the Mission: How the Trobriand Islanders Pervert the Spirit of a Jolly-Old Pastime
The facts about this unique form of cricket, as I presented them in class, were a little bit misinformed. The English Anthropologists (headed by the Polish father of modern anthropology, Bronislow Malinowski) did not introduce Cricket. It was the the English missionaries who followed them, around the turn of the century, who brought Cricket to the Trobriand Islands. The adaptation of the sport had not been intended by these misssionaries; they merely wanted to offer an alternative pastime to the highly sexualized "Yam Dance" already practiced among the islanders. It was the islanders themselves who "transformed the game into an outlet for tribal rivalry, mock warfare, community interchange, sexual innuendo, and an afternoon of riotous fun" (Berkeley Media LLC).
While I am certainly quick to acknowledge the poor quality of the article about The Mill on the Floss (prior to our alterations of course), at least it was apparent that the individual who wrote it took the time to actually read the novel before spilling his "insight" into the all-consuming void that is Wikipedia. Check out what is written about Rob Roy.
I have received most (but not all) of your group allegorisations of Macdonald's The Princess & Curdie, and I liked each very well and liked two for just that slightly finer of particularity. In the final analysis, the group who took the technically-correct approach to the allegorisation deserves the textually-appropriate usquebaugh....
The challenge will be making certain that there is a clear understanding of how these componets are simply abstactions from one unmistakale and unified artistic whole in imagination of George Eliot.
-- The Tables Turned --
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless--
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
-- William Wordsworth --
What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better and happier as I came under their influence.If you should be having any challenges with the experiential pedagogy we are using this term, by all means stop by an office hour or make a special appointment to develop the understanding even further.
Classfellow JP sends along Idiocracy, which delightfully illustrates the (elitist) Darwinian anxiety about the progression & regression of humanity."WARNING: The following program deals with mature (Darwinian) subject matter and contains scenes of violence and coarse language. Viewer discretionThe idea traces back to the short story that I have alluded to by Cyril Kornbluth, "The Marching Morons."
is advised."
At my local recycling center, the first bin is labeled “commingled containers.” Whoever dreamed up this term could have taken the easy way out and just written “cans and bottles.” But no, the author opted for words out of the bureaucrat’s style book, and chose the raised-pinky elegance of a phrase distant from normal English. He also added poor spelling (“comingled,” also a correct spelling, would have been clearer) and pointless redundancy (the concept of “co” is already embedded in the word “mingled”). How did they pack so many errors into two words of modern environmental prose?
'Let it come, man--let it come,' answered MacGregor: 'ye never saw dull weather clear without a shower; and if the world is turned upside down, why, honest menThis formula -- a martial clash vivifies & purifies a decadent Age -- was to be repeated, heinously, almost exactly a century later, as the drumbeat of an entirely unnecessary and unforgivably-conducted war sounded to the same effect in the second decade of the twentieth century ....
have the better chance to cut bread out of it.'
Have you noticed that modern Britain is the most matriarchal society in the history of the world? The four most famous figures in the public service since the war have been women - the Queen Mother, the Queen, Diana, Princess of Wales and Margaret Thatcher.
Here is the arrangement and the schedule of dates for the Mid-Term Essay, twenty five hundred words and revisions. The assignment is worth twenty percent of the Course grade, of which ten percent is for the draught and ten percent for the revision.
Eight-week writing path:
There will be a intra-group peer status review of the Group projects in class on course week ten, Friday July 13th. The results of the peer review will be handed in to the Tutorial leader and form part of the grading of the project. The project is due in class August 3rd. The assignment is worth twenty percent of the Course grade.
This tutorial assignment, worth ten percent of the Course grade, is an opportunity for peer-editing.
Ten-week writing circuit:
Nb. The draught, completed, receives five percent; the revision is worth five percent; for an Assignment total of ten percent of the course grade.
On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species made its first appearance and the world changed forever. An age of faith was plunged into profound religious doubt, and believers of every kind rose to pronounce anathema on Darwin’s godless tract, sparking a fresh battle in the long-running war between science and religion. But while the reactionaries raged, the scientific community soon came to accept natural selection, and the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work in 1900 (which marked the founding of modern genetics) set the seal on Darwin’s triumph by providing the missing piece to his puzzle – a scientific understanding of just how inheritance works.
Unfortunately, everything in the previous paragraph is nonsense....
