Response to Siearra's Post

I want to write this post to wholeheartedly agree with Siearra's post "The Importance of Science".  She discusses how she agrees with Darwin's perspective because he recognized that as humans all our actions are determined by scientific origins.  Thus, our "human nature" is then a perpetual cycle or continuation of the biologic constructs. Religious sanctions that attempt to explain our origins or actions absolutely cannot compete with scientific fact.  There exist so many religious disciplines, all with their own interpretations of life and death.  To ascribe to one makes a distinction and disregards other opinions, whereas in science the facts presented can be tested and proven or disproved.   While Siearra states that religious explanations of human nature "fail to take into consideration these crucial scientific factors and therefore are missing key points in their analyses", I believe that not only do they fail to do take into consideration the scientific points, they omit them intentionally.  Science would disprove every religious doctrine, so therefore they disregard them to "save face" and not be confronted by contrasting ideals.  I further believe that their "analysis" of human nature is nothing more than a formulated set of rules used to persuade and control masses of people, and does NOT work to explain or better interpret the universe. 

More Darwin- Memes

I want to explore how social memes can impact our human practices.  Dom brought up an interesting though in class; could changing mortality rates of infants impact genetic patterns? If a country has a very high rate of infant mortality (or if we just reference history here- say 1800s or early 1900s) does a link exist between this fact and the amount of children produced?  In today's society many people choose one or two children because they are comfortable with the fact that their children will be healthy enough to live into adulthood.  This then, is a result of human practices changing in regards to medicinal advances, not necessarily genetic or evolutionary components.  What other memes could support this example?  Are there any other human practices that are influenced by changes or advances in modern society, that could be mistaken for adaptive genetic dispositions?  Do you think this is contradictory to the quote Pojman uses that "our behavior is biologically influenced- even determined. So ethical principles and moral theory are little more than rationalizations of genetic programming"?

Playing with words, Darwin

We talked in class the other day about memes the their origin in social constructs.  I found it particularly interesting that memes, while removed from primal biological sources, are a component created from our biologic tendencies.  We discussed language in particular.  The fact that we have a innate genetic disposition to create some form of communicative ability creates the origin of the meme of language.  (Language not being the meme, the particular language spoken is the meme- such as Spanish/French etc.). Dr. Johnson then raised a very interesting topic- what if two words that are different have the same meaning?  (such as world and peace).  I started to think how this would affect our inclinations towards understanding the words themselves and also the greater concepts.  I encountered a conundrum, however, when I went back to the organic structure of the word.  If we are taught "world" to mean the exact same things as "peace", there would be no differentiating or subliminal association between the words. The words would simply mean the same exact thing.  What we associated with "peace" would be the exact object we would associate with "world"- and no special descriptions would contribute.