Darwin III Lesson Plan

Darwin III Discussion Board

 

“ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”-“hypothetical occurrence in an individual organism’s development of successive stages resembling the series of ancestral types from which it has descended so that the ontogeny of the individual retraces the phylogeny of its group.” (Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary)

I Where we Came From

“All the evil in the world was attributed to the original sin by which man had forfeited his primal perfection.  One had only to live according to the precepts of religion and one could be confident of eternal happiness.”

                                    --Lionel Stevenson 653

Part of our pilgrimage is where we have been, so what is your spiritual past? How were you raised?  How were you taught to view religion?

“I was raised in a family that values Jewish beliefs and traditions. My brothers and I all attended the day school attached to our synagogue, Beth Yeshurun, from Mothers’ Day Out (the first year of nursery school) until fifth grade. Growing up, I knew little outside of the small Jewish bubble I lived in. Judaism suffused my life; in school I attended daily services, took home Shabbat kits for Friday nights, learned how to read and write Hebrew, and was well versed in creationism.”

                                                Samantha Hoffer

 

“I was initially raised as an Episcopalian. I was baptized at birth, I was taken to church for 12 years, I went to my church’s private pre-school/day-care thingie until grade school, and I went to Sunday school on and off.”

                                                David Skaggs

 

“In my group of high school friends, we had 2 Jews, 2 Shi'ite Muslims, 1 Sunni Muslim, 1 Agnostic, 2 Hindus, 5 Christians (all of different denominations), and a Ba'hai... we discussed religious views every once and a while and gave each other a better understanding of some of the world's most controversial religions.”

                                                Saumya Tayi

 

 

 

 

 

II Questioning or Confirming Faith

“Be near me when my faith is dry,

And men the flies of latter spring,

That lay their eggs, and sting and sing

And weave their petty cells and die.”

                        Tennyson ‘Memoriam L’

Have you has your pilgrimage influenced your faith?  What experiences or epiphany moments help define what you believe? How have you questioned your faith? How does the University of Texas influence your spiritual journey?

“It was 6th grade when I first went to church, invited by my friends. Honestly, at first I think that it was originally a social thing for me; I just went along because all my friends were there (I had just moved to Texas, and I wanted a sense of belonging). However, going to church actually did help me through a lot of my struggles throughout middle school. Then, sometime between 9th and 10th grade, our original youth leaders left for California (met at church and got married!) and two new youth leaders came. I was in high school, busy with homework and keeping up with my academics and extracurriculars and couldn’t find the time to regularly go to church (and I wasn’t very fond of the new youth leaders). I think that was when I first started losing faith in Christianity, or when the role of religion in my life started to dwindle. My parents were never hardcore religious people; they encouraged me to go to church to “hear good things”, but they never forced me to go. As I grew older and matured, I found it more and more difficult to accept everything that was said at church; all the

“That God, which ever lives and loves,

One God, one law, one element,

And one far-off divine event,

To which the whole creation moves.” (Tennyson Epilogue)

Also, I felt estranged at my church. There were all these different cliques and I never seemed to fit in anywhere; even if I sat with my friends, I felt awkward. A little how I felt today.”

                                                Lydia Byun

 

“Sophomore year, after a summer of give and take with my parents over whether or not it was necessary for me to attend masses on Sunday, I headed (with three friend) a group that explored what religions of all kinds had to offer. The group was comprised of about 20 friends of friends who came by word of mouth varying from Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist, Muslim, and even atheist. We called it SEARCH, for that was what we intended to do. People then chose topics from which they wanted to lead discussions for future weeks on different aspects of human life and how opposing religions viewed them. For me, it was probably the most pivotal time in exploring what religion and spirituality meant to me. It was the period of time that I found myself struggling physically and emotionally dealing with day-to-day life with social problems, and more pressingly my father’s diagnosis/prognosis.”

                                                            Benjamin Stelly

 

 

III Science and Religion

“but more and more he became aware of his own insignificance, bounded by inefficient senses and “moving about in worlds not realized.”  And then the evolutionary theory completed the disruption of the old order.  The definite act of creation was replaced by indeterminately long natural processes; the intelligent controlling deity succumbed to blind forces functioning mechanically.”

                        Lionel Stevenson pg 653

What is the Relationship between science and religion? 

Are they Incompatible?

“It seems like the easy way out; it cannot be explained, so attribute it to God! Oh, the wonders of nature! Let us not ponder the intricacies of the world around us, but rather just tell God how awesome he is! This is a truly juvenile way to look at the world around us. Why can we not simply accept nature as an infinitely intricate entitity that we will never fully understand? Why is there this unceasing need to justify everything?”

                                                                        Dana Zwieble

 

“To me, science simply makes sense; it has proof; it is reality. There is physical evidence, proof, that researchers have painstakingly compiled and proven. There are definite answers and plausible theories that have their roots in history.”

                                                                        Lydia Byun

“But in my spirit will I dwell,

And dream my dream, and hold it true;

For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,

I cannot think the thing farewell.”

            Tennyson ‘Memoriam’ CXXIII

Can Science and religion coexist?

“Okay, so since that is over with, is anyone else as bummed out as I am? I don’t particularly enjoy that fact that “mankind [appears] as an incidental and fortuitous episode in the age-long history of the stars.”[3] In fact, it is something that I find very hard to accept. I’m supposed to do all this hard work creating a life for myself while being a good person and then when it’s over I just get decomposed by maggots in the ground? It just ends? Huh? No, no, no. There must be some other reason I am here, a reason that is much more fulfilling. This is where religion comes in. My religion fills me with a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging, and, to be honest, a sense of sanity. I have to believe that we were put on this earth, that our bodies are constructed so efficiently, that we are able to create and contemplate so much, for some reason other than pure coincidence. I have to believe that “Nothing walks with aimless feet; that not one life shall be destroyed, or cast as rubbish to the void, when God hath made the pile complete.”[4] Our lives have purpose and meaning, and as a result our lives are valued by God, no matter how insignificant we may feel while here on Earth.”

                                                            Tyler Joseph

“I completely agree that science and religion can co-exist. In fact, much of science enhances my religious beliefs. In a sense, "When microscope and telescope began to reveal infinities surpassing the powers of imagination, man for a time tried to accept them as showing that God had been all the more generous in providing a wonderland for human occupancy; but more and more he became aware of his own insignificance" (Darwin 653). The intricacy of human life is amazing. After taking one class in genetics, I immediately realized how little humans actually understand about how and why our body works the way it does. The messy web of protein to protein interactions and complexity of every detail that makes up my living body is a reflection of the beautiful details God used to form his precious creation: the human being. “

                                                            Mary McGeehan

“I will always believe in a greater purpose, but not necessarily a particular faith. I do believe in a supreme being, and I always will. At best, you could call me a deist. Or, at least a spiritualized atheist who, though nominally ironic, believes in some sort of god. Something greater does control the waves and particles of this all, but I am not sure what it is. When I listen to Eric Clapton, I refuse to believe that wavelengths, frequencies, and vibrations are responsible for the evocation of emotion, for the spirit that irrevocably exists in the sound. There is something more, and I not only sympathize with but agree with Tennyson’s stance on this sort of spiritual evolutionism. Darwin’s theories are irrefutable, but they do not call for a destruction of the spirit.”

                                                            Brian Banks

IV Free Will

“O life as futile, then, as frail!

O for thy voice to soothe and bless!

What hope of answer, or redress!

Behind the veil, behind the veil.”

            Tennyson ‘Memoriam’ LVI

How do your ideas about science and religion deal with your ultimate destiny to die? What freedoms do they allow in life?  What is the ultimate meaning of both on how life and death are conducted?

 

“As humans, our identities remain fluid through the people we meet and the learning that comes from our experiences.  Unlike, Tennyson, I would think that God has a passive role in determining our fates.  Our fates have already been decided: we will all die; and, as Buddhists believe, we will be reborn.”

                                                            Karisma Tamez

“I also did not understand why “If God existed, he could not be endowed with both omnipotence and benevolence” (Darwin 654). I understand that it can be difficult to reconcile the idea that a benevolent, all-powerful God would not allow bad things to happen to us, but I choose to hope that if there is a God he wouldn’t be constantly trying to “fix” things. I think such fixing would eliminate the challenge and thrill of life. I choose to believe that if there is a God, he’s not altering things and using his power like that as a favor to us.”

                                                            David Skaggs

V Ethics and Morality

“Whether a man be good or evil, he is similarly the prey to fate; but instead of facing his lot fairly, “to fight as best he can,” he has invented natural forces, finding it easier to suffer when he can rail at God and Fate for his ills.”

                        Lionel Stevenson pg 654

Is religion the reason for morality?  Would there be morality and ethics without religion? How would people treat each other without some sort of spiritual guide?

 

“I believe that our mind is not sophisticated enough to understand or believe this concept.  The total belief that nature is this unemotional mistake is to imply that we truly are “insignificance, bounded by inefficient senses and ‘moving about in worlds not realized.’” (Stevenson 653) And with that in mind we are to accept that “whether a man be good or evil, he is similarly the prey to fate.” (Stevenson 654) The spread of this philosophy would surely lead to the failure of society.  Without the incentive to be “good,” without direction and meaning to your life, people would descend into a state of chaos, filled with suicides, murders, theft.  Human existence would vanish. “

                                                            Andrew Wortham

How has religion stood in the way of morality and ethics throughout history? Would the world be more compassionate without religion?

 

“My biggest qualm with religion, however, is the way it has been used to abuse others. A particularly strong example is “God Hates Fags” (http://www.godhatesfags.com), an anti-homosexual website of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. These are the same people who decided to picket Heath Ledger and Bernie Mac’s funerals, because of the former’s role in Brokeback Mountain and the latter being African-American. Other obvious examples are the September 11th attacks, which were, once again, based on a twisted belief in a certain religion.”

                                                            Jenny Zhang

VI Personal Philosophies and Nature

“There rolls the deep where grew the tree. 

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.”

            Tennyson ‘Memoriam’ CXXIII

How does your relationship with nature reflect your spiritual beliefs?  Does nature solidify or challenge your beliefs? 

 “However, I look down at my hands and think of the millions of utterly complex cells functioning in perfect harmony together. I see the beautiful hues of the sunset and smell the fresh air after a delicate shower of rain. There’s a couple holding hands, so obviously in love. These are things that cannot be explained by science to me. Science may be able to tell me the exact chemical component which makes grass green, but it can never tell me why it is destined to be green and not red. Science is hard at work, full throttle, trying to figure out the complexities of life that have already been created, of happenings of the past. We are on this great search to find the answers, yet, “behold, we know not anything” (Tennyson LIV). And we will never know.”

                                                            Kajal Mehta

How does nature fall into your concepts of spirituality?  Is nature dependent or integral to humanity?  Is humanity integral to nature?

“This respect translates into my philosophy of life: “Nature has no special regard for humankind” (Stevenson 653). By no means do I mean this in a negative way. Rather, instead of viewing the world from an anthropocentric lens, I’d like to understand it as it understands me. I believe if the spirit of nature could verbalize everything it felt, there would not be one ounce of regard for mankind. “It” birthed us, gave us life. Without “it” we would literally not exist. “It” doesn’t need us- “it” doesn’t want us. If one striped us of our language, politics, “knowledge”, morals, technology, and everything else that we believe makes us superior, we’d be just as inconsequential as the house fly.”

                                                            Austyn Shaner

 

 

 

Spirituality in a "mechanical world"

            I don’t know about the rest of the class, but I can’t help but feel that our discussions on Animal Rights have become a stalemate.  Part of this I believe is because we have hashed the topic so many times, but I also feel that both extremes of the debate have formulized unrealistic views of animals in general.  On the one hand you have the basic philosophy that animals are automatons.  Pure biological matter, whose only goal is to survive, and don’t really possess true emotions, but rather perform behavior that will best reward them in life.  The other argument is that animals do in fact possess some sort of conscious thought.  That they are pure, innocent beings who are dominated and taken advantage by the wicked human species.  I can’t help but feel that both are not really accurate portrayals of the animals.  It would rather seem that our class is using animals as sort of a manifestation for their own values and ideals about nature.  And since animals have this fortunate inability to communicate with us directly, their silence can be the loyalty of our best friend or the total ambivalence of the world

.

People seem to view nature in Bambi vs. White Fang imagery

But whether it is animals or a higher power, humans are constantly trying to assign ethics and values to the world around them.  Humans cannot believe that “nature is but a vast machine indifferent to the sufferings of living beings.” (Stevenson 654)    I believe that our mind is not sophisticated enough to understand or believe this concept.  The total belief that nature is this unemotional mistake is to imply that we truly are “insignificance, bounded by inefficient senses and ‘moving about in worlds not realized.’” (Stevenson 653) And with that in mind we are to accept that “whether a man be good or evil, he is similarly the prey to fate.” (Stevenson 654) The spread of this philosophy would surely lead to the failure of society.  Without the incentive to be “good,” without direction and meaning to your life, people would descend into a state of chaos, filled with suicides, murders, theft.  Human existence would vanish.  “And Life, a Fury slinging flame.” (Tennyson L)

            “So runs my dream: but what am I?

            An infant crying in the night:

            An infant crying for the light:

            And with no language but a cry.”

                        ---Tennyson L

            I think Tennyson does an amazing job of expressing this despair.  Maybe we are nothing, maybe there is no purpose and we are the accidents of science.  And so we cry out to the world, but not in a language the world understands, just this forlorn, hopeless cry.  This is where, in my opinion the divine spirit comes in.  ‘God,’ in whatever shape or form, silences and comforts our tears. 

            “I stretch lame hands of faith and grope,

            And gather dust and chaff, and call

            To what I feel is Lord of all,

            And faintly trust the larger hope.”

                                    ---Tennyson LV

            Humans have perhaps “evolved” in a way twhere meaning and value are important, and with that we need justification.  Whether or not ‘god’ exists is not important, what is important is finding your own inner peace, that which satisfies your own personal sense of morality.  So that whether “the hills are shadows, and they flow from form to form;”(Tennyson CXXIII) you can be satisfied with your life in your final days.  I found the last stanza of Tennyson’s CXXIII quite meaningful, because in my opinion is sums up humanity’s need to believe in a higher purpose, and hints that perhaps our need to find morality is not a sign of Darwinian weakness, but rather one of the most beautiful aspects of science.

            “But in my spirit will I dwell,

            And dream my dream, and hold it true;

            For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,

            I cannot think the thing farewell.”

A Choice for Change?

“These values are rooted in a basic optimism about life and a faith in free will—a confidence that through pluck and sweat and smarts, each of us can rise above the circumstances of our birth.  But these values also express a broader confidence that so long as individual men and women are free to pursue their own interests, society as a whole will prosper.”

                                    --“The Audacity of Hope” by Barack Obama

 

 

          Part of what makes President Obama so popular is his ability to excite the qualities of humanity that we deem most important.  While John McCain was bragging about the fierce world of capitalism, Obama spoke of compassion for our fellow man.  Long, from an economic and political standpoint has the world tried to balance between the Darwinian competition and Kropotokin mutual aide.  I would like to believe, perhaps foolishly, that the world is beginning to evolve towards the mutual aide, side of the sphere and perhaps fierce competition is becoming extinct.

          If you look around the visible world of evolution, you can almost begin to see how nature is leaning towards compassion. This hopeful conclusion was supported by Kropotkin who hypothesized that natural selection favors creatures who are able to work together to support one another. “During which scores of thousands of thiese intelligent animals came together from an immense territory, flying before the coming deep snow, in order to cross the Amur where it is narrowest—in all these scenes of animal life which passed before my eyes, I saw Mutual Aid and Mutual Support carried on to an extent which made me suspect in it a feature of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.” (Kropotkin 399)  Nowak also cites biological evidence to suggest that compassion is desirable in natural selection: “In ecology, symbiotic associations are increasingly seen as fundamental. Biologist find examples of cooperation at the level of cells organelles and even prebiotic molecules.”(Nowak 404) This all made sense to me.  While violence and hatred has always been present in human and animal society, I would like to think that modern society is a little more stable Even within memorable American history society has evolved to be more compassionate.  Sixty years ago segregation caused the suffering of millions of African Americans across the country and now a black man is elected to the nations highest office.

 

Kropotkin developed the theory of Mutual Support watching heards of deer migrating

          As I continued reading today’s articles however, this notion that human society “evolving” to become more compassionate not only seems underdeveloped but a little frightening. For to say that a species is evolving towards a trend is to say one trait is being favored over others.  But in this situation, if “compassion” is our “trait” then how is it being selected?  Is human culture deciding to be more compassionate, or is compassion a physical make up or our being, dictated by hormones and chemicals. 

Not Comforting to think of thoughts as chemical reactions.

          Edward O. Wilson suggests that “self knowledge (in which compassion would fall under) is constrained and shaped by the emotional control centers in the hypothalamus and limbic system of the brain.  These centers flood our consciousness with all the emotions—hate, love, guilt, fear, and others—that are consulted by ethical philosophers who wish to intuit the standards of good and evil.” (Wilson 409) And that the “hypothalamus and limbic system are engineered to perpetuate DNA.” (Wilson 410) I will admit this to be one of the most distressing parts of Plan II Biology.  We spent several lectures learning how all of our emotions were determined based on hormone levels.  This would suggest that the complex thoughts I pride myself on are not profound or unique, but rather chemical reactions, of which I have little conscious control.  To further illustrate this point I saw an episode of 60 Minutes in which they did a story about how brain scans were being used to read thoughts.  Apparently the chemical reactions of thoughts are so predictable that a computer has been developed to actually read human thought based on brain scans of chemical activity. 

  An important addition to the idea that compassion is merely a physical trait that instills chemical reactions is that hatred and violence would also be mere chemical reactions. “The hypothalamic-limbic complex of a highly social species, such as man, “knows,” or more precisely it has been programmed to perform as if it knows,  that its underlying genes will be proliferated maximally only if it orchestrates behavioral responses that bring into play an efficient mixture of personal survival, reproduction, and altruism…. Love joins hate; aggression, fear; expansiveness, withdrawal; and so on; in blends designed not to promote the happiness and survival of the individual, but to favor the maximum transmission of the controlling genes.” (Wilson 410)   Here it gets very depressing, because if humans have evolved to balance compassion and competition, then that means those nasty “bad” qualities man kind has labeled are not totally controllable and yield “three putative implications of an innate human nature:

 

First, if the mind has and innate structure, different people could have different innate structures. That would justify discrimination and oppression.

Second, if obnoxious behavior like aggression, war, rape, clannishness, and the pursuit of status and wealth are innate, that would make them “natural and hence acceptable.

Third, if behavior is caused by the genes, then individuals cannot be held responsible for their actions.” (Pinker 472)

 

Pinker continues in his article to try and prove how this proves not every action and emotion is based on biology, but also influenced by human experience and reactions.  Still one has to wonder with all the evidence that emotions are correlated to chemical reactions, how much control we have over our emotions and thus our actions.  Maybe we are influenced by experiences, but maybe we only experience certain things because of what our DNA allows us to allow ourselves to experience.  Maybe this great moment America had was a choice to evolve into a more compassion country, but maybe it was natural selection dictating our actions so that “the organism is only DNA’s way of making more DNA.”