Charles Darwin’s exceedingly dangerous idea

In Darwin's dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Daniel Dennett describes Darwin's idea as the "best idea anyone has ever had."

In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and a physical law. But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea.

What exactly was Darwin's dangerous idea? According to Dennett, it was "not the idea of evolution, but the idea of evolution by natural selection, an idea he himself could never formulate with sufficient rigor and detail to prove, though he presented a brilliant case for it." (42) Dennett considers Darwin's idea to be "dangerous" because it has so many fruitful applications in so many fields above and beyond biology. When Dennett was a schoolboy, he and some of his friends imagined that there was such a thing as "universal acid,"

a liquid "so corrosive that it will eat through anything! The problem is: what do you keep it in? It dissolves glass bottles and stainless steel canisters as readily as paper bags. What would happen if you somehow came upon or created a dollop of universal acid? With the whole planet eventually be destroyed? What would it leave in its wake? After everything had been transformed by its encounter with universal acid, what would the world look like? Little did I realize that in a few years I would encounter an idea-Darwin's idea-bearing an unmistakable likeness to universal acid: eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks are still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.

(63) Darwin's idea is powerful, indeed. Many people see it as having the power to ruin the meaning of life.

People fear that once this universal acid has passed through the monuments we cherish, they will cease to exist, dissolved in an unrecognizable and unlovable puddle of scientific destruction.

Dennett characterizes this fear is unwarranted:

We might learn some surprising or even shocking things about these treasures, but unless our valuing these things was based all long on confusion or mistaken identity, how could increase understanding of them diminish their value in our eyes? (82)

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Population: Quiver or Quake

The writers on this blog are generally aware of the problems caused by population growth, for example here and here. But there is a movement in modern American Fundamentalist culture that puts the Catholic baby mill mentality to shame. They call it the Quiverfull Movement. The idea is basically that a woman is a quiver full of potential babies, and therefore must produce as many babies as possible. Only when she runs out of eggs may she consider another career. I first read about it at FreindlyAtheist a few days ago, with typically scathing commentary. Then another friend sent me a link to this report on Salon.com. It began a generation ago:

Since 1985, Quiverfull has been thriving in the Southern and Sunbelt states. Although the conviction of "letting God plan your family" is not an official doctrine in many churches, there are signs of its acceptance in high places; the Rev. Albert Mohler, Theological Seminary president of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, argued, for example, that deliberate childlessness was "moral rebellion" against God.
It is mainly a propaganda campaign,
Quiverfull has gained exposure through cable TV's fascination with extraordinarily large families, including the 18-child Duggar family. The Duggars, an Arkansas couple whose husband Jim Bob was a former Arkansas state representative, have appeared on several Discovery Health Channel specials about their immense brood and currently have a TLC reality show, "18 Kids and Counting," that focuses on the saccharine details of large family life.
So the principle of outbreeding your opponents is now a conscious tack of the American Evangelicals and Fundamentalists. Thoughtful citizens of this world intentionally breed less. Therefore we are bound to be ever more seriously outnumbered with a couple of generations of this nonsense.

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American productivity versus wages over the decades

Richard Wolff has been a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts since 1981. Media Education Foundation has just released a new video of Wolff, offering his opinions on the current economic crisis. Here's the trailer, which offers some dramatic motion-graphs illustrating wage stagnation versus productivity in America. Here's the blurb from MEF:

Professor Richard Wolff breaks down the root causes of today's economic crisis, showing how it was decades in the making and in fact reflects seismic failures within the structures of American-style capitalism itself. Wolff traces the source of the economic crisis to the 1970s, when wages began to stagnate and American workers were forced into a dysfunctional spiral of borrowing and debt that ultimately exploded in the mortgage meltdown. By placing the crisis within this larger historical and systemic frame, Wolff argues convincingly that the proposed government bailouts, stimulus packages, and calls for increased market regulation will not be enough to address the real causes of the crisis, in the end suggesting that far more fundamental change will be necessary to avoid future catastrophes.

I haven't viewed the entire video, only the trailer, but even the trailer presents important context for our current economic crisis. I do hope that, in the full video, Wolff puts blame not only on the profit-makers but also on American consumers, who have clearly made quite a few terrible decisions in their attempts to live beyond their means. Not all of that accrued individual debt was for the purpose of buying essentials such as food, housing and health care. There is a LOT of blame to go around: my targets include the greedy and corrupt financial sector and many irresponsible consumers. Not that all businesses are greedy, nor all consumers irresponsible. With this caveat, though, I did want to link to this video trailer because the graphs are mind-blowing. Further, MEF has put out terrific videos that offer clarity regarding many of our country's most contentious issues. One example is the MEF production, War Made Easy.

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Spending time at the Dallas-Fort-Worth Airport (DFW)

I spent the afternoon at Dallas-Fort-Worth Airport, unsuccessfully trying to get on a standby flight, then waiting for my originally scheduled flight. While I waited, I walked about, amazed at the size of the airport. The airport stretches as far as the eye can see. Gazing out of the terminal, you can see several control towers in the distance. A woman at the information booth told me that DFW covers more ground than Manhattan. I had a difficult time believing it, but it turns out that it's true. I learned here that DFW covers more than 29.8 square miles (18,076 acres), whereas Manhattan covers only 22.96 square miles. The airport is so big, that it is necessary to travel between terminals on an elaborate tram system ("Skylink" covers a 5-mile route at speeds of up to 35 mph). The vast grounds of DFW are lone-star-attitudeoverwhelming, but so is the interior. It's an entire city, staffed with 60,000 employees. There must be hundreds of restaurants and stores. Including this one, called "Lone Star Attitude." I noticed this store because I sat across from it waiting for my standby flight. It was a bit creepy, looking at the cows dressed up in human clothes. I think I'll get over it, but I did wonder whether this was an effective form of marketing. Perhaps only in Texas. cow-mannequins [Photos by Erich Vieth]

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The Happiness Project says: live better by deceiving your kids.

I usually like the online magazine Slate. I listen to many of Slate's podcasts, read several of the site's posts a week, and peruse their author-run blogs on occasion, too. The site isn't perfect, but I usually carry some respect for the site's authors and its generally thoughtful, funny content. Exceptions being boneheaded pursuits like their recent attempt to track down the evolutionary origins of Facebook's 25 Things meme (Hint to Slate: that trend dates back to the years before Facebook, the golden days of Livejournal). But for all of Slate's occasionally out-of-touch, misguided posts, nothing beats The Happiness Project. Authored by ex-lawyer and non-Slate author Gretchen Rubin, it's a recent addition to Slate's blog roll, and not truly a "part" of Slate itself. I still hold Slate somewhat responsible for sharing the drivel that the blog spews. I'll give you a pretty representative taste: Five Ways to Outsmart Your 3-Year Old. Let's take Way #1. Gretchen writes:

Continue ReadingThe Happiness Project says: live better by deceiving your kids.