To: TigerPaw who wrote (1735 ) 5/31/2007 9:38:11 PM From: Brumar89 Read Replies (1) | Respond to Kepler and Copernicus knew a good bit about the subject they studied. The point of the article was that since Darwinian evolutionary theory is based on inventive story telling it can be and is used by ignoramuses with no deep knowledge of their subject. In fact, the Darwinists he praises are not even scholars of any kind, let alone biologists. Wilson tells the story of Margie Profet, a woman who never studied biology, dropped out of school to give herself time to think, and ended up winning a MacArthur foundation “genius” award for her evolutionary theory of pregnancy sickness (morning sickness as it is usually called). When she started thinking about pregnancy sickness, she realized that nobody had applied Darwinism to it. She gathered some statistics and discovered that women who experience pregnancy sickness are less likely to miscarry than women who do not. So she naturally theorized that pregnancy sickness is the body’s way of telling women to be careful about what they eat. Pregnancy sickness, in Darwinian words, is a biological adaptation aimed at helping women and their babies survive pregnancy! Matt, who was bored with college until he discovered how easy and exciting it was to be a Darwinist. Matt took Wilson’s advanced course on evolution that was for both undergraduates and graduate students when he was only a first-year student. He was a jock in high school but was so self-assured that he thought he could master anything. Many first-year students are like this, but, rather than finding out that he had more to learn than he could ever have imagined, Matt thrived in Wilson’s course. He focused on the biological origin of laughter and, like Profet, discovered that little had been written about it from an evolutionary perspective. His conclusion about laughter was as predictable and banal as Profet’s theory of morning sickness: “Laughter is an especially effective mechanism for causing members of a group to feel the same way at the same time.” During his junior year, Matt wrote with Wilson an article outlining this theory that was accepted—no joke!—in the Quarterly Review of Biology. If it is this trivial when applied outside biology, why would we non-biologists imagine that it is deeper when it is restricted to biology? One cannot help but suspect that if evolutionary theory looks absurd, simplistic, and circular when applied to something as complex as religion, then it might look the same way when applied to biological organisms.
