DISCOVERY! (Pt. 1 of 4)

I discovered an old blog! I'm transferring those posts here. You can see what young Jenna was musing about way back when.


Gorillas Can Ask for Things Too (Aug. 2007)

Apparently scientists have now discovered a link between us and our "ancestors". Chimpanzees at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center ask each other and humans for a variety of things with the same gesture- an upturned palm. The upturned palm is said to be one of the oldest and most widely understood signals in the world.

I can not see how these scientists make the leap from "Look they use the same gesture we do" to "It must be descended in neurological sensors within ape ancestry." It is true that I never really realized the commonality of the upturned palm in cross-cultural conversations but the evolutionary application is simply false.

Language is a beautiful thing and how it was developed is a true mystery. According to "A World of Eloquence in an Upturned Palm" from the New York Times on August 28 the various complex languages people speak today were begun when our ape "ancestors" learned to hold their palms upwards (in a natural position to recieve something) and gesture "Gimme."


Ethics and Evolution (Sept. 2007)

In the New York Times on Tuesday September 18, Nicholas Wade wrote an article titled "Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?" The premise of the article is that evolution is now being considered a source for moral rules, as opposed to God or reason.
View the whole article at www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution has become a sort of religious doctrine for scientists of our age. Darwin’s original theory states that because species have great fertility and generally no two individuals are identical, those with a beneficial genetic variation survive and pass that variation on to their offspring. Darwin stated nothing about things deeper than the tangible. The word ‘morality’ is never defined in the article so one can only assume the writer means morality in the sense of an innate discerning of right and wrong, and that is not something physical or observable in the sense that we can see the cause and resulting action. Applying evolution (a defined biological theory of the progression of species) to something philosophical, spiritual, or religious- morality- is naïve and unscientific.

The question of ‘who is worth more?’ seems to be the slant of morality questions. This is not a true method of defining a sense of right or wrong. Asking someone whom they would be willing to sacrifice in a life-threatening situation is often pretentiously hypothetical. Jason Rosenhouse wrote in his Evolutionblog, "If a building is on fire and you have the choice to save 12 frozen embryos in a petri dish or a live healthy baby, who would you save?" Either answer to this question can be reasoned and condoned by society. My response is however, why is that question even being asked? Is the answer valuable in the pursuit of truth and righteousness?

An impulse to sacrifice the few to save the many is not something that can be called ‘morality’. As Frans B.M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University says, "Many animals show empathy and altruistic tendencies but do not have moral systems." C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, called ‘morality’ the Law of Human Nature or the Law of Right and Wrong. Why would a genetically selective theory of species progression have something to do with a sense of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’? That is like someone applying a geological principal to their interactions with people. People are not rocks, morals are not deoxyribonucleic acid.

Survival of the fittest is inherently selfish. There is no reason for a genetically superior individual to selflessly assist an inferior. As Dr. Haidt discovered there are major commonalities between cultures worldwide however, using ‘evolution’ as an explanation for this phenomenon is lazy and only answering half of the question. Evolution, at its most basic, deals with the process of progression and does not explain the beginning. Darwin was not preaching psycho-babble; he merely tried to explain the connection between creatures of past ages and those of today and over-reaching scientists need to understand that.