Karen, there were a couple other interesting and somewhat related articles in the Sunday paper. First, there was
Are You in Anthropodenial? . a review of 'The Ape and the Sushi Master' by Frans de Waal, nytimes.com
De Waal shows how behavior among monkeys and apes depends
heavily on social learning. He cites, for example, the research of a
colleague who studied the responses of young monkeys when they were
shown live snakes for the first time. These youngsters, raised in captivity,
remained utterly unafraid of snakes -- until, that is, they were allowed to
observe their parents, all born in the wild, reacting with fear. Ever after,
the young monkeys expressed the fear they'd learned, not from any
experience of their own but by emulating their elders.
In another study de Waal himself conducted, rhesus monkeys, which are
characteristically combative, were placed with stump-tailed monkeys, a
far more conciliatory species. The startling result was that the rhesus
monkeys ''developed peacemaking skills on a par with those of their
more tolerant counterparts.'' The rhesus monkeys, even after being
segregated later, remained less quarrelsome than before their exposure to
more peaceable cousins. So much for the unalloyed influence of physical
prowess. . . .
What's particularly bracing about this book is that this insistence on
''observables'' hasn't led de Waal to think small. His narrative, in the end,
is a remarkable journey of discovery to the heart of a profound question:
what can we learn about the evolution of our own cultures by studying
the behavior of our primate cousins? He broaches the possibility that
generous ''helping responses,'' observed among animals reliant on
close-knit relationships, have evolved into something more refined --
authentically unselfish behavior. If he's right, this book is a step toward
outlining the evolution of our own moral codes.
Oh no. Everybody knows our "moral code" came from God, the idea that it started with the apes like everything else has to be a heresy of some sort. More prominently placed was this front page article:
Evolutionists Battle New Theory on Creation nytimes.com
That particular theory being one that has been much flogged around here lately. This article places it in the rather obvious "creation science" context it belongs in.
This time, though, the evolutionists find themselves arrayed not against traditional
creationism, with its roots in biblical literalism, but against a more sophisticated idea: the
intelligent design theory.
Proponents of this theory, led by a group of academics and intellectuals and
including some biblical creationists, accept that the earth is billions of years old, not
the thousands of years suggested by a literal reading of the Bible.
But they dispute the idea that natural selection, the force Darwin suggested drove
evolution, is enough to explain the complexity of the earth's plants and animals. That
complexity, they say, must be the work of an intelligent designer.
This designer may be much like the biblical God, proponents say, but they are open
to other explanations, such as the proposition that life was seeded by a meteorite
from elsewhere in the cosmos, possibly involving extraterrestrial intelligence, or the
new age philosophy that the universe is suffused with a mysterious but inanimate life
force.
God or some other unspecified Deus ex Machina, to some it just doesn't make sense if you can't appeal to a higher authority. |
