ASEBL Journal

Self and Soul: Biology meets Philosophy

2012-02-19T08:41:00.000-08:00

Recently, a rather intelligent psychology student was told by a humanities professor that there is no self. Not surprisingly, the professor in question would probably not object to being camped with post-structuralism, so we could probably discard, along with self, a notion such as the good. Like goodness, self has (at least for human beings), biological imperatives. As psychologist Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. has demonstrated, personality variance is an adaptation to group interaction and sociality. In fact, John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick (discussing the work of psychologists Wendi Gardner and Marilynn Brewer) indicate that any self has three facets (depending on the situation): private, relational, collective.

Neither self nor goodness is necessarily a transcendental signified: granted we could not put either one on a table, but we can clearly define (from real life) aspects of each one. As social creatures who spent most of their heritage as hunters and gatherers (the Pleistocene era spans over 2.5 million years), being fit meant having a sense of self (in the context of others) and being good to others (at times). Cost versus benefit is not the only consideration in terms of being good: research on apes (e.g., Frans de Waal) and on insects (e.g., E.O. Wilson) demonstrates that there can be unconditional gestures of benevolence or instinctual self-sacrifice for the benefit of another (and clearly there are cases of such benevolence in human history).

Any reading in contemporary psychology (e.g., Steven Pinker) would demonstrate that a person (building a sense of personhood) has a conscious mind that creates (for many personal and social reasons) a self. In fact, evolutionary psychologists (e.g., Leda Cosmides and John Tooby) would say that the human mind is to a great extent a product of evolution and still contains responses to our ancient past. Therefore, the mind is not empty at birth, and the self is not constructed entirely from external environment: rather, since the mind has built-in adaptations (e.g., to cooperate, to select a mate, to nurture a child), there are pre-formed building blocks from infancy related to self in a group. Additionally, to say that there is no self denies the biological fact of frontal lobes (especially a prefrontal cortex) where (as often cited by scientists) one’s attitudes, values, and beliefs reside, where individual (self) decisions are made. Without self a human being would be either an automaton or some simple organism whose basic instinct is only to grovel for survival. Self is riddled with memories, emotions, feelings, and most importantly, the ability to plan (abstractly) for the future.

Goodness is mentioned (above) in this note for a reason (since the aforementioned professor has an interest in ethics with a focus on the philosophy of the middle ages – i.e., religious “philosophy”). Our ability to be good, kind, and benevolent is not divinely inspired. Just a little reading in evolutionary biology or evolutionary psychology would reveal – as clear as day – that there is a biological notion of self: we could not survive as human individuals in human groups if we had no (human) sense of self. Likewise, for anyone to study morality and ethics and confine oneself to the middle ages (for all of its wisdom) overlooks the advances of the intervening six hundred years – and quite a bit has happened since then, from David Hume and Adam Smith, to Charles Darwin and Antonio Damasio. That is, while we tend to be self-centered creatures, we are able to act kindly toward others for practical reasons that quite often have nothing to do with teleological or divine reasons (e.g., Robert Trivers).

On a related note (since medieval philosophy has been mentioned), two philosophers were recently overheard discussing whether or not souls could have a conversation. While one need not agree with how Daniel Dennett argues that there is no special ingredient (i.e., a soul) in being human, at the same time, to imagine that a soul is somehow self-embodied to the point that it can recognize, think, and converse with another soul ignores completely any findings in science. So, on the one hand, we have someone denying the existence of self (which is more than quantifiable), and, on the other hand, we have others assuming the existence of soul (which is not quantifiable). If there is a special ingredient in being human, most likely it is individually based and has something to do with gene combinations and variations in brain chemicals (i.e., self). Psychologist Jerome Kagan (building off ideas about personality types first advanced by Carl G. Jung) has spent nearly his entire career researching and writing about individualized temperament, concluding that each person is different and special in this sense alone.

In terms of the human species, clearly any special ingredient would include, collectively, certain brain chemicals and the more developed brain functions and parts. Coming back to what initiated this posting, there are parts of the human brain that enable us to conceive of (and to construct, individually) a sense of self. We are creatures that live well beyond any mere sensation of self-awareness – we are aware that we can be aware, and we organize (individually) memories, feelings, and our capacity to plan and direct attention in order to create a self. While not all aspects of the self are (yet) scientifically explainable, no thinking, contempoary person should deny that most of who we are is biologically based. Some naturalistic philosophers before Darwin (e.g., Schopenhauer) argued for uniqueness of character, and now psychologists such as Kagan (and neuroscientists such as Michael Gazzaniga) are proving what has been common knowledge: each of us is an individual self, with different degrees of consciousness and caring. While there is a biological basis for us to be good (since it helps us survive in a group), not everyone is good in quite the same way. Environmental factors have the potential to aid in shaping us, but we comprehend (and create) self from the essential uniqueness of our individual temperament susceptible to such shaping (or not).

Returning to our main point: what are we teaching our college students – many of whom are serious and eager scholars – if we neglect evolutionary biology that clearly complements philosophical ideas? One cannot be only a biological or a (medieval) philosophical thinker: findings in science elucidate many of the core ideas in philosophy and vice versa. The death of the humanities (as Joseph Carroll has so eloquently explained in his books) derives from these very scenarios that create sealed, solipsistic towers of words simply referring to other words (or using words to ignore physical reality) without any reference to the findings of evolution. Let us now begin a conversation where evolutionary science and philosophy are equally engaged.

- Gregory F. Tague

Biology and Creativity

2012-02-05T10:16:00.000-08:00

The “Beyond-Selfness” and Neurobiological Substrates of Poetry

The venerable journal Poetry is commemorating its one hundredth year in publication this year, and part of the celebration is a fascinating series of contributions by poets in the “Comments” section of the journal each month. The February, 2012, issue includes a section by poets describing and reflecting on their experience in the process of writing, with a particular focus on the relationship between poetry, spirituality, and prayer. This is certainly not unusual or novel territory, but I was struck by the coherence of the comments by many poets around certain themes. For example, the poet Carolyn Forché states that “the more you’re there writing [poetry], the more you realize you are not writing it . . . This is an experience close to revelation, to the realm of prophetic language” (Poetry, February 2012, p. 462). Similarly, Kazim Ali avers (with regard to writing poetry about spirituality and religion): “If you talk all the time about something, you stop knowing anything about it” (Ibid., p. 436). Further, Jean Valentine makes the connection between poetry, meditative prayer, and dreaming, regarding all of them as healing processes, and “all being out of our hands” (Ibid., p. 438). She maintains further that “the poetry I like best is mostly silence . . . that it seems to have come out of silence, to exist in the midst of silence, and to go toward silence” (Ibid., p. 439). Finally, Eleanor Wilner proposes that “the poet must relinquish a certain kind of control, and attain a kind of self-forgetfulness” (again relating the writing of poetry to the process of prayer) and declares that “the poem is never just about experience, it is an experience” (Ibid., p. 448).

What are all these poets talking about? What kind and quality of experience are they referring to? Why the attribution of the process of writing poetry to realms of cognition that are beyond personal control, beyond self, and more proximal to some form of altered state of consciousness? Actually, I believe that the answer to these questions is fairly simple, in a way: The creative process of poetry – and very likely other fields of creative and artistic endeavor – seems to call upon, or even to require, a shift in consciousness, a move toward “letting go,” a yielding to some aspect of mind that feels “beyond self” or closer to some sense of otherness or greaterness (which some refer to as god).

In a previous post on this site, Jason Wirtz suggests the usefulness of the concepts of plasticity and automaticity, which derive from cognitive theory, in explicating what he refers to as the “Muse phenomenon.” He proposes that this phenomenon, in which “writers feel that they are channeling a source outside of themselves,” can be understood in terms of the combination of plasticity (the brain’s ability to adapt to new information by developing novel neural connections) and automaticity (the tendency of practiced skills to become “procedural,” or not requiring conscious awareness to function). Certainly, this is an interesting point of view, and worthy of further investigation, although I do not believe it goes far enough in addressing the experience described by the poets quoted above. Their experience is beyond just that of “channeling,” and seems to include a strong sense of being beyond themselves, outside themselves, or lacking a relationship to a personal “self” at all when they are in the process of poetic creation.

To my mind, the relevant and fascinating question here, however, is how this state of consciousness or being – and its compelling nature in the creative process – came to develop in the human species, and what evolutionary function it has served (and perhaps still does). We as a species have known about this cognitive shift for millennia, as Wirtz noted in reference to the ancient Greek conceptualization of the Muse, but we have little to say about why it exists. We tend to think of it in terms of a religious perspective, and there is a risk, then, in some circles, that it will be “thrown out with the bathwater”; that is, that we will regard this highly valued and central experience as a vestigial or ancillary epiphenomenon to our development as a species.

To be sure, there has been much written about the creative process, and its nature and quality have been much examined and articulated – from literary, philosophical, and religious perspectives, among others – but its neurobiological and presumed evolutionary bases are much more difficult to access or delineate. Some exciting recent research has been done in this regard using functional MRI (fMRI), with some progress in delineating the areas of the brain that “light up” or shut down under conditions of creative flow. For example, Limb and Braun, in a study of musicians, found that the dorsolateral and lateral orbital areas of the prefrontal cortex are relatively more deactivated during jazz improvisation, while the medial prefrontal cortex is more active. The former areas are associated with self-monitoring, conscious volitional control, and effortful problem-solving (colloquially the seat of the “ego”), while the latter is more associated with stimulus-independent, internally-motivated behavior. In other words, the brain of a musician in improvisation suggests a diminishing of a sense of “self,” and an increase in the allowance of “unfiltered, unconscious, or random thoughts . . . to emerge” (Limb & Braun, p. 4). The authors of this study also note that this pattern of deactivation and activation appears in hypnosis, meditation, day-dreaming, and REM (i.e., dream) sleep.

These are fascinating findings, and certainly with parallels to the (improvisational) process of writing poetry. They are also confirmed phenomenologically in the descriptions of the poetic process quoted above. In fact, in a sense, these findings should not be surprising to those of us who participate in creative endeavors, nor to those who study the process of creative inspiration. Moreover, most can likely hypothesize regarding the evolutionary benefits of the shift in consciousness that apparently accompanies – or is even requisite for – the creative process. However, the core question remains unanswered, perhaps because in an age in which such “epiphenomena” of neurally-based brain function make uncomfortable bed-fellows with “hard science.” To date, then, a full understanding of the meaning of this creative consciousness in the development of the mind, the evolution of our species, is left as just that: a compelling question in need of an answer if all of our experience as humans is to be understood in relation to its functional and adaptive neurobiological substrates.

- James K. Zimmerman

Works Cited

Limb, Charles J. and Allen R. Braun (2008). “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation.” PLos ONE 3(2): e1679.

Poetry (Feb., 2012). Vol. CXCIX(5). Chicago, IL: The Poetry Foundation.

On the Nature of Being Human

2012-02-04T06:50:00.000-08:00

This is the PREFACE to the just-published literary anthology ,

We are primarily interested in stories that deal with human character. Who are we as a species and as individuals? What is our human nature? While we have constructed, over thousands of years, a vast cathedral of scintillating, rational humanity, we can be primal and shadowy with visceral emotions. We can profoundly love and superficially hate. Though we are by nature social creatures, we can commit acts of aggression (either against ourselves or others). And yet, quite often, we seek through rituals a natural peace with ourselves in unison with our family or the larger environment.

What is our evolved human essence? What makes us tick as a species? At one point in history, as many as ten different hominid species roamed the planet, but only we endured. There is even speculation that seventy thousand years ago only a few thousand of our species were alive. Why do we struggle on, survive, build cathedrals (and yet hurt each other)? Why do we have rituals, and why do we create and sometimes destroy relationships? What is (in the phrase of one of our contributors) the human factor? What does it mean to be (simultaneously) a deeply meditative and a yet a spontaneously feeling human being?

The fact(or) of being human means recognizing that there is in each of us a call of the wild, however subtle. There is something elemental in us that lingers. Who hears the ancestral call? Who answers the call? What is the response of any individual to the force of being human? For most of our human history, we have not lived in cities but have developed from hunters and gatherers (roaming in small clusters) into engineers of sophisticated national languages and intricate cultures. How much of the old nature lingers in us still? Apparently quite a lot.

We are in a natural world from which we emerged; we are part of a large universe of nature; and we wrestle with aspects of our own human nature. Our history is such that we are social creatures who have evolved very complex emotions not only of sympathy and compassion, but also of jealousy and hatred. So the call of the wild does not mean running off into the woods and hunting fish with one’s teeth; it means acknowledging our deeper connections to the earth beyond concrete buildings, and more importantly, our essential connection to each other.

There are aspects of our psyche (feelings and instincts) and of our physical structure (teeth and fingernails) with which we must reckon. While we have evolved superstructures of civilization, there are darker moments in our collective and individual histories, mostly (as this volume investigates) on a personal or inter-personal level. While familial creatures who create loving bonds, we are also capable of inflicting harm.

For this book we received quite a corpus of submissions – well over one thousand pages. We have tried to cull from that mass just enough material to make our literary point, but keep in mind that the stories between these covers consist of many different styles and voices. Much of the writing is poetic, magical, contemplative, and even humorous. We are sure that after having read this small book, you too will be captivated by the question, Who are we, individually and collectively?

- Gregory F. Tague and Fredericka A. Jacks

The Biology of Inspiration

2012-01-31T06:01:00.000-08:00

Reclaiming the Muse: Biological Processes Underlying the Muse Phenomenon

Oh for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention.

~William Shakespeare

A few weeks ago I attended the premiere of a film titled Margin Call. After the showing the audience was privy to a Q&A with writer and director, J.C. Chandor. Chandor commented that it took him several months of writing dialogue for the characters to become recognizable in his mind, several months in order for the characters to take shape and begin to have voices of their own. This took me back several years—twelve years, to be exact—to a Q&A with writer Charles Baxter who had recently published the novel Feast of Love (2000). Baxter shared an anecdote in which he began hearing the characters from his novel speak to him while driving on the freeway, leading him to pull over immediately and write down what they were saying.

The Muse phenomenon is an elusive strategy of invocation wherein writers feel that they are channeling a source outside of themselves, that they are acting as a privileged medium. One of the first to mention the Muse phenomenon is Plato, who relates in the Ion:

“The Muse first of all inspires men herself; and from these inspired persons a chain of other persons is suspended, who take the inspiration. For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. […] For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.”

For Plato, the Muse phenomenon is a physical act of inspiration in which the poet is literally possessed by the Muse. It’s fascinating to me to mark the similarities and differences between this classical view of the Muse and more contemporary views of the Muse as we see in the examples of J.C. Chandor and Charles Baxter. For example, I’m sure that Chandor and Baxter do not think of an actual Muse goddess inhabiting their spirits, and I’m even more certain they have not built any altars to the Muse, yet their experiences are certainly characteristic of channeling voices that exist independent and autonomous to their own thoughts and minds.

I’ve been fascinated with the way writers invent, and for over a decade now and in the past few years I’ve taken this fascination more seriously by interviewing successful writers about their processes of invention. Most recently, this research led me into the fields of evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, and neuroscience as I continue to act as reconnoiter of insights into the invention process of writers, all the while willfully and necessarily crossing artificial yet artfully crafted and well-guarded disciplinary boundaries. In this essay I want to look more closely at the Muse phenomenon to unpack and understand its contours more completely by viewing some of the biological processes at work—in particular, how two coordinated biological processes, plasticity and automaticity, account for the Muse phenomenon as related by writers and other artists. My aim is to enrich our understanding of this phenomenon which has been an invention strategy of writers since the invention of writing.

Plasticity references the brain’s epigenetic ability to alter its own architecture in response to the cognitive demands and choices made in response to one’s environment—in other words, our brains are continuously changing and adapting throughout our lifetimes in response to experiences so that, for example, your brain’s architecture will be slightly altered as a result of reading this essay. Plasticity is evidence that the brain has created new connections—specifically, an increased number of connections among axons and dendrites—in order to operate at a higher rung on the cognitive ladder.

A neuroscientific study that illustrates plasticity most effectively is a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI ) study of London taxi drivers (Maguire, et al.). This study, conducted on 16 London taxi drivers with experience ranging from 1.5 to 42 years, demonstrated that a part of the hippocampus responsible for spatial awareness was larger in those taxi drivers with more experience. In sum, those drivers with the greatest experience navigating the London roadways actually grew larger brains in the location related to the spatial awareness. Another study illustrating such plasticity of the brain was conducted on dancers. This electroencephalography (EEG) study showed that professional dancers had greater alpha synchronization than those of novice dancers, indicating that their brains actually patterned thought differently as a direct result of dancing experience (Fink, et al.). Similar studies have been conducted on stringed musicians (Kandel, 217) and jazz musicians (Limb).

The second concept I want to relate—automaticity—is a type of procedural knowledge that we use in order to gain mastery over a skill and push ourselves beyond what we are already capable. A good example of this is playing the piano or typing wherein key location has been internalized, has become automatic, to the extent that one no longer needs to search for the keys in order to play a melody or type out a paragraph. In my interview with notable scholar Mike Rose he spoke to this process of automaticity:

“If you think about any learned skill, whether it’s being a defensive tackle on a football team or a dancer or a race car driver or a surgeon or a skilled plumber, at the beginning stages all of this stuff is so very conscious and filled with concentration and trying to master these various moves and as you become more and more expert it becomes more and more routine and more and more just a part of the way you function so that your cognitive space, if you will, is freed up to do other things.”

In my estimation, automaticity is evidence of plasticity. As a learned skill becomes automatic, such automaticity is evidence that the architecture of the brain has transformed to aid the completion of the chosen skill.

What do plasticity and automaticity have to do with the Muse phenomenon? I believe plasticity and automaticity are primary biological processes at work behind the Muse phenomenon and help to explain why writers, and various other artists, feel as though they are channeling something external to themselves. With practice and experience the architecture of the brain adapts to function at a higher level of cognition, internalizing procedural structures so that we may reach higher ground. Writers working with character development, as the opening examples of J.C. Chandor and Charles Baxter illustrate, develop mental representations of these characters to the extent that their brains have actually reached a point where these mental representations can begin to feel as though they have taken on a life of their own. In fact, I would argue that their brains—via the biological processes of plasticity and automaticity—have created independent, autonomous characters in the form of representations that are complete enough to operate and exist within their own framework of drives and desires. An illustration of this would be the way archetypes function within the larger culture. Archetypes are characters who have been developed to such an extent in a given culture that they are easily represented as having their own drives and desires. If I ask you to tell me what the wicked stepmother, prodigal son, or vampire might do in a given situation you would have a pretty good idea as to how to respond.

I believe it is to our great advantage to take the Muse phenomenon from its outdated, alchemical moorings and reinvigorate its heuristic usefulness for contemporary writers and artists. The way to do this is to further our understanding of the Muse phenomenon via an interdisciplinary approach marshalling knowledge and evidence from both the humanities and sciences. Plasticity and automaticity are two examples of biological processes among many potentials that cut across these disciplinary boundaries to help explain and explore the Muse phenomenon.

- Jason Wirtz

Works Cited

Fink, Andreas, Barbara Graif, Aljoscha C. Neubauer. “Brain Correlates Underlying Creative Thinking: EEG Alpha Activity in Professional Vs. Novice Dancers.” Neuroimage, 46, pgs. 854-862. 2009. Print.

Kandel, Eric R. In Search of Memory, The Emergence of a New Scientific Mind. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company. 2006. Print.

Limb, Charles J. and Allen R. Braun. “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation.” PLos ONE 3(2): e1679. 2008. Print.

Maguire, Eleanor A., Davig G. Gadian, Ingrid S. Johnsrude, Catriona D. Good, John Ashburner, Richard S. J. Frackowiak, and Christopher D. Frith. “Navigation-Related Structural Change in the Hippocampi of Taxi Drivers.” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 97, No. 8. 2000. Print.

Plato. Ion. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/ion.html

Rose, Mike. Personal interview. 14 February 2010.

Do you EvoS?

2012-01-29T10:46:00.000-08:00

Submissions to the EvoS Journal
Call for Papers

EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium is preparing a special issue on teaching evolutionary theory in the higher education classroom. We especially welcome pedagogical pieces from disciplines not traditionally associated with evolution, such as the humanities, social sciences, and the arts. The online medium of this peer-reviewed journal allows us to post graphics, audio, and video files along with traditional text articles. We are seeking submissions in one of the following formats (particularly curriculum articles):

Curriculum Articles, that include teaching materials for implementing innovative teaching ideas related to evolutionary studies in your own classroom.
Research Reports, that report original research from the classroom, using experimental or non-experimental methods.
Theoretical/Review Contributions, that provide insights into issues tied to evolutionary studies in higher education.

Please submit ideas for articles to Rosemarie Sokol Chang (evostudies@gmail.com). This issue is scheduled for a 2012 publication date, therefore submissions must be received by May 31, 2012 for consideration.

Journal Website: http://evostudies.org/evos-journal/about-the-journal/

Darwin & Davenport - Guest Post

2012-01-26T09:48:00.000-08:00

Guy Davenport on Darwin, Agassiz, Faith and Metamorphosis.

For the late Guy Davenport—author, essayist, one of the translator-editors of The Sayings of Jesus/The Logia of Yeshua[1]—Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution “was born in some sense prematurely.” By this he means that geology had not yet “given Darwin the time needed,”[2] nor had Mendel’s work yet been rediscovered. This was only one of a number of comments he made about Darwin’s work, some of which may be of interest to readers here.

In one of Davenport’s early stories “The Dawn in Erewhon” a young Dutch philosopher, Adriaan van Hovendaal, comments that “Man has a history rather than a nature. . . . He has to be taught. Otherwise his nature is the same as an animal’s.”[3] This is one of the reasons Davenport doesn’t embrace received Darwinism; it has nothing to say to what is most important, most human, about man, that which sets him above simpler animals.

Writing of the immediate post-World War I years, when artists began embracing the archaic, Davenports points out that,

We had a new vision that death and life were a complementary pattern. Darwin and Wallace had demonstrated this, but in ways that were more disturbing than enlightening, and Darwin’s vision seemed destitute of a moral life.[4]

Elsewhere, Davenport contrasted Darwin to the 19^th century Swiss-American naturalist Louis Agassiz, a contemporary of Darwin and Thoreau—he and Thoreau discussed the mating habits of turtles at Emerson’s dinner table. But when Agassiz read The Origin of Species not long after it appeared he didn’t agree with Darwin’s theories. In his essay “Louis Agassiz,” Davenport writes,

Hindsight instructs us to wonder why Agassiz could not see the truth of Evolution. But hindsight also reminds us that Agassiz consistently located intelligence in or behind nature . . . rather than live with the miserable confusions of nineteenth-century mechanism. Darwin’s superimposition of Progress upon the process of Evolution taxes pure empiricism more than Agassiz’s finding an intelligent plan or even a divinity in nature. If Darwin’s mechanism of natural selection has the merit of doing away with a single act of creation, it nevertheless leads to the embarrassment of introducing both purpose in nature and cognition in the evolutionist as dei ex machina.[5]

Agassiz felt that Creation had come about by way of the Divine Intellect, which didn’t mean that he denied change, but that he sought to find “premeditation prior to the act of creation. . . .” “The more we look into his work,” Davenport writes, “the more we realize that, in a sense, he did see the truth of Evolution.”

[Agassiz] had Darwin’s facts before him and saw with different eyes the pattern they made. . . . . For Agassiz, evolution meant the growth of the embryo in the egg. . . . This was the classic sense of the word until the Darwinians applied it to the entire organic world. Where [Darwinian] science now sees a linear development in time, Agassiz saw a lateral spread of design, somehow modified over long undulations of the eons.[6]

That is, Agassiz’s interest in form lay along a different axis. So, in the end, for Davenport, Agassiz is only “a poet,” with a mind of intense brightness, while Darwin is the distiller of an epoch-altering theory.

Does all of the above indicate that Davenport preferred Agassiz to Darwin? No, because Agassiz looked for a detached Divine Intelligence, was unwilling to let Nature be responsible for itself. Davenport for his part looked for the actions of Nature’s own intelligence. In this, Darwin was much closer to Davenport, both of them interested in form, neither conventionally religious. Davenport acknowledges his respect for Darwin’s achievement by naming him, with Ovid and Picasso, one of his “Three Students of Metamorphosis.” Agassiz and Darwin are, in Davenport’s mind, descendents of Ovid, “and fairly soon we may find both [Agassiz and Darwin] on the shelf with Ovid, splendors of imagination,”[7] but Davenport doesn’t place Agassiz among the exceptional three, the most deserving students.

Ovid studied men turning into animals; Darwin animals into men. Between these two brilliantly imaginative perceptions the subject of metamorphosis stands as one of the most lyric of natural facts.[8]

Darwin, Davenport observed approvingly, placed the forms of nature “in a time-order, and invited scientists to find the serpent halfway in metamorphosis toward being a pterodactyl, the pterodactyl becoming bird. . . . The Origin of Species was a misnomer. Darwin’s Metamorphosis would have been better. . . .”[9]

- W. C. Bamberger

[1] The Sayings of Jesus/The Logia of Yeshua, Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia (Washington, D. C.: Counterpoint, 1996).

[2] Guy Davenport. The Hunter Gracchus and Other Papers on Literature & Art (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1996), 168.

[3] ____. In Tatlin! (N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974), 149.

[4] ____. The Geography of the Imagination (San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 27.

[5] Ibid., 241-243.

[6] Ibid., 243.

[7] Ibid., 246.

[8] Ibid., 245.

[9] Ibid., 245-246.

Arts & Sciences

2012-01-14T06:31:00.000-08:00

The University of Missouri-St. Louis will host the Consilience Conference:

Evolution in Biology
The Human Sciences
The Humanities

Keynote Speaker, E.O. Wilson

April 26-28, 2012. Conference Materials HERE

Latest ASEBL

2012-01-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

January 2012 ASEBL Journal available at the St. Francis College website, here. Read in PDF or ISSUU format.

•This Issue Features Articles on Women

in England and India•

▬ ▬

† Rachel Tudor on “The Ethics and Ethos of Eighteenth-Century British Literature,” page 2.

† Jemma Hinkly on “Early Feminism in Eighteenth Century British Literature,” page 8.

† Archana Parashar on “A Harmonious blend of Tradition and Modernity in Rama Mehta’s Inside the Haveli,” page 13.

▬

More on God & Science - Guest Post

2012-01-03T13:11:00.000-08:00

According to The New York Times article introducing Alvin Plantinga’s new book [Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism], Plantinga states that belief in God is a basic belief that does not need to be proven, just as the existence of God cannot be disproven. He points out that many naturalists marshal science to support their stance as atheists, but it is the atheists who have misinterpreted Darwin in assuming that his theory of evolution by natural selection excludes the existence of intelligent design.

Plantinga’s opponents emphasize that natural selection is a random, unguided process. However, this random process, whether guided or not, has a purpose: the evolution of the individual species. Natural selection is a purpose-driven system, which begs the question: is there a reason behind the purpose? The article quotes Plantinga as saying “I think there is such a thing as ‘sensus divinitatis’ and in some people it doesn’t work properly.” This innate sense of the divine—is it real or is it a vestige of the earlier evolutionary needs of our ancestors, a need which has outlived its purpose? One only has to look at the suggestions of ritualism found at Neanderthal burial sites dating some 60,000 to 80,000 years ago to see that the sense of the divine has been at work in our hominid history since earliest times. As rational beings, we have a need to make sense of the world, to give it order. This consciousness of the divine, and the spiritual and religious traditions that spring from it, provides us with a means of doing so, and also gives us a code of ethics and morality by which to live in society (although, interestingly, the definitions of “right” and “wrong” differ from culture to culture.) Similar to the ways in which our bodies have evolved and adapted to changing environmental conditions, is the sense of the divine something which has evolved within us as a necessary survival mechanism to help us cope in a complex social world? If not, if instead this sense is an evolutionary vestige, like the human appendix and coccyx, why then does the need for belief in the spiritual world remain so strong in cultures across the globe, surviving with such tenacity that wars are fought over these beliefs? Is it simply a matter of cultural inheritance, the passage of traditions down through generations dating back to our early hominid ancestors, or is it indeed an inherent part of our nature, planted into us while we’re still in the womb?

And what about Darwin himself? After years of studying the natural world, was the man who consolidated the theory of evolution an atheist? In an 1879 correspondence, Darwin writes, “It seems to me absurd to doubt that a man may be an ardent Theist & an evolutionist. . . . I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God.— I think that generally . . . an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.” (Letter to John Fordyce, May 7, 1879. Source: Darwin Correspondence Project Cambridge University, UK)

So it would seem that Darwin would side more with the views of Plantinga than with Plantinga’s opponents. Regardless, his theories continue to generate discussion about questions that may never be answered, but which provide a forum for another human trait—the penchant for theoretical debate.

- Lisa Sita

Guns & Genes

2011-12-28T06:43:00.000-08:00

The New York Times published an op-ed piece by Seamus McGraw, “Hunting Deer with my Flintlock” (26 December 2011, page A27), and the article not only conjures some very old memories, but invites comment from an evolutionary perspective. The short narrative is engaging, mostly since I am now editing our fourth literary anthology entitled: Being Human: Call of the Wild. McGraw’s piece (though not a short story) hits the themes of the book: the contradictory sides of humanity – both the cruel and the caring.

The article describes the hunter’s fascination with the flintlock, and the responsibility (his word) of pruning out the destructive deer population near Bushkill, Pennsylvania. (As an undergraduate, I read Harry Caudill, so I am not insensitive to a region’s delicate ecological balance.) Nevertheless, most intriguing is how the narrator expresses his disdain for killing – twice he says, “I hate to kill” – and yet his stated intention is to be, rather, responsible (to his community and to the increasing deer population).

The article is a brilliant exposition of, first, our deeply-ingrained hunter/gatherer mental archetypes, and, second, our more highly-developed moral sense. At times, these two poles, ever in conflict, can collide, and the killer instinct can become paramount. Evolutionary psychologists tell us that most of our long human history was spent as hunters and gatherers, so those mental operations and mechanisms are still quite predominant in us. For a much shorter period of time we were agriculturalists (and have spent only a fraction of our history in towns and villages). We are hunters at heart.

The article is primal humankind, the hunter/gatherer with his elemental genes responding to his wild, forest environment. The narrator reminds us, through his own story, what it means to be part of a tribe. Though he emphasizes his solitude in hunting, he makes clear that he is part of two special groups: one that hunts and one that hunts with a primitive weapon. This is classic male humankind, when specific brain chemicals become excited at the risk of hunting and activated by a gratified feeling of the kill. The article is a wonderful testament to our human history, how in spite of our humane development and progress, our still-active, ancient psychic life can be prompted unconsciously. At the same time, the narrator expresses the advanced, conscious human brain, one that contemplates complex moral decisions and exhibits conscience.

So why tell this story? On the one hand it validates the aggressive, violent side of being human; and on the other hand, there is the side which over the course of human evolution has developed mechanisms to control such aggression. Other, less-developed primates also express social and empathic emotions (and are not always completely aggressive).

On a personal note, I once attended a wedding in Eastern Pennsylvania during hunting season and was surprised to see men walking down the streets casually carrying rifles. Later that day, at the wedding reception, the bride’s brother clinically told me how he took one of his dogs (that had somehow annoyed him) in the backyard and shot it in the head. I also recall reading in The Atlantic Monthly, about forty years ago (when I was a teenager), a story very similar to McGraw’s. The narrator wrote about his hunt, and then proceeded to explain how, in spite of his apparent brutality, he could go home, listen to Beethoven, have a French wine, and read Henry James. (I might have those facts wrong, but that was the gist of it.)

There is no gene to control appetite, and we still have canine teeth for some purpose; so perhaps (for many of us) the desire for fresh kill is uncontrollable. The question is: Who satisfies that primal desire and who resists?

- Gregory F. Tague

God & Science

2011-12-14T14:25:00.000-08:00

In an article in The New York Times (Wednesday, 14 December 2011, Arts section, page one), “A Philosopher’s Book Sticks Up for God,” philosopher Alvin Plantinga is quoted as saying, “’It seems to me that many naturalists, people who are super-atheists, try to co-opt science and say it supports naturalism . . .’” More likely, scientists (or philosophers who do not limit their study to proving the existence of God) have started out with religion (apathetic, indifferent, or otherwise) and then, through study and research, have altered their beliefs (in accordance with their findings). Scientists are not born as atheists who then spend their career-oriented energies in disproving the existence of God. Scientists steer clear of abstractions and focus on empirical matters. One side (of this imaginary debate) need not be privileged over the other. When philosophers and scientists publicize such (imagined) distinctions, meaningful dialogue breaks down into accusations and turf wars. The need to defend one’s turf is a natural part of our ancestral, hominid history.

The article strongly hints at the age-old distinction between what is rational and what is not. Current brain science demonstrates that to make such a distinction is erroneous: while we are capable of reason, there are many areas of the brain firing simultaneously, many areas of which are primal and emotive and contribute, ultimately (or not), to a reasoned response. In fact, the rational parts of our brain (and to say “parts” is something of a misnomer) are dependent upon the so-called irrational parts. Emotions power reason. (Reason is incapable of self-activation). Simply, this is because part of our brain is an old structure (animalistic) that fires up first. So when the Times reporter says that the philosopher offers a “densely reasoned argument against . . .” – there is anger by using a part of the brain to launch an attack that only, in the (polished) end product, appears (wholly) reasoned. (Certainly Prof. Plantinga’s initial responses to Dawkins and Dennett were not reasonable but emotional: we do not reason back into emotion.) We need our highly-charged emotions in order to be rational. We are not, first, rational; we are, first, emotional, and subsequently capable of being rational. Rationality is a slow, deliberative process dependent upon emotion (an energized, quick response).

The article goes on to say how Theism has a God of order, a universe of order, and the creation of rational beings such as us. More likely, those products of nature that were not ordered did not survive; so what we see as order is really what has endured because it works in the natural order of things. This is not merely survival of the fittest (originally Herbert Spencer’s phrase), which means (as literary Darwinist Joseph Carroll has pointed out), survivors survive. Rather, while we can marvel at the beauty of the natural world, the facts prove that our wonder (an emotion) sees only the end result of millions of years of process and change. We behold the polished stone, not the rough cut.

At one time, there were as many as ten hominid species along with our ancestors roaming the earth. What happened to them but demise, so our survival exemplifies order but does not eliminate the fact that less ordered species lived with us side-by-side. Darwin takes pains addressing this notion of an orderly universe in The Origin of Species, to explain (reasonably) how the imperfection of the geologic record has not left us enough information to develop definitive answers about order (who and what came from where and why they ended up there). Darwin summons and marshals many other scientists (who preceded him) with support to make his points; he does not wave a magic wand or point to a hazy cloud – he rests his case on what appeals to the rational mind, evidence.

How could we be rational creatures when brain science of the past generation has demonstrated that emotions – what our hominid ancestors relied upon almost exclusively – play an important role in reasoning? The article quotes Prof. Plantinga as saying, “’You really can’t sensibly claim theistic belief is irrational without showing it isn’t true . . .” Evolutionary psychologists would agree and say that we need (since it is built into our human mind) to have (emotional) belief in something greater (to help us rationally explain the universe) – so theistic belief is true to both (which are really one) the emotional and rational aspects of being human. Importantly, many truths need not be rational – love, for example. But love is true (to life), nevertheless.

The article notes that Prof. Plantinga is a Calvinist. There were key preachers in England in the seventeenth century (Calvinists such as Benjamin Whichcote and Ralph Cudworth) who questioned what they had been taught, and it was people such as these who helped nourish the burgeoning scientific (and empirical) thinking and the philosophical revolution (away from religious abstraction) that began with Shaftesbury and Hutcheson and led up to Hume. Are we to take a step back into the (pre-Newtonian) thinking of the seventeenth century? Did not Newton rationally explain the order of the universe? As the Times articles says: “. . . even philosophers who reject . . . theism say . . . arguments for the basic rationality of belief . . .” are important. The brain is one massive unit of billions of neurons and trillions of synapses, and there is nothing that is wholly rational – everything interacts together simultaneously in a very small space. One might believe belief is rational, but essentially it is emotional. One can make rational explanations for many emotions – love, for instance.

The larger picture is how do philosophy and science cooperate? Many philosophers and scientists have worked together (Maxwell Bennett and Peter Hacker), and many scientists (such as E.O. Wilson who was raised on the Bible) have asked for a consilience (recalling the word of the nineteenth-century philosopher of science William Whewell). Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume, and Adam Smith (from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries) worked out elaborate delineations of human sympathy, and those findings have been borne out by research (in empirical studies, such as done by Marc Hauser and Frans de Waal). Before Darwin (and hence before an empirical gene science) Schopenhauer (a strong reader of Hume) built his entire moral philosophy on compassion. Emotions rule us, whether we like it or not. (Even Aristotle, as Martha Nussbaum has taken pains to point out, discusses the power of human emotion.)

In fact, recent thinking (Leda Cosmides and John Tooby come to mind) suggests (picking up from Darwin), that rationality is an emotion, and emotions are part of our (naturally selected) evolution. We need to be rational as much as we need other emotions, so it is no wonder we pride our human reason. We can be reasonable about emotions, but can we be emotional about reason? At any rate, all of these past thinkers, clearly, were not confined to one discipline, or to one corner of any discipline, but were concerned with engaging conversations among disciplines. What has happened to that great conversation (to employ the metaphor of Mortimer Adler)?

We have an animal nature (believe it or not), but such a nature does not hinder us: it keeps us going, physically, intellectually, and morally. Perhaps with some irony on the part of the Times reporter, the article ends by quoting Prof. Plantinga as saying, “’To call a philosopher irrational, those are fighting words . . .’” But is not fighting irrational – an emotional (and much needed), programmed response?

[Disclaimer: this post was written only in response to a NY Times article; the writer of the post has not read any books by Prof. Alvin Plantinga and is, simply, addressing the issues and concerns raised in the article.]

- Gregory F. Tague

2011-12-03T09:30:00.000-08:00

ASEBL Journal Announces a SPECIAL ISSUE to

COMMEMORATE The 200th BIRTH ANNIVERSARY [2012] OF CHARLES DICKENS

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“George Orwell Charges Charles Dickens with Plagiarism:

Judge Not, That Ye Be Not Judged”

George Steven Swan, S.J.D.

Associate Professor, NC A&T State University, Greensboro, N.C.

What follows is the abstract by Dr. Swan. Read the full article (both erudite and entertaining) here, in either PDF or ISSUU format.

George Orwell charged plagiarism (unconscious or otherwise) against Charles Dickens. Orwell identified a story recited by Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers character Sam Weller, and alleged that its source was an ancient Greek author. Orwell reconstructs from his schooldays-memory this unnamed Greek’s prior version. These two items do share a resemblance. But Orwell’s tale derived from a Greek composition text by Arthur Sidgwick. The Sidgwick work having been published following the death of Dickens, Dickens is exonerated of the Orwell accusation. Sidgwick synopsized Weller’s story for students of Greek to translate. Orwell’s misindictment recalls a parallel to Sidgwick’s exploitation of Dickens’s Weller. For this text, presumably from Orwell’s own schooldays, included a summarization of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. Not later than 1900, Twain knew himself to be a source exploited by Sidgwick. Yet Twain never cried plagiarism.

Ironically, Orwell himself was to implant into Nineteen Eighty-Four both a story-scenario and multiple details found in a novel by Roger Peyrefitte, Les Amitiés Particuliéres. Literate in French, Orwell definitely drew upon other French material in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Peyrefitte’s novel had been published in 1943 and 1945. Peyrefitte’s book was reviewed in Horizon during July 1946 by Orwell’s onetime-mistress and future-wife, Sonia Brownell. Editorially assisted by Sonia was Horizon’s lifelong friend Cyril Connolly. Horizon, Brownell and Connolly in July 1946 all tend to associate Orwell with Peyrefitte’s book. Orwell began Nineteen Eighty-Four around August 1946.

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