Evolution and ExorcismsWritten by Robert Bruce Baird
EVOLUTION: More surprising to me as I consider where my intellectual head-space has been on this issue, which is central to theological ideal; is fact that I have become more of a creationist. Skeptics may say that God doesn't exist and I am inclined to agree he/she isn't within our purview to limit and say we know; HIM, or even what it is that really goes on, in world about us. It would be difficult to say there is any one humanistic discipline or theology that fits with my perception. Teilhard de Chardin's 'templates' and 'quantum many worlds' join Lamarckian science, that requires uncertainty and values mystery and uncertainty principles with purpose. In final analysis you can put me in whatever 'cubby-hole' you want and there’ll be agreement and respect for truth therein expressed. I see a lot of people sounding like they disagree and yet I see little difference except when they seek personal gain by it. Surely science has given a great deal of support to concept of consciousness existing in very smallest parts of energy, and in ways it performs what was once considered miraculous, or magical. Here are thoughts of two very scientifically oriented people from MIT in a book called 'Darwinism Evolving': "They also made it harder for scientific worldview to be received with equanimity by other sectors of culture. Indeed, since reducing impulse undermines fairly huge tracts of experience, people like Wallace, who feel deeply about protecting phenomena they regard as existentially important, frequently conclude that they have no alternative except to embrace spiritualism, and sometimes even to attack scientific worldview itself, if that is only way to protect important spheres of experience that have been ejected from science's confining Eden. In response, scientists and philosophers who feel strongly about liberating potential of a spare, materialistic worldview began to patrol borderlands between high-grade knowledge scientists have of natural systems and low-grade opinions that in view of science's most ardent defenders, dominate other spheres of culture and lead back toward superstitious and authoritarian world of yesteryear. 'Demarcating' science from other, less cognitively worthwhile forms of understanding was already a major feature of Darwin's world. A line beyond which Newtonian paradigm could not apply was drawn at boundary between physics and biology. We have seen how hesitant Darwin was to cross that line and what happened when he did. Twentieth-century people are sometimes prone to congratulate themselves for being above these quaint Victorian battles. They may have less reason to do so, however, than they think, for fact is that throughout our own century, same sort of battles, with emotional overtones no less charged, have been waged at contested line where biology meets psychology, and more generally where natural sciences confront human sciences. Dualisms between spirit and matter, and even between mind and body, may have been pushed to margins of respectable intellectual discourse. But methodological dualisms between what is covered by laws and what is to be 'hermeneutically appropriated' are still very much at center of our cultural, or rather 'two cultural', life. Cognitive psychologists and neurophysiologists are even now busy reducing mind-states to brain-states, while interpretive or humanistic psychologists are proclaiming how meaningless world would be if mind is nothing but brain. Interpretive anthropologists are filled with horror at what would disappear from world if rich cultural practices that seem to give meaning to our lives were to be shown to be little more than extremely sophisticated calculations on part of self-interested genes. Conflicts of this sort would have given Darwin stomachaches almost as bad as ones he endured over earlier demarcation controversies. The rhetorical pattern of these battles is still depressingly similar, in fact, to Huxley's confrontation with Wilberforce. Hermeneuts ridicule scientists like Hamilton, Dawkins, and Wilson when they suggest that nothing was ever known about social cooperation until biologists discovered kin selection. Reductionists in turn criticize hermeneuts, now transformed largely into 'culturists,' for bringing back ghosts and gods, just as their nineteenth-century predecessors were taxed with being 'vitalists' every time they said something about complexity of development. Humanists identify scientists with an outdated materialist reductionism. Scientists insist that hermeneutical intentionality is little more than disguised religion. Perhaps, a way out of this fruitless dialectic between 'two cultures', can be found if each party could give up at least one of its cherished preconceptions {Or just give up science that rejects certain facts in favour of convention or 'Toilet Philosophy'.}. It would be a good thing, for example, if heirs of Enlightenment would stop thinking that if cultural phenomena are not reduced to some sort of mechanism; religious authoritarianism will immediately flood into breach. They should also stop assuming that nothing is really known about human beings until spirit of scientific reductionism gets to work. Students of human sciences have, after all, been learning things alongside scientists ever since modernity began. Among things they have learned are that humans are individuated persons within bonds of culture and cultural roles, and that as recipients and transmitters of cultural meanings, they are bound together with others in ways no less meaningful and valuable than ways promoted by strongly dualistic religions. By same token, it would be helpful if advocates of interpretive disciplines would abandon a tacit assumption sometimes found among them that nature is so constituted that it can never accomodate rich and meaningful cultural phenomena humanists are dedicated to protecting, and that therefore cultural phenomena 'ought never' to be allowed to slip comfortably into naturalism. Humanists seem to have internalized this belief from their reductionist enemies, whose commitment to materialism is generally inseparable from their resolve to show up large parts of culture, especially religion, as illusions. These opponents, we may safely say, take in each other's laundry." (7)
| | Love is in the air-Science too!Written by K.A.Cassimally
Ah… love! What a wonderful thing. The meaning of life itself, isn’t it? Artists, poets and play writers have made greatest progress in humanity’s understanding of love. So what’s love doing in a science column? Well lately scientists have managed to get themselves included in restricted group of love-explainers.Scientists now think that love is nothing else but a series of chemical reactions in people. If you are in love with someone then you are also in love with that person’s genes subconsciously. More surprising still-if there is anything more astonishing that this last ‘fact’-is that not only do your eyes work when you see a perfect partner but so does your nose-and of course heart. Smell apparently plays an important role in attraction between two persons. You are in fact attracted to a person who is more like your own parents not only physically speaking but also olfactory speaking. This chosen person of your heart is also chosen person of your nose! Many external appearances will prove that you are well and truly in love. Flushed cheeks, racing heart beat and clammy hands are only a few examples. ‘Inside’ body though, there are other definite signs that Cupid has passed by. Helen Fisher of Rutgers University is one of most respected researchers in field. She proposed that people fall in love in 3 different stages. Stage 1: Lust Lust is driven by sex hormones testosterone and oestrogen. Testosterone, as many readers might have thought, is not only found in men. In fact it plays a major role in women’s sex drive.
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