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Matthew Lujan August 3, 2008 English 1B DW#33 Essay #5 Rough Draft The Imaginary Orient “All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it…through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise” –Adolf Hitler, Mein Kamft There has always existed the human drive to differentiate him from “the other”, as Simone de Beauvoir theorized. This manifests into forms of racial, religious, cultural, and sexual distinctions. Yet, these psychological tensions often convert into power struggles, such as acts of slavery, war, and genocide. But the most exacerbated exoticism has been that of the mythical “Orient” by the West (The United States and Europe, respectively). The portrayal of Islamic peoples in Western film, art, print media, and television has a direct correlation with the West’s foreign policy. Since the beginning, the West’s intent has been to demonize Islamic society as a strategy to coerce public opinion through the media to supplement government policy in the Middle East. Orientalism: The Early Beginnings of the Propaganda According to Edward Said, “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and “the Occident” (Orientalism 2). This distinction initiated with the plight of French painters to the Middle East, whom returned from their perilous journeys with artwork presumed to reflect the everyday realities of the Middle East. Yet, the question begs to be asked, whose reality are we talking about? The reality of those in the painting, or their perceived reality by the painter? When dealing with French Orientalism, it is most defiantly the prior. Inconsistency is found in the absence of history, scenes of work, and Western presence in these supposed “realities” (Nochlin 33-57). Take for instance, Jean-Leon Gerome’s Snake Charmer. Gerome presents an image of lazy, sloth-like, childish people who have nothing better to do all day than charm snakes. Adding to their “otherness” is the position in which the characters are placed. The boy has his back turned away from the audience, alienating himself and his spectators from the viewer. The spectators are highly exaggerated, donning turbans, walking sticks, and layered clothing against a wall enlaced with Turkish tiles and Arabic lettering across it. The charmer himself is highly eroticized, portrayed nude, clad only with his snake, his bare feet under a Persian rug, and exhibiting his rear end to the world. The stillness of the work suggests that this “Oriental world” is without change, “a world of timeless, atemporal customs and rituals” (Nochlin 36), untouched by the Western colonial, which aides the painter to persuade his audience that what is depicted is an unchanging reality, regardless of Western presence. The Near East is not just seen as a mystical, forbidden place, but also a space where suppressed passions can be acted out. Not that the Middle East wasn’t oversexed before the Orientalists arrived; the Near East was sinominous with harems, and half-clad belly dancers willing to sexually entice their male audience for money. Women were seen as sub-human, their only raison d’être to please and be dominated by men. No other work portrays this better than Eugene Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus, where he, in accordance to the assumption shared by men of his class and time, established that men were naturally entitled to the bodies of certain women (Nochlin 42). In the work, the Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus, who, upon hearing of his defeat, had all his precious possessions, including his women, destroyed, and then went up in flames with them. The impassioned brushstrokes show an intricate involvement in the work, and the warm, enticing colors seduce the viewer to join in the “erotic extremism, and the fulfillment of sadistic impulses” within the painting (Nochlin 43). Yet, the viewer can distance himself, for he cannot see past the “Oriental” tones of the painting. For him, it reflects the Oriental reality of the connection between sexual possession and murder as an assertion of absolute enjoyment (Nochlin 43). Thus, the old saying goes, “Touch, but don’t taste, taste, but don’t swallow”. Delacroix’s work is based on the presumption that the Middle East is a man’s playground, and by painting such a scene, he can excuse the sexual violence depicted based on the notion that it is reality. The sadistic and vicious themes of the Orientalist movement were accepted because they were made with a chilly and remote pseudoscientific naturalism. In The Slave Market, Jean-Leon Gerome depicts an antique slave market, in which a fully nude, light-skinned slave girl is being evaluated by a potential customer. The buyers are presumably of Arab origin, dressed in layers of “Islamic” garb and head coverings. One of the buyers sensually sticks his two fingers into the girl’s mouth, as others look on unashamedly. In the background there are women watching children, covered from head to toe in the traditional Islamic coverings while other buyers rush the market behind them. This display of naked, powerless women to clothed, powerful men has a voyeuristic sensation to it, like that which might be found in the basement of a video store, not in an open-air market. Not to mention the implication of selling a light-skinned girl to dark-skinned men, the preconceived notion of darker races being barbaric, backwards, and immoral and light-skinned races as being moral and just. The work was given an Oriental setting as to divide, as Samuel Huntington has called, “The West and the Rest”, the Christian world from the Islamic world, respectively. It taps into touchy subjects such as the slave trade and womanly innocence so that the audience will be enraged at seeing such a sight and never be able to empathize with Islamic cultures, for they will have a preconceived notion of the Islamic world as a perverse, uncivilized society. (Ironically, the West (presumably Europe and America) has a long history of slavery, and didn’t give women equal rights until the 20th century). The undertones of the Orientalist movement are simple. “Orientalizing in this case—is the certify that the people encapsulated by it, defined by its presence, are irredeemably different from, more backward than, and culturally inferior to those who construct and consume the picturesque product. They are irrevocably “Other” (Nochlin 51). Hollywood’s Stereotype Hollywood is the most influential entertainment industry in the world. It is the source of cultural identity and fame of Americans and viewers abroad. Yet, it has successfully defamed the Arab people for a century, unbeknownst to many audiences. What was once passively accepted is now being called into question, why Hollywood vilifies the Arab community. “The popular caricature of the average Arab is a s mythical as the old portrait of the Jew. He is robed and turbaned, sinister and dangerous, engaged mainly in hijacking airplanes and blowing up public buildings. It seems that the human race cannot discriminate between a tiny minority of persons who may be objectionable and the ethnic strain from which they spring. If the Italians have the Mafia, all Italians are suspect; if the Jews have financiers, all Jews are part of an international conspiracy; if the Arabs have fanatics, all Arabs are violent. In the world today, more than ever, barriers of this kind must be broken, for we are all more alike than we are different. –Sydney Harris Of all Hollywood’s films, “more than 900 feature films display Arab characters” (Shaheen 10), and of those 900 films, hundreds of them contain uncontested slurs, calling Arabs: “assholes”, “bastards”, “camel-dicks”, “Pigs”, “devil-worshipers”, “jackels”, “rats”, “rag-heads”, “towel-heads”, “scum-buckets”, “songs-of-dogs”, “buzzards of the jungle”, “sons-of-whores”, “songs-of-unnamed goats”, and “songs-of-the-she-camels”. Not including the slang “Ayrab”, which is the equivalent to kyke, WOP, nigger, chink, and Jap (Shaheen 11). Yet demonizing a race is nothing new for Hollywood. This can be seen in its treatment of Jews, Native Americans, African Americans, and Asians throughout the past century in popular film. Dr. Jack Shaheen poses the question, “Ponder the consequences. In February 1942, more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent were displaced from their homes and interred in camps; for decades blacks were denied basic civil rights, robbed of their property, and lynched; American Indians, too, were displaced and slaughtered; and in Europe, six million Jews perished in the Holocaust” (Shaheen 4). But why haven’t we learned our lesson about dehumanizing a people? Why do stereotypes of Arabs continue to be repeated? The answer lies in the fact that the Arab is portrayed as “the other”, and this “other”, is inherently different from “us” (whatever ‘us’ may mean). The Middle East is eroticized in popular culture, as a place of mystery and adventure. Often, the setting for a movie in the Middle East is “a desert locale consisting of an oasis, oil wells, palm trees, tents, fantastically ornate palaces, sleek limousines, and camels” (Shaheen8). This venue greatly differs from the everyday suburban household in the Midwest United States, in which mum makes you peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drops you off in her minivan. The costumes provided in these movies further enhance the glamorous scenery, adorning actresses with “chandors, hijabs, belly dancers’ see-through pantaloons, veils, and jewels for their navels” (Shaheen 8). The whole ambiance of a film set in the Middle East is based on the fictitious reality that the Orientalists’ brought back from their Near East adventures. These films deny Arabs and Arab-Americans the right to be depicted factually and fairly. Not everyone in the Middle East rides on camels, just as not everyone in the South rides horses. But film directors deny this, because, let’s face it, “The Jewel of the Nile” just sounds so much more enticing that does “The Jewel of the Mississippi”. Disney’s Aladdin is one of the most beloved American animated films to date. It grossed $60 million U.S. dollars, not including more money for international rights video sales, and rentals (Shaheen 50). Yet, its racism wasn’t foreseen by the public. The film recounts the tale of Aladdin, a “street rat” who is not only parentless but homeless. His only friend is a monkey named Abu, who helps him steal food to survive. Aladdin coincidentally falls in love with the Sultan’s daughter, Jasmine, but they cannot get married, because he is not a prince. The story sounds acceptable on paper, but when animated, demonstrated ethnocentricism at its best. Aladdin, Jasmine, and the Sultan are light-skinned, with wide eyes, and small, flat noses. Jaffar and the palace guards, considered the “bad guys”, are dark, with sinister eyes, heavy accents, and large noses. However when ethnocencrecism is absent, stereotypes re-emerge. When Princess Jasmine escapes the castle walls, and innocently gives a hungry boy an apple, a malicious, ugly merchant with a colossal nose violently grabs her hand and asks, “Do you know what the penalty for stealing is?!” Jasmine pleads with him to go get her father so that she may pay the man, but he doesn’t believe her and grabs a knife out of his jacket to cut her hand off. The message that this sends to children is, in the Near East, even if you want to help a starving child, you will get your hand cut off. Disney obviously ignores the fact that hand-chopping is only implemented in Saudi Arabia, not everywhere in the Middle East. This violence is further established in the beginning of the film, when a man riding a camel in the desert sings, “Oh I come from a land/ from a faraway place/ where the caravan camels roam. / Where they cut off your ear/ if they don’t like your face/ it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home” (Shaheen 51). Why would anyone begin a children’s film with violence? In 1993, in response to public pressure, Disney deleted the lines “Where they cut off your ear/ if they don’t like your face” and changed it to, “where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense”, but the damage had already been done (Shaheen 51). A generation of children would grow up with these songs and images of the Near East engraved in their brains of what it was really like to live in the Middle East. The News Media: Policies Impact Opinions “Competing imperial powers invent their own theory of cultural destiny to justify their actions abroad”. -Edward Said When analyzing Islam’s representation in the media, it is important to understand how the media works, respectively who owns it and what they want seen and heard. Oftentimes, the media has an “echo” effect. What one station says, another will repeat, sometimes verbatim. The information projected to the viewers is not based on researched, factual evidence, but opinions shrieked out from political pundits such as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. These opinions are repeated and repeated until what is being repeated is seen as fact. This undertaking fundamentally undermines and exploits democracy. The effect that such rantings have had on the Islamic community has been irreversible. A prime example of mainstream media distorting the truth and pointing their fingers at the Muslim community was the bombing in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was widely assumed that the attack had been “Middle Eastern” in origin, coming from threatening aliens abroad, not an American citizen. Throughout the investigation, the FBI and CIA investigated people by the color of their skin, the spelling of their name, and their religious beliefs, all under the false pretence that any act of terrorism is performed by someone of Middle Eastern origin (Findley 74). It seemed as though almost all Americans were in agreement, that the tragedy was the work of Muslims. These notions had been ingrained into public psyche after the events of the Iranian Hostage situation in the eighties and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. All of the sudden, the “terrorist” crisis mushroomed. Images of bearded men, Arabic script, and Middle Eastern experts flooded mainstream television. The message, however, hadn’t changed since the Crusades. Muslims were portrayed as violent, religious fanatics, who suppressed their women and spent their lives preparing for jihad, that blood curling, menacing Arabic word that had a spine-chilling effect for many Westerners Outraged that such atrocities were inflicted upon “their own”, strands of violence proceeded between the Muslim and Christian communities. Later on, it was discovered that the perpetrator was Timothy McVeigh, a White, Irish, and Roman Catholic. So why was it so readily available to accuse the Muslim community of acts of aggression, instead of the Catholic community? The only answer lies in how Islam is portrayed in the media. The Ku Klux Klan is a home-grown American terrorist organization who has committed countless acts of violence against Jews and Blacks, but no one says that they represent the whole Western Christian community. So, just as one shouldn’t assume that all Christians are KKK members, one should also not presume that all Muslims are jihadists. Additionally, the media was quick to misquote the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stating that he “wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map”. After the speech, many translators refuted the English translation, saying that what the President had said could be interpreted many different ways, mainly “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. But their cries were quieted with the media’s incisive response. They depicted the President as an anti-Semitic, who denied the Holocaust, and served as a threat to the American people. Following this massive outcry of the American people, worrying that Iran might attack Israel and then the United States, Mike Wallace interviewed the President on 60 minutes, and asked him why he wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map. President Ahmadinejad said, “I think that the Israeli government is a fabricated government” (representative press), but most of his speech wasn’t aired on the program, it was left out. He continued, “…and I have talked about the solution. The solution is democracy. We have said allow Palestinian people to participate in a free and fair referendum to express their views. What we are saying only serves the cause of durable peace. We want durable peace in that part of the world. A durable peace will only come about with once the views of the people are met” (representative press). He further continued of democratic elections and hope for the peoples of Palestine, who had been oppressed by the Israeli government. But one would have to dig to find this information, because main stream media will not show it. They want to deny the American people any chance to sympathize with Palestinians, based on the United States’ undying support for the state of Israel, since its creation in 1948. This is the reason why no one ever sees pictures of the poverty and misery that the Palestinian people live through, day after day, under this regime. Regardless of whether one is a Jew or not, one cannot deny the inhumanity of the realities of the occupied territories. The media does not show the Palestinians missing limbs, being beaten while going through daily checkpoints, or the effects of the bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. What they show are angry, American flag-burning protestors, shouting in Arabic, “death to America!” Then the camera usually moves to the veiled women, and children throwing stones at Israeli guard, giving the illusion that the Israeli army is retaliating against aggression. What is left out of the media is that Israel is in breach of the UN charter in which Israel was supposed to evacuate the occupied territories, but never did. Rupert Murdoch is the main reason for this lack of factual news. He owns nine satellite television networks, one hundred cable channels, one hundred and seventy five newspapers, forty book imprints, forty television stations, and one movie studio. His television network reaches two hundred and eighty million people, his Asian satellite network reaches three hundred million people, his cable channel reaches three hundred million homes, and his magazines reach twenty eight million people, which totals to a total audience of 4.7 billion people, about ¾ of the entire world population (Outfoxed). Big brother government has honed in on Murdoch, and together, they have created the largest propaganda machine in the world. Every morning, memos are sent to network employees from John Moody, explaining what they should and should not discuss. Topics such as economics, medical care, and global warming are not discussed, but issues on gay marriage, school shootings, and anti-American sentiments are aired. The networks will not focus on anything that puts the government into question. A prime example is when Jeremy Glick, the son of a victim of 9/11 was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly. During the interview, Glick explained that he believed that 9/11 was a planned precursor to facilitate the government in executing the War on Terror. O’Reilly cut his mike, and promptly told him to shut up, several times, out of respect for Glick’s deceased father. But this type of negation of a diversity of viewpoints should not be surprising. FOX news CEO and chairman is Roger Ailes, the former media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr.’s presidential campaigns. Both Murdoch and big brother government know that the average American relies on the nightly news for an update on current events, and they use it to their advantage. They choose what is seen and what is not seen. If the news were unbiased and simply reported what happened, citizens could make up their own minds. But the government wants to feed Americans their opinions, spoon feeding them like babies until they are so full that they can’t speak. Their motivation is fear, and fear handicaps Americans into blindly trusting the government for protection. For instance, is it really that surprising that before 9/11, the Middle East was portrayed as a backwards, primitive culture? When Murdoch’s news networks had segments on the Middle East, it focused on Islam, women, and terrorism. The only interviews were videos from terrorist organizations, then inviting “experts” to comment on the tape. But where did these experts come from? And why would the media want to stereotype the Middle East in such simple terms? The Middle East is a vast, diverse area, offering many viewpoints, but those viewpoints are not welcomed on conservative networks such as FOX. It is easy to come to the conclusion that the media’s portrayal of the Middle East made it easier to enter into the War on Terror. The government played on the public’s view of the Middle East, and persuaded them into a war which has no legitimacy. Is it surprising that the government declared the War on Terror on 7 October 2001, roughly three months after the 9/11 attacks? In an interview, former CIA analysis Ray McGovern questions former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the legitimacy of the War on Terror, and displays current American sentiments about the ongoing war. Ironically, if Americans had a truly free press, they would know that the United States basically set up the War on Terror in the 1980s. During the Iraq-Iran War, over a million people were killed. Americans thought that it was a religious battle, but unbeknownst to them, the United States facilitated the war in order to profit from its ruins later. In 1982, the US sold arms to Saddam Hussein against Khomeini, and then in 1983 the US sold arms to Khomeini against Saddam. Previously, the US had helped the Ba’ath Party rise to power, and critics are saying, “One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute "regime change" in Iraq” (Representative Press). In George Washington’s final address to the nation, he warned, “So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation” (Yale). Americans would be wise to think back on this founding father’s worries of government corruption by special interests. The only way to undo the manipulation is to re-educate, and there must exist a desire to understand “the other”, otherwise, we will continue on a “cultural war” with has no solution or ending. We must take mythology out of our psyche and humanize “the other” in order for peace to be an option. In the words of Mother Teresa, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other”.
Works Cited Findley, Paul. Silent No More. Amana Publications, 2003. Little, Douglas. American Orientalism. The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Said, Edward. Covering Islam. Pantheon Books, 1981. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978. Shaheen, Jack. Reel Bad Arabs. Olive Branch Press, 2001. Nochlin, Linda. The Imaginary Orient. Publisher Unknown. http://www.democracynow.org/2006/5/5/retired_cia_analyst_ray_mcgovern_takes
Intelligent Design: The Argument from Ignorance (or, The Creationist in Scientist's Clothing)
According to the founders of the intelligent design (ID) movement, "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." (Discovery Institute, 1999) Intelligent design should be abolished as a viable educational alternative to evolutionary theory, because it is merely Christian theological speculation masquerading as a scientific claim. In recent years, school boards across the country have succumbed to pressure from ID proponents, applied toward the aim of having ID taught in biology classes as a legitimate alternate theory of the origin of Earth's species. Despite setbacks to the movement, such as the 2005 trial in Dover, Pennsylvania in which plaintiffs successfully challenged the legality of a public school district's mandate that ID be taught alongside the theory of evolution, efforts to establish intelligent design as a valid scientific paradigm have continued unabated. In its purest form, design theory proposes that life on Earth did not achieve the observed variance of species via eons of natural selection and genetic drift, as is the hypothesis of modern evolutionary theory, but rather that "certain features of...living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and are not the result of an undirected, chance-based process such as Darwinian evolution." (IDEA Center, 2004) Any such claim is merely a disguised form of creationism, religious in intent and unscientific in content, and any proposed inclusion of the ID paradigm in a public-school curriculum therefore violates the establishment clause of the United States Constitution's first amendment. Though its origination dates to the turn of the 20th century, the term "intelligent design" came into modern scientific usage following the landmark Edwards v. Aguillard case heard in 1987 by the Supreme Court of the United States, in which the court ruled by a 7-2 majority that the teaching of creationism could not be mandated in Louisiana public schools "because the primary purpose of [Louisiana's] Creationism Act is to endorse a particular religious doctrine, [and therefore] the Act furthers religion in violation of the Establishment Clause." (Brennan, 482 U.S. 578) Following this decision, Charles Thaxton, the editor of a book called Of Pandas and People, decided to have over one hundred textual references to "creation" or "creation science" in drafts replaced by "intelligent design" prior to the work's publication in 1989, because he had heard the phrase from a NASA scientist and thought "That's just what I need, it's a good engineering term." (Witt 2005; see also Kitzmiller v. Dover 2005). Design theory as it exists today was thusly born from a need to repackage the concepts of Christian creationism into an ostensibly secular framework for inquiry, while also supplying a more palatable educational alternative to replace the initiative deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The insidious goals of the ID movement were more recently and explicitly formulated in 1999 by a Seattle-based Christian think-tank called the Discovery Institute, in an internal manifesto called the "Wedge Document", the existence of which has since been denied by the Institute, dismissed as an "urban legend" by its contributing theorists, and ultimately acknowledged by the Institute's co-founder Stephen C. Meyer, though he claims it was stolen from his office. (Mooney 2002) In this document, the short- and long-term goals of the Institute are clearly delineated: to spur the debate involving ID and evolutionary theory with the goal of changing public school curricula in at least ten states by the fifth year of action, to address and reverse the social consequences of scientific materialism (such as abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality), and to promote a socially conservative agenda by "seek[ing] to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture." (Discovery Institute, 1999) There can be no doubt that the initial phases of the ID movement were political in nature, or that the broader intent of introducing ID as a legitimate educational alternative was present even in these nascent stages. Nowhere in the "Wedge Document" are any of these scientific pieces of evidence presented, nor does it discuss possible methodologies or future avenues of inquiry. Nevertheless, the whole of design theory rests on the false dichotomy that either evolutionary theory in its current form is true and complete (an obviously erroneous statement), or there are unexplained and therefore inexplicable modes of nature that necessarily imply the existence of an intelligent cause. Philip Johnson, one of the founders and chief architects of the ID strategy, neatly provides a summary of this fallacious line of reasoning: "If creation is admitted as a serious possibility, Darwinism cannot win, and if it is excluded a priori Darwinism cannot lose." (Johnson 1990) Having established that intelligent design theory began as a political statement and was always explicitly based on a repackaging of Christian creation stories, with the intent of inserting this theology into public school science curricula, it now remains to investigate whether the subsequent decades have produced any truly scientific claims on behalf of ID, or whether the movement has remained in ideological stasis. Science is defined by two primary characteristics: the explanatory power of its formulations, and the falsifiability of its predictions. Evolutionary theory as it exists today is the single most well-supported scientific paradigm in the history of mankind, both by its description of speciation via natural selection and genetic drift (which is augmented by the action of punctuated equilibrium), and by its predictive power in such realms as microbiology and fossil archaeology. "[Darwinism] eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” (Dennett 1995) By contrast, intelligent design theory offers no scientific explanations beyond the spurious claim that the Christian god is responsible for the origin of species (a statement that is, by definition, based on faith and tradition instead of logic), and contains no testable predictive capacity that could be falsified in the Popperian sense of the term. Instead, the pseudo-scientific claims of ID rest on such vaguely defined concepts as irreducible complexity, in the case of the writings of Michael Behe, or complex specified information theory as described by William Dembski. Irreducible complexity is defined by ID proponents as "a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." (Behe 1998) The existence of such a system in the biosphere would purportedly be devastating to the Darwinist paradigm in which numerous, successive, and slight modifications bring about all biological variance. Behe proposes that molecular-scale organelles such as cilia belong to this category, thereby inferring design, or "the purposeful arrangement of parts", as the primary force to which is owed the presence of such entities as cilia and protein-transport/synthesis systems in cells. This proof of impossibility is shielded, as is typical, by the hidden axiom: since current molecular biology does not know the precise sequence by which the addition, deletion, and duplication of proteins give rise to functional organelles, there must not be such a sequence -- ignoring completely the possibility that future investigative endeavors can expand the store of knowledge and theory available to science. (It should be noted here that a long-time favorite example of irreducible complexity has been the human eye, although that argument has been generally abandoned in the face of overwhelming evidence for an uninterrupted chain of visual systems that begins with single-cell light-sensitive spots and moves seamlessly up the evolutionary ladder to advanced eyes such as the frog's, which is so powerful it can detect individual photons! One imagines that the list of irreducibly-complex systems compiled by ID adherents will thusly continue to grow smaller in the future.) As Philip Kitcher notes in his flawless evisceration of this claim, "Behe has made up his own ideas about what transitional organisms must have been like, and then argued that such organisms couldn't have existed." (Kitcher 2001) This is a classic example of the argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, although it is not the most egregious violation of logic committed by the ID movement. The concept of complex specified information (CSI) is another popular, and even more ambiguous tactic frequently utilized by design theorists. As initially formulated by William Dembski, the CSI argument holds that Darwinian natural selection cannot explain the existence of certain kinds of information (Dembski 1997), because the events that embody this information are highly unlikely to have arisen by chance. The essence of this claim is that natural causes, being a mixture of chance and necessity, cannot produce highly unlikely outcomes. However, "Darwinian theory makes probabilistic, not deductive, predictions" (Fitelson, Stephens, & Sober 1999) and as such cannot be scientifically evaluated on its own; we must compare the predictive capacity of evolutionary theory with that of a competing paradigm, in this case the design theory, which conveniently makes no predictions regarding the evolution of information in an intelligently-constructed system. Also predictably, the CSI argument postulates that chance and necessity alone cannot increase the information in a system (as if the mere presence of more megabits in a genome implies that the genome is necessarily more "complex and specified", whatever that means), although evolutionary science has repeatedly shown that gene duplication and deletion can alter the size of the informational content describing a biological system. (Dawkins 1998) In the final analysis, CSI is merely a way to recast the increasing complexity of life via natural selection as a highly improbable sequence of organization of genetic information, when a proper application of information theory to the question of speciation would simply require "numerous, successive, and slight modifications," in the words of Darwin himself. We have seen the origins of intelligent design theory as a political movement designed to change the course of social progress and alter the educational paradigm of the life sciences, in order to establish Christian theology as viable science and "affirm the reality of God." (Johnson 1997) In addition, we have shown that the scientific claims made by ID proponents are entirely specious at best, and intentionally misdirecting at worst; no predictive capacity or explanatory power exists in the paradigm of intelligent design. As such, this "theory" is unfit for inclusion in the science curricula of U.S. public schools, since the words of ID's founders themselves have betrayed the thin disguise intended to fool laymen into believing the theory has probative and scientific value beyond the promotion of a decidedly religious agenda. The establishment clause of the United States Constitution has rebuffed, by the judgment of two federal courts including the highest bench in the land, two major assaults designed to insert Christian creationism into the secular public educational system. However, it is clear that the Discovery Institute and their ilk will not easily abandon their goal of tearing down scientific materialism in favor of theistic philosophy, given their shameless attempts thus far to force Christian theology into the minds of America's youth.
Works Cited
Behe, Michael. "Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference". Cosmic Pursuit, vol. 1, no. 2, (1998): 27-35
Dawkins, Richard. "The 'Information Challenge'". The Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4 (1998): 22-25.
Dembski, William A. "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information". Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith, vol. 49, no. 3, (1997): 180-190.
Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. (1995). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Edwards v . Aguillard. (1987). 482 U.S. 578 (Justice Brennan, William J. writing for the majority; Justices Scalia, Antonin and Rehnquist, William dissenting)
Fitelson, Branden, Stephens, Christopher, and Sober, Elliot. "How Not to Detect Design -- Critical Notice: William A. Dembski, The Design Inference". Philosophy of Science, vol. 66, (1999): 472-488.
Intelligent Design Theory in a Nutshell. (2004). Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center. http://www.ideacenter.org
Johnson, Philip E. Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. (1997). Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press.
Johnson, Philip E. "Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism". First Things, no. 6, (1990): 15-22.
Kitcher, Philip. "Born-Again Creationism", in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. (2001). Pennock, Robert T. (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. (2005). 04 cv 2688
Mooney, Chris (2002). "Survival of the Slickest: How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message", The American Prospect 13(22)
Pennock, Robert T. (Ed.) Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. (2001). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wedge Document. (1999) Discovery Institute. http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf
Witt, Jonathan. (2005). "Evolution News & Views: Dover Judge Regurgitates Mythological History of Intelligent Design". Discovery Institute.
Scott Mitchell English 1b-12215 Professor Gallegos July 30, 2008 Argument of Proposal: Evolution in Jeopardy As a Western society, Americans value biological sciences and education to advance our society. The theory of Evolution, created by the famous naturalist, Charles Darwin, should be mandatory in every American school because children are not being properly educated just by learning about the Christian faith. Evolution is the theory that species have changed through time by adapting to the environment around them. In my view, Evolution is supported by four main ideas: The Fossil Record, Homology, Biogeography, and Natural Selection. So why is Evolution so important? For millennia, humans have been asking the questions of how we got here and what our purpose is in life. People turned to religion as a way of understanding these questions. However, fundamentalists in Christianity and other faiths are making every effort to disprove what so many of us have learned in our science classes for the past one hundred years. “What is at stake is nothing less than America’s scientific soul” (Miller 12). America’s scientific soul is our universities and research institutions that have led the world in almost every category of science. The genius of our scientists has led to the domination of the Nobel Prizes in science for decades. My personal experience in the matter is why I favor evolution in the classroom so strongly. Recently, I and a friend of mine debated our own opinions on the topic. He went to a private Christian school where a majority of his studies were on the bible, while I read biology books in science at my public school. His main point that took me for a loop was that he believed Earth was created around the same time as the bible was written. This made me real concerned because what is going to happen when my friend grows up and experiences the real world? Chances are he is probably going to experience forms of social inequality because of his ‘outlandish beliefs’ to some and this isn’t acceptable. As a friend, I value his opinions and respect his beliefs, but many would call him crazy for this. This is why evolution, which has been adopted by other religions such as Catholicism, must be taught to all children. Another example of the debate between creationism and evolution was recently shared by my Saddleback College Biology Professor. My professor taught biology in Bakersfield, California in his former days when this area was heavily Christian. When it was time to open up the chapter on evolution, the class went silent. Every student in the class dropped their pens and folded their arms giving this man a dirty look. My professor had no idea what was going on. Later that day, my professor’s colleague told him that “No one uses the ‘e’ word here.” So right before going to bed every night, my professor would try to trick his brain so he could teach evolution by teaching it’s principles but never even mentioning the word ‘evolution’. He succeeded in never using the word in class and every one of his Christian students learned evolution back to front without even knowing it. This proves some religious people lack the educational principles of evolution. If evolution is taught in classrooms, I believe this unfounded fear people have of evolution infringing upon their beliefs will disappear. There is a sea of evidence supporting evolution in the classroom. Evolution explains the four questions we might want answered as humans: what, where, why and how? The fossil record is a clear indicator that Earth has been around for billions of years. Biogeography explains the distribution of organisms on earth. Next, the recent discovery of DNA structure unlocked new worlds to biologists. Most importantly, adaptations in organisms are centered on natural selection – individuals with certain inherited traits produced more offspring then individuals with other traits. Evolution answers the what, where, when, why, and how questions humans have been asking since the dawn of science (Dennett 23). For instance, Evolution states that we are here in order to survive and pass on genes because the bottom line in biology is: Reproduction. A species will become extinct without this instinct. Religion likes to argue that “the universe was created by God, for God’s purposes, then all the purposes we can fin in it must be due to God’s purposes” (Dennett 24). So according to this argument by Religious supporters, we are living our lives not to better ourselves, but to satisfy God. Secondly, Evolutionists date our species, homosapiens, back to 5.3 million years ago (Campbell 515). Devout followers of Christianity interpret the bible as literal and believe that earth was created when the bible was written only a couple thousand years ago. Geologists have proven this to be untrue with the use of carbon-14 dating. Religion explains that humans are god’s instruments while evolutionists believe we’re organisms bent on survival. There have been five mass extinctions, proven by the fossil record that has wiped out life on earth (Buell 521). Scientists have used the fossil record to prove their theory of evolution. “Rivers carry sediments (fossils) into seas and swamps. Over time, sedimentary rock layers form called strata. As erosion takes place and water levels rise, this strata and the fossils inside are exposed” (Campbell 453). This is how scientists have been able to piece together the history of organisms on our planet. How can a bible explain dinosaur fossils being found every day all over the world better than a biology textbook? The bible is a religious text and therefore should not be used to teach scientific principles Why do our prestigious museums hold hundreds of these fossils on display in their hallways? Are scientists making all this up?” Religious leaders have not published research on fossils in scientific journals, so they are no more qualified to write about fossils than they are qualified to write about auto mechanics or music theory” (Buell 16). I am not an atheist and believe its naïve to think that some form of a higher power does not exist. However, it’s unethical to teach children in today’s society that the fossil record is false and that ‘God put dinosaur bones in the ground to test his followers.’ Homology supports evolution by providing a common sense approach to an organism’s history. Homology is the study of how organisms share a common ancestor at one point in their existence. For example, mammals exhibit a similar skeletal structure between organisms. The human hand has the same forelimb bone structure as a cat’s paw and a whale’s fin has the same bone structure as a bat’s wing. These similarities are due to a common ancestor that adapted to its environment. Scientists say that human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain is 98% identical in structure. This makes primates a common ancestor of humans. How have organisms that exhibit similar characteristics been found on opposite continents across the globe? According to Biogeography, organisms originated on the same land mass, called Pangae, billions of years ago. Through time, the continent broke up and drifted away distributing organisms all over the world. Charles Darwin, the founder of evolution, explains this phenomenon. “In considering the distribution of organic beings over the face of the globe, the first great fact which strikes us, that neither the similarity nor dissimilarity of the inhabitants of various regions can be accounted for by their climatal and physical conditions (Darwin 283). The most important evidence in proving evolution is Natural Selection. “Natural selection is a process in which individual’s have certain heritable characteristics to survive and reproduce at a higher rate than other individuals” (Campbell 540). Natural selection occurs through interactions between environment and organisms. Let’s take humans for example. Humans were the first species to create fire. We adapted to our environment successfully, making us a superior species. Humans have been able to survive by passing these traits of conforming to our environments to produce more offspring. Since evolution is supported by facts and research, all Americans should be fully educated in the sciences. Overwhelming evidence supports why evolution should be taught in every American school. The fossil record, homology, biogeography, and natural selection are the main focus in evolution. Any school that leaves out the teaching of evolution in the classroom should not be accredited as a school. Pope Benedict XVI has embraced evolution into Catholicism. He asks the question, “What came first? Creative reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason (evolution), strangely enough bring forth a mathematically ordered cosmos?” Americans have the right to make up their own minds in the evolutionary war, but evolution should not be denied to students.
Works Cited Buell, Carl and Prothero Donald. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. Columbia University, 2007.
Campbell a. Neil. Biology: Concept and Connections. By Beth Wilbur. San Francisco 2006.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of the Species: By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Bantam Classic. June, 1999.
Dennett C. Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Simon and Schuster. New York, NY. 1995.
Miller R. Kenneth. Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. Penguin Inc. June 12, 2008.
Schonborn, Christoph. Creation and Evolution: A Conference with Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo. Ignatius Press. May 2008
Ruchi Lamba ENG 1B: #12215 Prof. Gallegos’ Class DW #28 - Essay#5 – Research/Argument of Proposal – Rough Draft August 5, 2008
Too Many Barriers for Working Mothers
Working mothers do not earn as much as working fathers because neither corporate America, nor the society at large caters to the needs of working mothers. The discrimination is inherent in the corporate structures which do not allow women the opportunity to progress in their careers and raise their families at the same time. These barriers include the lack of high-paying part-time jobs, lack of networking opportunities, and a male-dominated executive environment. The discrimination is also inherent in family structures where women bear the greater burden of domestic work than men, and also face greater social expectations in their roles as mothers.
Recent studies show that there are only two professions in the nation where women earn more than men and these are modeling and prostitution (Kinsley and Lambert, 39). In every single other job, women earn about 25 percent less than men, and are stalled a more or less 75 cents to each dollar a man earns. (Kinsley and Lambert, 39). To complicate matters further, this wage disparity increases when women have children. By choosing to take a longer maternity leave and spend a few years taking care of their infants, women forfeit chances of promotion, cash wages, and the ability to earn more wages. According to author and Wage Gap advocate Evelyn Murphy, a woman will lose between $700,000 and $2,000,000 over her working lifetime.
This disparity in wages earned by working mothers and the rest of the population is morally wrong because it hinders a woman’s ability to support herself and her children financially. It affects her liberty to earn on equal terms as men. And, it is not a desirable situation for American society, because this is not just a woman’s issue, it is a social issue. About 70 percent of American families with children have all adults in the workplace – and most women are working not because they choose to work but because they need the money for their families (Story, 79). So the issues need to be viewed not as a woman’s problem, but as a societal problem. Households earn more when women have husbands that participate at home and take action as fathers engaged in addressing their children’s needs. And companies do better when they put in family-friendly in order to retain their top female talent in this increasingly competitive world. Companies have to spend a lot of money training new staff when women leave to raise children. “The high rate of departure is a losing proposition for the firms since it takes four years on average to recoup the original investment in an associate’s training (Kolb, Williams and Frohlinger).” And the advantage of keeping a working mother on staff are numberous. “Mother rats nearly always beat virgins in competitions that involve multitasking” (Clark). Corporate America creates a lot of barriers for working mothers and the chief among them is the lack of highly paid part-time jobs. Women are unable to find part time work in higher-paying fields – work that will allow them to make more money. Mothers are scrambling to find work that allows them to take care of children and still earn money, and are forced to work in low-paying fields. “Six out of ten women work in low paying fields of health, office staff, retail sales, food service, cleaning and childcare.” (Women At Work) “Only about 35-38% of married mothers, about 42% of mothers in general, work full time all year, indicating that the remaining majority are finding other flexible solutions and investments to bring in income” (Crittenden 57).”
Another corporate barrier that working mothers face is that they cannot put in the time needed to network and socialize outside work hours. Mothers cannot travel in circles where they can rise above the poverty level income. They can’t network over drinks after work because daycare ends at 6pm. They cannott travel overseas because their spouse may not be home full time to watch the children. And while they may want to do these things, or even know the value of networking in companies, they are too bound by family expectations to deliver what corporate America demands. Unless they go into traditional female fields, but then the pay is lower.
Another major barrier that working mothers face at work is that there are virtually no women in top management. Women are not in charge in corporate America. Men are. According to Crittenden, about 99 percent of the FORTUNE 500 CEOs are men. About 85% of corporate boards are men. Men control the means of societal influence by holding 70-90% of Congress, news editor and university faculty positions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of year 2003, although women make up about half of the workforce, men still dominate more mid and senior level positions. Women are only 6.4 % of the top earners in the Fortune 500.
As a result, the most powerful decision makers in corporate America are men and they do not see the barriers that working mothers face. The men are reluctant to make the necessary changes that will allow working mothers to have a career as well as raise their children. A Working Woman online survey in 2001 revealed that fully half of the women thought asking their employers for a more flexible schedule after they have children will appear as if they are not as serious about their work.
It is possible to blame women for choosing careers that pay less overall. For example, looking at the Bureau of Labor numbers from 2003, nursing (health care) and elementary teacher positions (education) pay less than x-ray technician and professorship positions. The first two categories are over 90% women while the second positions are over 90% men. All of these positions are hard work and still offer flexibility. The positions dominated by men pay more. However, those who make this argument fail to realize that what women don’t choose is to be paid less for the same jobs once they have children, or to face speculation about their commitment to work (or their kids), to be penalized for asking for flexible hours while the kids are infants, or to be side-lined to less important positions because of bias.
Working mothers also face other barriers in society and some of these are at home. Working women are still coming home to thirteen hours or more of housework per week (Aloi, 5). The disproportionate amount of housework forces them to take on part-time jobs. Only about 35-38% of married mothers, about 42% of mothers in general, work full time all year, indicating that the remaining majority are finding other flexible solutions and investments to bring in income (Crittenden 57). According to numerous university studies, men have not taken up shared parenting. This leaves women, working or not, to do most of the daily family-grind which cannot be put off to later, for example, getting the children from school to lessons.
Women are also forced to live up to an expectation of motherhood that is too high. ``We have this idea of what it means to be a mother. A mother is someone who should be available to her child 24 hours a day. But a worker is now someone who is supposed to be available 24 hours a day as well. Those are mentally irreconcilable” (Graff, 19). Men do not face the same kind of expectations.
Unless changes are made in our society, that allow women to have children and careers at the same time, the wage gap will continue. Companies need to offer women the flexibility of working from home, or working part-time and create networking opportunities that will not exclude mothers. At the same time, fathers need to take up a greater share of domestic work at home and society at large needs to re-examine its expectations from mothers. Unless, these changes take place in American society, women will be forced to take a path that may be altruistically fulfilling, but not financially.
Works Cited List: 1. Aloi, Daniel. Mothers face disadvantages in getting hired, Cornell study says. Cornell Chronicle Online. August 4,2005. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug05/soc.mothers.dea.html
2. Clark, Nancy. WomensMedia. The Case for Hiring Mommies. Deloitte Research. 2004. http://womensmedia.com/lunchtalk/2006/03/25/
3. Crittenden, Ann. The Price of Motherhood. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2001.
4. Marriage and Divorce. Census 2003. U.S. Census Report. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/marr-div.html
5. Mill, John Stuart, and Currin V. Shields. On Liberty. New York: Alpha Books, 1956.
6. Murphy, Evelyn, and E.J. Graff. Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It. New York: Simon and Shuster, 2006.
7. Story, Louise. Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood September 20, 2005. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/college
8. Women at Work. 30 July 2008 9. L A Times, by Molly Selvin, This Mommy Track May Go Somewhere 9. WomensMedia.com Site: Negotiating Work/Family Issues, by Deborah M. Kolb, Judith Williams, and Carol Frohlinger 10. Scientific American, January 2006, “The Maternal Brain” by Craig Howard Kinsley and Kelly G. Lambert
Illegal immigration and its effects on California’s economy and society.
Down in the south-western border, we are facing a huge crime that is committed daily and almost hourly. In the night they come in groups of sometimes over a hundred, with their family members, friends, and whoever else is willing to commit such a horrendous crime. They are not shedding blood or stealing money, but illegally coming into our country. (THESIS) With illegal immigration at an all time high, California is now affected greatly by the amount of money we lose catering to them, and the effects of its society. Illegal immigration is a huge problem that our government freely lets pass right under our noses and what does our country do about it? Nothing. Based upon geographical placing, most illegal aliens come from the neighboring country of Mexico making the illegal’s more of a Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. This country is labeled a third world country, being based upon how underdeveloped their society is. They have mass amounts of poverty and a very high crime rate. Their governmental standpoint is corrupt and is usually run by criminals, making the country very hard to control or to have any traces of civil rights to their citizens. This is the main motivation for those who decided to abandon their homes and extended family, to travel to the United States to form better lives. However when they do arrive to the U.S. they do not go through proper procedure to gain legal residency in our country. With millions of other immigrants who come from various foreign countries doing it the legal way, what gives them the right to cheat the system. To become a legal residence in the United States, immigrants must go through a multi step process that involves visa petitions, certification or green card, and also obtain valid visa numbers along with tedious paperwork. From the mouths of citizens that have gone through this process, it usually takes about five years while after your certification is completed, it takes another five years to be processed to then take your test for residency. The test usually includes questions based upon our countries history including how many stripes on the flag, first thirteen colonies, and other various patriotic facts. This is the right way, they way it should be done and they millions of immigrants have been legally getting residency. Without legal residency in the country of the United States, you cannot receive a various amount of paperwork or certification. This ranges from social security cards, drivers licensees, to even signing their children up for Little League Baseball. This does not stop most of the illegals. Important paperwork is stolen and is used to the highest extent of identity theft. Without a social security card they cannot be employed under a normal job that needs this information for tax purposes, and that is a huge problem right there, they don’t pay taxes. Most illegal’s are hired “under the table” meaning they are paid in cash or personal checks as a way to avoid proper payment. No medical taxes, social security or other government taxes that pay for public schooling and improvement of our roads and utilities. Therefore, us rightful, taxpaying Americans are funding for them to use our hospitals, roads, and other government funded rights for free. Without insurance, they go straight to emergency or urgent care medical facilities where policy is to not turn away anyone in need of help. From there they can duck under any medical bills or other fees that needed to be paid for the services we are providing. It is a constant circle of stealing. The children that are either snuck in or born into our nation, are they catered to by providing free public education while their parents do not pay their dues for such a great opportunity that we provide. Schools are all at their ultimate high of overcrowded classrooms and not enough books for the needy, and there should be no sympathy for those who try to ride the education train for free. Assisted living is also another government funded programs in which our tax dollars again pay for discounted food, and other medical programs that should be used for the less fortunate, instead of the criminals. If an illegal immigrant comes across the chance to get valid employment, through friends, family, stolen information whatever the case, most then choose to send their hard working checks outside of our economy. It is wire transferred, shipped, sent through the mail back to Mexico or any other country where they derivate from back to their less fortunate families. Here it is used to help any situation they may be in, but it is not circulated back through our own country. In times a slowing economy and the talks of recession, we need this cash flow to go through the United States where it should be used anyways if they are choosing to live in our country. Not only are we forced to pay and blindly stolen from for their “needs”, most illegal immigrants do not learn the native language of English. You cannot pick up a document, flyer, or any written material without a Spanish translation is located on the back. There is a constant mental block when forced to communicate with someone who cannot speak our native language, and in fact it is quite frustrating. Most do not even choose to take the required English Second Language classes to come up to speed with our English speaking nation; in fact it is not required at all! • Deportation
Felicia Lubienski English 1b DW33 Rough Draft August 5, 2008 babybronco26@yahoo.com Evolution Evolution is thought to be impossible in some people’s eyes. It is thought that we come here from a being higher than a human. This is where evolution comes in to play. It is not what everyone believes, but it is for those people who do not believe we come from a higher power. Evolution shows more on how it is possible that we have been on this planet for several thousand years and our ancestors have evolved over time. I am proposing to give enough facts to show that it is possible that we did come from evolving throughout the years. There is a ton of facts that show this is possible and not one hundred percent impossible. There is Charles Darwin, the stages of Evolutionary Forces, a discovery of a biped, and even more evidence to prove that evolution is definitely a possibility to where we may have came from. Charles Darwin was an English naturalist; he was a collector and a geologist who found scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors. He is known as the “father of evolutionary thought.” He was not the first to come up with these theories however, he took different parts from earlier scholars to put them together and his just ended up being the most popular. Charles Darwin’s contributions were evolutionary biology, the philosophy of science, and the modern zeitgeist. In his thoughts on evolutionary biology one of the main notions of branching evolution imply the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single unique origin. This meaning that we did not just evolve from most people believe by having a man of some higher power putting us here, but from species of earlier times that have evolved over time. This is where natural selection comes into play which was founded by not only Darwin, but from Alfred Russell Wallace as well. Natural selection is simply a mechanism that simply eliminated inferior individuals. Another philosopher Herbert Spencer described evolution as “survival of the fittest.” A Darwin quote on natural selection “that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all the good silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers…. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages.” Darwin did however right many books on his theories of evolution. On of the readers that is not a firm believe said this: “If the Darwinian theory is true,” wrote another clergyman, “Genesis is a lie, the whole framework of the book of life falls to pieces and the revelation of God to man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and snare.” Wrote in remark to Darwin’s book The Origin of Species. “Catastrophists supposed that he earth had gone through a series of great floods and other catastrophes that successively extinguished different groups of animals. Only this, they felt, could account for the discovery that higher and lower geological strata had different fossils.” Chevalier de Lamarck studied fossil mollusks. He had a notion that fossils were not evidence of extinct species but of ones that had gradually been transformed into living species. Darwin’s view on evolution: successive slight modifications of species, if continued long enough, can transform it radically. The competition between each specie will impel them to become more different. Each creature tends to become more and more improved in relation to its conditions. This is true considering the fact that is has been proven that dolphins have evolved from a type of land animal, and frogs go from being water to land animals. Darwin however is just the founder of evolution. His natural selection was put together into a group of evolutionary forces that unit together in making evolution possible. The evolutionary forces are the forces that can actually lead to a change in an allele frequency over time. The Evolutionary Forces are Mutation, Natural Selection, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow. The process starts with Mutation which is when a new allele is introduced into a population, which will end up changing different allele frequencies to the point where the change over time. Next comes Natural Selection, which is the genetic variation. In this stage of natural selection is where certain characteristics allow individuals to survive in certain areas. This goes back to the mutation so that we can stand to survive in cold weather, hot weather, or even from certain animals to become sea and land animals. Without this, we wouldn’t have frogs. Frogs is a good example because they start off in the water and somehow end up being able to survive on land. They go through mutation. The next step is the Genetic Drift. The genetic drift is the random changes in allele frequencies from one generation to the next. Today we are seeing a lot of random changes in our lives. From having a simple problem with your heart or being mentally challenged when born. The mutations happen everyday, everywhere around us. The final step in this process is the gene flow. Gene flow is the movement of these alleles from one population to the next. This happens when we move and something is passed to someone new. This happens everyday in today’s world, whether it be a type of flu virus, or HIV. Things are easily passed from one group of people to the next. These changes alone show that we are evolving everyday in this world. No it does not prove that we have evolved from monkeys, but that is the next step in understand another possibility from where we came from. It is thought that humans come from chimpanzee’s that evolved from an earlier species and that from an even earlier one. The reason why this is thought is because humans and chimps have 98% of the same DNA. Which shows that we are almost exactly like them. It is said that this two percent difference is the difference in the brain between human and chimps. The only real difference is that humans can speak and are more intelligent. Chimps also have the capabilities to learn symbols and be humorous when interacting with humans. However there is a small difference between the two brains according to a brainocentric neurobiologist named Robert Sapolsky. Although when looking at the genes, they tell us that humans and chimps might be even more similar than we might think. So with only this small two percent difference why do we not believe it is possible that we have evolved from them over time. Some might say because we are not still evolving today. This evidence has yet to be found exactly why it has stopped, but there are many other facts with good enough anaylsis to prove that we did evolve from a earlier ape like being, just maybe not a chimp; maybe that is where it stopped. Another source to show how close we are to our ancestors is an Australopithecus Afarensis (a primitive hominin found in East Africa, dating between 3.7 million to 3.0 million years ago), also known as “Lucy.” Lucy was one of the first bipeds to be found in our world. Biped meaning that she moved around on two legs and had joints that could move just like humans have today. More describing towards biped is that it means to retain long arms, curved fingers, and curved toes. She also had a cranial capacity that was ape like, which eventually becomes human like through studies. She seemed to be very small almost the size of a child, but the new she was an adult when she died because her third molar teeth had erupted. She is an example of what people might think of some type of caveman or human ape. Although she is not the only biped to be found thus far, more have been found in the site of Hadar in Ethiopia, just not as many parts as “Lucy,” there are just similarities they have found between apes which could possibly been human like. This just shows that there are other possibilities where we could have came from and it shows in times sooner than Christ. It somewhat gives hope to those of us who do not believe in the high power than human, but gives us the opportunity to look at something that could be more natural. Evolution is that natural thing that we have gotten evolving from a biped to a what we are today, which is something magnificent. The question that most people want to know is why we are not still evolving. The only answer to that is that we are still evolving, people are getting genetics that make the different than other people, who knows maybe there is a possibility we will evolve within the next million years, but no one will be here that is here now to witness this miracle. But maybe we wont, maybe the evolving is done and over with now, the only thing that I have to say is that I do agree with evolution and I believe it is possible that it is where we come from. Even if it was some sort of ape. Evolution is something that people should take into consideration, it is a possibility that we have evolved over time to become what we are today. Look at all of the technology we have today, we didn’t have this thirty years ago, our minds keep evolving and people keep becoming more advanced and intelligent. It just goes to show that we keep evolving, even if its not the apes that are changing, its our turn to change into something greater, they’ve had their turn.
Works Cited It wouldn't let me publish my workcited...so its not included.
Because of increased attacks on evolution from advocates of Intelligent Design and creationism, educators should actively seek to make explicit boundaries between evolution and religion, dispelling falsities perpetrated by each side of the debate. This will help to not only decrease theistic hostilities and preserve evolution in our schools, but open up the active learning of evolution to all students, both atheistic and theistic.
First, we must consider what both Intelligent Design and Evolution entail. Intelligent Design theory asserts that there are some biological things which are too complex to explain by natural means. Things which have this “irreducible complexity” prove that only a Designer, or God, could be responsible for them. Most scientists regard Intelligent Design to be the exact same thing as creationism, which is the literal interpretation of the Genesis story in the bible as scientific truth. Creationism was banned from public schools long ago on the basis of the separation of church and state. Intelligent Design advocates, predominantly Christian, assert that evolution is a flawed theory and that complex life could not have evolved from less complex life forms.
The theory of evolution is generally ascribed to Charles Darwin. Although numerous people had thought of parts of evolution up to that point, it was Darwin who put all the pieces together and published the definitive work Origin of Species. While evolutionary biology has come a long way since Darwin, for instance the discovery of DNA and genetics, the basic principles of evolution remain the same. Evolution states that all life forms descended from a single common life form. Because evolution is a scientific theory, it is necessarily limited to only those things which can be observed. Evolution is necessary to the study of the biological sciences. "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"(Dobzhansky).
The hostility between the advocates of these two different explanations for the development of life has been rampant since Darwin first published his book, but has gone through ebbs and tides, and is currently at a high point. There have been numerous cases across the country where theist’s who advocate Intelligent Design want to put Intelligent Design into schools alongside evolution as an alternative explanation for the development of life on earth. At the very least, creationists want teachers to teach evolution as a flawed “theory” which should be religiously questioned and, in effect, not be accepted. As in the case of Kitzmiller vs. Dover School Board, these differences can result in vitriolic hatred, extreme positions, and divisive communities. Evolution as a scientific principle taught in our schools is threatened. The separation between church and state is threatened. Worst of all, the state of education is threatened.
All of this hostility adds up to threats to education. The battles of evolution and intelligent design only serve to undermine evolution and make people believe that evolution is a lie. At some point, it is conceivable that a school board or a court might side with intelligent design and allow it into our schools which would violate not only our scientific sensibilities, but the separation between church and state. All of this hostility also creates a poor environment for education of all students, of all beliefs. Peers are pitted against peers. Children are caught in a fight between church, school and parents. This is a bad learning environment; children who were already averse to learning evolution will be given an authority upon which to rest their aversion. This also creates a poor environment for teachers who have to fight harder to get scientific truth’s accepted as scientific truth’s.
In order to find a solution, we must try to pinpoint where this hostility stems from. From the Christians point-of-view, the biggest argument is that evolution leads to a moral decline. In their article, “Evolving Towards a Compromise”, Amy Binder and Josh Evans assert that this has been the major argument Christians have had against evolution since the beginning. They lay out a timeline and major arguments from Christians who believe that evolution leads directly into a godless society unbounded by morals; moral relativism. But how do Christians take the leap from evolution being taught in schools to moral degradation?
Many Christians believe that evolution promotes atheism and that it is atheism that causes moral degradation. While atheism is not a religion ( it is, in fact, the opposite of religion) many Christians see it as a religion in itself that is a direct threat to their own religion and has no place in schools under the guise of “evolution.” In a way, since Christians see atheism as a religion, then its presence in evolution consists of religion being promoted by the state. In some very specific instances, the court has ruled that atheism can be seen “as” a religion for “legal purposes.” While these cases are extremely narrow and tend to focus on providing people the right to practice atheism, it is not a stretch to believe that in time the recognition/ of specific types of atheism as a religion might take place. In very narrow circumstances, some experts view the practice of atheism as a religion. Atheism, for Christians, leads to moral degradation because it makes humans all “animals” with no sense of right and wrong and with no moral guidance from a higher being or a religious text. So are these fears of atheism as a competing religion founded? (Need to address moral degradation = atheism…why this belief???)
In some instances, yes. Michael Ruse, a prominent philosopher of biology and an evolutionist, says, “Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
While many evolutionists are men and women of deep faith, some of the most vocal and outspoken advocates of evolution are also outspoken atheists who actively work to “convert” people from religion into atheism. The most famous of these is Richard Dawkins. An Oxford professor. Richard Dawkins most recent book is Delusions of God. His website offers flyers, intended for distribution to promote his book, which say “Imagine No Religion”. He is a vocal and proud atheist who talks about how he became an atheist. “I toyed with atheism from the age of about nine, originally because I worked out that, of all the hundreds of religions in the world, it was the sheerest accident that I was brought up Christian. They couldn’t all be right, so maybe none of them was. I later reverted to a kind of pantheism when I realized the shattering complexity and beauty of the living world. Then, around the age of 16, I first understood that Darwinism provides an explanation big enough and elegant enough to replace gods. I have been an atheist ever since.” He has a DVD available which talks about the problem with religion and which has on its cover a cross inscribed with the title “The Root of All Evil?” Clearly, Professor Dawkins has taken the leap from the science of evolution to a conclusion of his own that religion and God are false. Because of his prestige as a professor and as an advocate of evolution, it is easy to see how the idea of atheism has become entwined with evolution. In his book, Haught states that, “Much of the ambiguity expressed in the various denominational reactions to Darwin can be explained by the fact that scientist’s themselves have often presented evolution as inherently atheistic” (40).
William Provine, another prominent evolutionist, has said “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear -- and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.”
This is the foundation for the religious rejection of evolution and is one of the greatest travesties ever put upon the American people. These scientists have bounded not only their methods and conclusions within science, but also their minds and philosophies, and are incapable of thinking beyond naturalism. While science must remain bounded in the natural world, there is no reason why the human mind shouldn’t be able to go further, especially in search of things as yet incapable of being explained by science. Messages such as these, which move beyond science into necessitated atheism, should necessarily not be allowed in schools. These scientists have moved beyond what science and evolution can tell us and into a realm of their own beliefs. The voices of moderation are not nearly so vocal. Kenneth Miller, a witness in the Dover case and prominent evolutionist, “cautions both people of theistic faith and scientists that science can neither prove nor disprove God.”
This atheistic vision of evolution implies to the uneducated mind, and even the educated mind, that science, and evolution in particular, has disproven God. That God is false. While Darwin’s theory has opened new worlds to those who do not believe in a God, the overarching implication that atheism is necessary to “believe” in evolution is a horrifying statement to those of deep religious belief. If this is the message they are getting from society and scientists, then it is no wonder that they do not wish their children to hear this same message. While it is a big assumption, perhaps this is also part of the reason why they try so hard to promote a literal interpretation of the bible and push creationism, as a way to scientifically assert themselves against scientific bullies who claim they have disproved God (totally speculative). Whether or not Christians know the falsity of this statement, it makes no difference as they cannot be sure that their children, who are young and impressionable, will be able to distinguish the falsity. The falsity is that science cannot prove or disprove God, and that claiming atheism as fact or undeniable based on evolution is a fallacy, perhaps as much as claiming Christianity as fact based on the bible. Educators may, consciously or unconsciously, leave this inferred truth in the minds of children who do not fully understand what science is, what religion is, and how the two intersect.
Allowing this false idea to lie implicit in our science courses and in our general public has further fueled an already burning hostility. Scientists and educators may overstep the bounds of science to imply that science is all there is, and that God has been disproven, or, at best, only exists as a construct of man. This is as unacceptable as Christians trying to assert the book of genesis as a scientific text for the general public to prove that God does exist. Christians, along with many scientists, have claimed the unfounded belief that evolution goes hand in hand with atheism.
In our educational system, in our entire society, we make attempts to accommodate religions of every kind. Whether it is special meals for Jewish or Buddhist children, or special dress codes for Muslim or Sikh children, or special allowances such as for Jehovah’s Witness who do not wish to say the pledge of allegiance, we should make every attempt to dispel this falsity from our classrooms and make our communities and classrooms better, less hostile places, for not only teaching evolution, but for learning evolution, for people of all faiths.
It is important that we clearly demarcate the boundaries of science and explicitly separate science from religion. This would help to not only affirm the scientific status and basis of evolution, but serve to decrease hostilities and create a better learning environment. This would allow all religions, not just Christianity, to remain intact in each individual. This idea is both simple and feasible.
A statement could be written by and approved by local school boards and biology teachers. This statement would similar to the one promoted by the Dover School Board, only this statement would work to affirm the status of evolution as scientifically sound, and then go on to state the explicit boundaries between science and religion. It would in some way include these necessities. First, Evolution is a scientific fact and is necessary for understanding biology. Second, that science is bounded by naturalism and science can only report on what is observable and must seek natural causes and mechanisms. Third, evolution can neither authoritatively prove nor disprove god and should not be used as a tool to promote either religion or atheism.
Hopefully, this statement will not only allow theists to feel more secure in their beliefs, it will also prevent any teachers from consciously or unconsciously stepping over the boundaries of science and implicitly asserting that evolution disproves god. Hopefully it will also open up educational attitudes for learning science. This statement will make knowledge about science explicit so that implicit arguments or inferences made in class cannot take hold. This statement will not only separate religion from science, but also church from state, while at the same time allowing religion to remain cleaved to each individual. There is no reason to abandon religion to pursue an education, and as a country that ensures religious freedom, we should ensure it remains so. Hopefully it will also open doors for religious students to not only learn evolution in a safe environment, but to begin integrating it, if they so choose, with their faith. To break down hostilities and barriers to science, education, and knowledge.
Some may argue that this solution “panders” to religion and religiously ignorant attitudes. For example, in his book Gordy Slack says that changing the title of a class from the “origins of life” to “origins of species” is somehow pandering to creationists, but I disagree. First, the “origin of life” is still disputed today, so truly science can only teach with any certainty the development of life and origin of species. Also, by explicitly recognizing the boundaries of both science and religion, we are washing away ignorance. Hopefully, it will quell flames which have been stoked by ignorance. We will hopefully open up the world of science to those who before might have thought they had to choose between religion and science. This will make a safer, more tolerant, more knowledgeable base of students. This statement and general set of attitudes I have proposed only reflects scientific facts and in no way panders to religion or compromises science. It only washes away ignorance and wrong inferences which have been propagated by parties on both sides of the debate.
Many have promoted the use of alternatives such as opt-out, home school or private school. However, I feel these solutions are not enough because they leave false assumptions, ignorance, and hostility intact. All children should be able to learn, if not embrace, evolution. We can make this a reality.
By adopting strategies to wash away ignorance, ease hostilities, and explicitly state the boundaries of science, educators can help ease theist students into a welcome environment for learning evolution. Both science and religion are important parts of American society and each deserve respect. Hopefully this compromise can lead the way to reduce hostility and attacks on evolution in schools.
Joe Gallegos English 1b – [dw#33] Essay #5 – Research – Rough Draft August 5, 2008 Evolution: Fact or Fiction? Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has been the predominant theory of the origin of man since 1859. The strength of Darwin’s theory comes from the information and facts gathered to back it up. Since its conception, evolution has become the accepted scientific belief that all species have evolved through a process called natural selection, the process in which nature preserves and accumulates a species functional and advantageous abilities and kills off traits of lesser beneficial value. Even though Darwin’s theory has been widely accepted in the field of science, it has yet to be accepted in religious circles. Since Darwin presented his theory, it has been a topic of great and almost hostile debate between the Church and State. Concerns promptly arose surrounding the validity of Darwin’s research. With the current advancements in science, is it possible that scientists have found Darwin’s theory to be inaccurate? Have these same advancements allowed us to prove him right? Will Darwin’s theory of Evolution become the undisputed fact of man’s origin? Science, in any form, is based on an accumulation of facts in which one may draw a theory or conclusion about a given subject. Is evolution a theory? Is it a fact? The definition of fact is a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true. Facts have to be verifiable pieces of evidence, which can be proven over and over again by different people. (Wikipedia, Evolution as Theory and Fact). Proven facts then go on to become laws of science. The theory of evolution has not been concidered a law of science due to abnormalities in research data. Since evolution has not been fully proven, how has the evolution theory become so popular and accepted without one hundred percent bullet proof evidence to back it up? Why has this theory, rather than other theories, such as Creationism, become the canon teaching for our science classes? It is because evolution offers the closest solid scientific research based idea of our origin. The theory of evolution has followed the process of scientific method to an extent which public schools can deem teachable. On the other hand, Creationism is a faith based concept which can not be supported by scientists. Creationism also falls into the category of the separation of church and state; therefore it is not allowed to be taught in our public school systems. Scientists are constantly searching for the undeniable truth, this will either prove evolution or debunk faith based Creationism. If proven wrong Darwin’s theory would leave the door open for many other ideas like a creator, a greater being, God. “Our faith in the doctrine of Evolution depends upon our reluctance to accept the antagonistic doctrine of special creation [creation by God]” (quoted by Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, p. 109). There are three proofs in which Darwinism is built. The first one is the fossil record. Darwin thought that he would be able to find the transformation of species in the fossil strata. This was a vital piece to his puzzle. Darwin states in his own book On the Origin of Species, “The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory” (p. 319-320). Through his own research, Darwin found that the fossil findings did not necessarily lend a helping hand to his theory. He surmounted that geologists would eventually uncover fossils remains that would provide facts for his theory, but there have been no conclusive findings as yet. The second proof concerned natural selection. Darwin used Nature’s way of weeding out bad genes to illustrate how evolution would occur. This does occur in nature the strong survive, but how long would it take for one species to evolve into a higher being? The third proof of Darwin’s theory was added after his death by his colleagues. They believed that random mutation mixed with natural selection would cause new species to form (Seiglie). Since Darwin presented these proofs, none of them have been proven with any scientific facts. The only evidence that has been found is merely the fossils of sea creatures in certain layers of rock. There are no other layers that show these same creatures having evolved from one species to another. In fact, scientists have found that insects have remained the same throughout an entire geological column. Other findings have shown a layer of fossils that contain a wide variety of animal remains that are not present in other layers. This would suggest that there was a large occurrence of creation bringing these animals into being which could possibly support the Creationism theory. Those who believe in Darwin’s theory are at a loss as to how so many new forms appeared at once. “Orthodox Darwinism offers a plausible biological explanation for what might have happened, but is in conflict with the evidence of geology. And the alternative theory accepts the geological record, but cannot explain how species could arise so suddenly” (Creation and Evolution, p. 19). Creationists argue that no one has been able to find proof that one organism has changed into another organism and Darwinians argue that there are no facts that God exists or had anything to do with creation. Both parties have not been able to present facts to support either of their theories. However, science has made some progress they have recently found discoveries in the fossil record that might be able to prove that humans might have evolved from apelike ancestors. The natural selection idea turns out not to be a strong proof because it doesn’t change the species. It has to do with survival and not the arrival of a new species. This part of his theory was pretty much swept under the carpet and discredited. As for the random mutation proof, scientists have changed their minds about that. They now feel it was a weak theory. With Darwin’s theory of evolution being so closely scrutinized, it is obvious that scientists are starting to reject it completely and are looking for a better one to replace it. They have not found one, but the creator theory has not been ruled out. They believe in some sort of creation or creator, but they feel that the Darwin theory should not carry so much weight. This theory was presented so many years ago and maybe we should take a closer look and reevaluate our ideas and come up with some real facts as to how creation happened.
Debbie K. Maxwell Eng1B Class 12215 [dw#33] Essay #5
Rough Draft
Greek biographer Plutarch once said that “perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.” It is important not to infringe on the rights of free speech that are so highly valued and honored in this nation; however, some situations are still in need of resolve. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) needs to take a step towards protecting the children of this country by the simple act of airing violent television shows after primetime hours, thus reducing the amount of violence seen by children through the media. Through the viewing of statistics on violent acts committed by young teenagers, examining in more detail this simple action’s benefits, and pointing out how it will impede the possibility of future government involvement, this proposal proves itself worthy of attention. Television can be a powerful influence in developing value systems and shaping behavior in children. In the 1960’s and 70’s it was very common for schools to utilize what was known then as the “audio visual” aid, of movies in the classrooms to help students learn. Today it’s used more for entertainment. Television programming today, is very violent. Hundreds of studies have been done on the effects of Television violence on children and teenagers. The studies have shown conclusively that children who view these violent programs can become immune or numb to it as well as gradually believing that violence is the best way to solve their problems or disagreements. As any parent knows, children love to copy and identify with their favorite cartoon character. Children, who view these violent shows frequently, are more likely to imitate the behavior of what they see. (Josephson). It’s also been validated that children that already have emotional, behavioral or learning disabilities are even more influenced by the television violence. The evidence does not always magnify itself in the early years, but can be delayed and surface years later. For example, there have been literally hundreds of studies examining the connection between media violence and violence in real-life. The results from six of the nation's top public health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the American Medical Association: "Well over 1000 studies… point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children" (American Academy of Pediatrics). The benefits of having the FCC move the more violent programs to a later time slot, which would typically then include a more adult audience, are staggering. We have only to look at those children who act out aggressively…. The results can be deadly. Technological advances have dramatically increased the availability of violent entertainment today. When television was first introduced, it became a critical part in making violent entertainment more available to children. More recently, cable systems and video games have increased exposure. You can now view “actual crimes” in progress with the help from hand-held cameras. Not long after American households started viewing television, there was a dramatic increase in violent crime (Felson). Another experiment done where, television viewing and aggressive behavior were assessed over a 17-year interval in a community sample of 707 individuals. There was a significant association between the amount of time spent watching television during adolescence and early adulthood and the likelihood of subsequent aggressive acts against others. This association remained significant after previous aggressive behavior, childhood neglect, family income, neighborhood violence, parental education, and psychiatric disorders were taken into account as well (American
There are a myriad of news articles filled with children committing copy-cat crimes. After the crime lab and research has been completed, it has been found that the child was inspired by some horror film or violent video game. For example, the infamous case of “the Columbine murders.” in which some analysts argued “that part of the killers' problem may have been desensitized due to their constant exposure to violent imagery in such video games, as well as music and movies, theorizing that their obsession with these forms of media may have led them to depersonalization.” American media compared the massacre to a fantasy sequence from the 1995 film The Basketball Diaries in which protagonist Leonardo Di Caprio wears a black trench coat and shoots six classmates in his school's hallways. In a study done, the evidence indicated that a mass media violence triggers a brief, sharp increase in U.S. homicides. Immediately after heavyweight championship prize fights, 1973-1978, U.S. homicides increased by 12.46%. The increase is greatest after heavily publicized prize fights. After exhaustive findings and tests, the evidence suggests that heavyweight prize fights stimulate fatal, aggressive behavior in some Americans (Phillips). Another study showed that U.S. suicides increase after publicized suicide stories. These findings have been replicated again and again with American and Dutch data. The rise occurs mainly in the geographic area where the suicide story is publicized. The more publicity (television news), given to the suicide story, the more suicides rise thereafter. Another great concern over the amount of violence on television and the increasing crime statistics among young people could potentially lure our Government into getting involved. Our country does not need one more government program or bureau to be implemented at our expense. Yes, I would certainly like to see the FCC involved in the management of the time frame adjustment for those violent programs, but not our government, as they have in some recent issues such as maintaining the weight of Americans. When television was first introduced to the American family in the 1950’s only 5% of American households had a television set. By 1960, that figure had risen to about 90% of American homes. With the arrival of television came the responsible groups like the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR), which sponsored journals and articles that focused on examining the various programs and classifying them by coding categories. The NCFR was initiated in 1950 and focused on content analyses of the material presented in television programs (i.e., habits, educational applications, etc). Each article was reviewed by at least two authors and assigned to one of the three categories. Agreement between the coders was achieved in all cases. Only 22 articles pertaining to television have appeared in the NCFR journals since 1950. Of these 22 articles, 8 were found to focus on effects of television, 2 focused on content and 12 focused on how television was used. After reviewing this account, it became quite clear that there was very little material devoted on the topic of content. There are no “watch-dogs” monitoring the media, for children who are usually home unattended and able to freely turn on any type of violent program. I am concerned that as the crime rate continues to increase among children and adolescents, and as the television shows continue to get more violent, it is a fact that our government will feel it necessary to get involved We will begin seeing the headlines of more bureaucracy being put into action. Today television sponsors play a significant part in determining what broadcast standards are. They have tremendous abilities to influence programming decisions, even greater than the FCC. If advertisers are willing to buy time on certain shows with more violence, the television stations will sell them the time. “Advertisers must use this unique position of influence to encourage greater restraint in the depictions of violence on prime time television “ (Parents TV.org). By reviewing the statistics and acknowledging that violence on prime time television is damaging to our children, our cities and our world, is worth our time and perseverance in being willing to put forth the effort in what it will take to have the violent television programs moved to a non-prime time hour.
Works Cited Felson, Richard B. Mass Media Effects on Violent Behavior . Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 22, (1996), pp. 103-128 Annual Reviews http://www.jstor.org/stable/2083426 American Academy of Pediatrics. Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children. 26 July 2000. Congressional Public Health Summit http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/jstmtevc.htm
Johnson, Jeffrey G. “Television Viewing and Aggressive Behavior during Adolescence and Adulthood.” American Association for the Advancement of Science 295.5564. 2002: 2468-2471. JSTOR. 5 August 2008. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3076178
Josephson, Wendy L. Television Violence: A Review of the effects on Children of Different Ages. p 48. http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ncfv-cnivf/familyviolence/pdfs/tvviol.pdf
Fabes, Richard A. “A Time to Reexamine the Role of Television in Family Life.” Family Relations. 38.3. 1989: 337-341. JSTOR. 5 August 2008. National Council on Family Relations.
Phillips, David P. “The Impact of Mass Media Violence on U.S. Homicides.” American Sociological Review. 48.4. 1983: 560-568. JSTOR. 5 August 2008. American Sociological Association.
Re-Search / Argument of Proposal Rough Draft Passengers under Surveillance “The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,” said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco, CA, after he found out that the officer at the border control included a note in Gilmore’s file that he carried a marihuana-related book, “Drugs and Your Rights”(The Washington Post). Airline passengers are inspected by the so-called Automated Targeting System (ATS) which is operational since the late 1990s and used to collect records on millions of people, not just Americans, who fly, drive or take cruises heading in or out of the country. However, the public was not clearly informed about its existence till 2006. The U.S. Congress should revise the passenger screening policies because they are violating people’s privacy rights. The stored records include information on one’s race, the phone numbers given as emergency contact, flight details, credit card information, and they even keep track of the books one is carrying. A Wired Magazine and Washington Post article revealed that the government not only uses a passenger screening program on airports, but they keep and store all the information for years. The ATS, along with the government’s other passenger screening project, known as the Secure Flight, are opposed by civil libertarians, who say that the government’s data collection effort violates the Privacy Act, “which bars the gathering of data related to Americans’ exercise their First Amendment Rights, such as their choice of reading material, or persons, with whom to associate” (The Washington Post). The ATS was primarily designed to help border inspectors decide which passengers are suspicious. Russ Knocke, the spokesman of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that the Department is not interested in the passengers’ reading or other habits, however if the person’s behavior or the items he is carrying might become suspicious in any way for the border inspector, he is allowed to start some additional scrutiny, but it is “uncommon for the officer to document interactions with a traveler that merited additional scrutiny” (The Washington Post). Having said that and reading some data the officers were collecting about travelers reveals that the DHS database includes “Passenger Name Record,” PNR-information, which has the names of the persons connected with the traveler somehow, addresses, credit card information, telephone and e-mail contact details, itineraries, hotel and car reservations and according to Ellen Nakashima, a Washington Post staff writer, even the type of bed requested in a hotel. Besides the PNR-information other notes taken by the inspection officers are also stored in a governmental database. This massive database just started to exist in 2007, when the government established direct electronic links between airline and governmental databases. The system connects data from intelligence, law enforcement and other databases and recognizes possible terrorists. This cause and purpose would even be worth to answer some random additional questions asked by inspectors and to let them go through one’s hand baggage three times at the same airport. However, people might be more outraged if they knew that the government will keep every record, inspection notes and every kind of detailed personal information in their database for at least forty years. Some already raised voice against this, arguing that for instance their family members’ phone numbers, who are not even travelling together with the certain passenger, end up being in a governmental database. “This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth” – said James P. Harrison, director of the Identity Project, a group established by privacy advocates (The Washington Post). You might also want to watch what you’re telling to the border inspectors because the government not just sees and hears everything, but it will also not forget easily. The U.S. administration also wants to introduce some new security measures for international flights heading to the U.S. They demand to put armed guards on all flights from Europe (The Guardian). Giving out the personal data from all passengers, and even from the relatives or friends who are allowed to escort travelers beyond departure barriers, raise a dispute and opposition against the U.S. proposition. Most of the EU countries are against this idea, however Greece and the Check Republic are willing to sign the agreement, and this way they will be allowed to enter to U.S. without a visa. Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary said in a conference in August, 2006 that “if we learned anything from September, 11, 2001, it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information.” After September 11, they used credit card and telephone records to identify the terrorists’ connections, but their ultimate goal is to have the necessary tools that might help track down potential terrorists and those in connection with them. This is the sublime version which people also consider to be their government’s duty: to keep safe not just the borders, but also every citizen, and low-risk traveler. Knocke, the DHS spokesman also confirmed that an additional program, called DHS Trip was also implemented “to provide redress” for those travelers who already had problems at the screening points (The Washington Post). David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation -whose goal is “defending freedom in the digital world”-, said that the problem with this system is that a DHS Trip agency decision cannot be challenged in court and travelers have no right to change false information collected about them (The Washington Post). There are many stories on different forums created by regular people who just wanted to discuss the difficulties and hassle they had to undergo while processing their data on airports. The Washington Post reported that Zakarya Reed, a Toledo firefighter has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since 2006. He told in an interview that the border officials were questioning him about those two “politically charged” articles he published in his local newspaper and were written on the U.S. policy in the Middle East (The Washington Post). Last time I checked free speech was a First Amendment right, so it seems that the government wants to track down possible terrorists, but also to control their citizens’ opinion. Civil libertarians are against the passenger screening system. According to Bill Scannel, the spokesman of the Identity Project, “they [the government] want people to get permission to travel” (Wired Magazine). The Secure Flight Program initiated by the DHS wanted to screen domestic flight passengers inside the U.S. by comparing passenger information with the data purchased from private companies, but this plan finally changed under the pressure of civil organizations. All the information gathered by the screening systems end up in a governmental database and can be used for decades, which is just not right and maybe not even legal. Several rules and regulations were introduced after 9/11 that violate privacy rights. It is expected from the government to protect the residents from possible attacks, but by keeping everyone under surveillance and having the right to look into everyone’s private information, the government is overstepping its bounds. People must know about these privacy issues, so let’s get more acquainted with the rights guaranteed by the Amendments, thus this was the government has a smaller chance to trick pr exploit the people.
Doodles are a great way to understand someone. Do they doodle with curves or rigid, harsh lines? This translates to whether they are relaxed and contemplative, or frustrated and stressed. Art has been a form of therapy for some time. There are many ways to understand the brain and change behaviors and thoughts. Some processes deal with current behaviors and thoughts; some deal with solely past thoughts and behaviors. One must consider the definitions of the unconscious, the types of psychoanalysis, and art therapy. It is also important to understand the positive aspects of art therapy: universal application to patients, inclusion of the past and present, and the filter-less nature of drawing. I advocate that art therapy should be used as the primary form of psychoanalysis because of its detailed representation of the unconscious.
To understand the effectiveness of any type of psychotherapy, it is essential to first understand what is meant by the unconscious. Our perception is split into two parts: a conscious and an unconscious. The first part, the conscious, is the part of our being that we are aware of at all times. It is when we know what is happening, when we can process information, and when we can collect information from within our brains, that we are conscious. On the contrary, the unconscious is a state of being during which information and events are not “remembered”. The brain does not process or recollect the actual occurrences. For example, many times people that have experienced extreme trauma as a child, suppress that memory into their unconscious. They have no recollection of the event, but their behavior is still affected by it. Carl Jung, in his book, Man and His Symbols, stated, “the unconscious consists of a multitude of temporarily obscured thoughts, impressions and images that, in spite of being lost, continue to influence our conscious minds” (1). These thoughts and images form part of our being. They are things that become suppressed and stored in the far reaches of our brain. Through therapy, one can gain access to the unconscious and not only understand one’s current behavior, but even change it. The unconscious is a powerful thing that can lead to great insight into a person’s behavior, personality and being.
Knowing the background and definition of psychoanalysis is equally as important as understanding what the unconscious represents. Psychoanalysis is a collective process of gathering information from a person’s unconscious, analyzing that data and deciding on an appropriate therapy to correct the person’s behavior, thoughts or ideas. According to the American Psychoanalytic Association, “there are currently diverse approaches to treatment within psychoanalysis, yet these approaches all share the aim of helping patients bring to their consciousness what is unconscious or difficult to acknowledge”(2). By utilizing therapy, psychoanalysts can determine what is first in the unconscious and then develop a plan to help the person gain more self awareness. By pulling the information from the unconscious to the conscious through psychoanalysis, psychologists are helping the patient towards self-actualization and behavior change. This is an important concept; it is the idea of the unconscious and psychoanalysis that help us to understand and correct behavior.
There are a myriad of psychoanalytical processes. Each has a unique style and purpose and some are more effective than others. There are two types of psychoanalysis: those dealing with the conscious and those dealing with the unconscious. The processes that affect the conscious correct the current thoughts and behaviors of a person. Cognitive therapy is a process that focuses on changing one’s patterns of thought. It is mainly a source of therapy for present problems, not including problems in one’s past (3). Similarly, behavior therapy focuses on current issues with behavior, correcting them by positive reinforcement and desensitization.
Besides the therapies that deal solely with the present, there are some that are designed to work on the unconscious or suppressed being. These processes include hypnosis, free association and art therapy. The first, hypnosis, is used to direct a person back into their unconscious and verbally communicate the thoughts, behaviors and ideas of their unconscious. Second, free association is a written process. A person enters a somewhat-hypnotic state, clear of conscious mind, and freely writes whatever comes out of their unconscious. Finally, there is art therapy, the process of representing unconscious thoughts and ideas through art. This includes drawing, painting, and even dancing. Each process appeals to a different sensory process: verbal, written and visual. These therapies each analyze the thoughts and ideas of the unconscious.
Art therapy is a specific psychoanalytical process that I propose to be the most effective. In order to understand and agree with that argument, it is first necessary to more accurately define art therapy. Art therapy is drawing, doodling, painting, or any visual, pictorial representation of unconscious symbols, feelings and behaviors. According to Mayo Clinic, the purpose of art therapy is to, “increase self awareness, cope with symptoms and traumatic experiences, and foster positive changes”(3). Art therapy, like any other form of psychoanalytical process is used to discover undiscovered, deeply-hidden thoughts and ideas within a person. Then, through pictorial or visual representation, the person can understand their issues and correct their thought process or behaviors. These symbols are a window into a person’s unconscious for the psychologist. Art therapy provides the therapist with information that the patient may be afraid of sharing or simply, completely unaware of its existence.
Similar to the idea that there are many different ways people can learn, there are also many ways a person’s unconscious can be understood. Some processes are better than others. Art therapy is the most effective and all-encompassing psychoanalytical process for unconscious discovery and understanding. According to Jung, “because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend” (1). By using symbols, doodles and art therapy, one can understand more about themselves and other people than is possible with simple verbal interaction. There are many reasons that art therapy is more effective than other processes. These include comfort levels of the patients, broad range of ages, races, and social status included, and the ability to work with the past as well as the present.
One of the most decisive reasons art therapy should be the principal process to discover unconscious information, is the incorporation of a variety of people. Art therapy is a process that is all-inclusive. It is a procedure based on symbolic representation, “Regardless of culture or geographic location, certain symbols have similar if not exactly the same meaning across the human spectrum” (4). Art Therapy is not hindered by language, education level, age or culture. There are no obstructing factors to doodling. Despite the person’s background or personal information, a symbol represents something specific: a desire, frustration, idea, or behavior. They are universal. On the contrary, the therapy process of free association is a problem for some people. According to www.abc.net, in their scientific research they found that, “a particular subgroup of teens, with problems such as low literacy, did not respond well to conventional approaches to cognitive behavior therapy” (5). Any person, unable to read, or having a low vocabulary, would be unable to effectively represent their unconscious thoughts. Art therapy, being drawing, painting and interpreting doodles, allows for no obstructions and a clearer view of the unconscious mind. Therapy should not be something that is limited to a certain type of person or distributed to the elite only. It is a process that should be considered for anyone willing to fully realize his/herself. Using symbols and doodles can include people such as the low literacy teens, aforementioned.
Another reason art therapy should be the premier psychoanalytical process is that it includes both the past and the present. Unlike cognitive and behavioral therapy, art therapy can be used to understand the consciousness of the person’s past and present. Cognitive and behavioral therapies aim to understand the present unconscious and change current thoughts and behaviors. Doodling and symbolic representations can give insight to the reasons a person’s behavior and thoughts are the way they are, by interpreting what the symbol means about the person’s past. This process is also free of personal restriction. According to www.enchandtedmind.com, “Doodling allows the unconscious to come to the surface without judgment or critical analysis from the conscious mind”(6). When simply discussing one’s problems, issues, or frustrations, there is always a certain amount of interruption by the conscious and feelings of guilt, unworthiness, or discomfort. By using art as a form of therapy, the patient is more likely to be comfortable and therefore, truthful. Honesty during therapy is essential, as it is the only way to truly uncover the unconscious.
Drawing or doodling is a simple task and not many people are aware of how much information can be retrieved through this information. There is no filter when drawing. Similarly, “doodling allows the unconscious to render in symbolic expression. Symbols have universal as well as personal meaning.” (6) The ideas represented in art therapy are not only ideas that are represented commonly, across cultures, ages and social status, but also on a personal level. A symbol can represent something, but the size, decoration and skew can represent something personal. For example, Steve Martin drew a doodle of an arrow. Typically, universally, an arrow represents direction, or knowing your direction. The arrow that Steve Martin drew was a funny arrow, like the one that can be put on your head to look like you have an arrow piercing through your skull: in one side and out the other (as seen below).
This symbol, not only represents the fact that Steve Martin has direction (as evidenced by his successful acting career), but that his direction is comedic (7). His arrow represents, through his unconscious, his inner desire to entertain. Symbols and doodles are filter-free representations of the unconscious; they have the ability to universally represent a person’s feelings or ideas without the barrier of past versus present.
Art therapy is effective for all races, ages, genders and social levels. It is a form of therapy that includes thoughts and behaviors of both the past and the present. Art therapy creates an open environment for the conscious to pull thoughts out of the unconscious, free from the normal filtering of the conscious mind. Unlike other psychotherapies, art therapy can be used for any personal case: young, old, illiterate, college educated, African, American and anyone in between. Its universality in discovering and understanding the unconscious is precisely the reason I propose that art therapy should be the primary therapy for psychoanalysts.
Work Cited 1. Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols. 2. (http://www.apsa.org/ABOUTPSYCHOANALYSIS/tabid/202/Default.aspx#conscious). 3. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/psychotherapy/MH00009 4. http://www.enchantedmind.com/html/creativity/techniques/art_of_doodling.html 5. www.abc.net 6. www.enchandtedmind.com 7. www.zorrapredictions.com
11 comments:
Matthew Lujan
August 3, 2008
English 1B
DW#33 Essay #5 Rough Draft
The Imaginary Orient
“All propaganda must be so popular and on such an intellectual level, that even the most stupid of those toward whom it is directed will understand it…through clever and constant application of propaganda, people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise” –Adolf Hitler, Mein Kamft
There has always existed the human drive to differentiate him from “the other”, as Simone de Beauvoir theorized. This manifests into forms of racial, religious, cultural, and sexual distinctions. Yet, these psychological tensions often convert into power struggles, such as acts of slavery, war, and genocide. But the most exacerbated exoticism has been that of the mythical “Orient” by the West (The United States and Europe, respectively). The portrayal of Islamic peoples in Western film, art, print media, and television has a direct correlation with the West’s foreign policy. Since the beginning, the West’s intent has been to demonize Islamic society as a strategy to coerce public opinion through the media to supplement government policy in the Middle East.
Orientalism: The Early Beginnings of the Propaganda
According to Edward Said, “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and “the Occident” (Orientalism 2). This distinction initiated with the plight of French painters to the Middle East, whom returned from their perilous journeys with artwork presumed to reflect the everyday realities of the Middle East. Yet, the question begs to be asked, whose reality are we talking about? The reality of those in the painting, or their perceived reality by the painter? When dealing with French Orientalism, it is most defiantly the prior. Inconsistency is found in the absence of history, scenes of work, and Western presence in these supposed “realities” (Nochlin 33-57). Take for instance, Jean-Leon Gerome’s Snake Charmer. Gerome presents an image of lazy, sloth-like, childish people who have nothing better to do all day than charm snakes. Adding to their “otherness” is the position in which the characters are placed. The boy has his back turned away from the audience, alienating himself and his spectators from the viewer. The spectators are highly exaggerated, donning turbans, walking sticks, and layered clothing against a wall enlaced with Turkish tiles and Arabic lettering across it. The charmer himself is highly eroticized, portrayed nude, clad only with his snake, his bare feet under a Persian rug, and exhibiting his rear end to the world. The stillness of the work suggests that this “Oriental world” is without change, “a world of timeless, atemporal customs and rituals” (Nochlin 36), untouched by the Western colonial, which aides the painter to persuade his audience that what is depicted is an unchanging reality, regardless of Western presence.
The Near East is not just seen as a mystical, forbidden place, but also a space where suppressed passions can be acted out. Not that the Middle East wasn’t oversexed before the Orientalists arrived; the Near East was sinominous with harems, and half-clad belly dancers willing to sexually entice their male audience for money. Women were seen as sub-human, their only raison d’être to please and be dominated by men. No other work portrays this better than Eugene Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus, where he, in accordance to the assumption shared by men of his class and time, established that men were naturally entitled to the bodies of certain women (Nochlin 42). In the work, the Assyrian ruler Sardanapalus, who, upon hearing of his defeat, had all his precious possessions, including his women, destroyed, and then went up in flames with them. The impassioned brushstrokes show an intricate involvement in the work, and the warm, enticing colors seduce the viewer to join in the “erotic extremism, and the fulfillment of sadistic impulses” within the painting (Nochlin 43). Yet, the viewer can distance himself, for he cannot see past the “Oriental” tones of the painting. For him, it reflects the Oriental reality of the connection between sexual possession and murder as an assertion of absolute enjoyment (Nochlin 43). Thus, the old saying goes, “Touch, but don’t taste, taste, but don’t swallow”. Delacroix’s work is based on the presumption that the Middle East is a man’s playground, and by painting such a scene, he can excuse the sexual violence depicted based on the notion that it is reality.
The sadistic and vicious themes of the Orientalist movement were accepted because they were made with a chilly and remote pseudoscientific naturalism. In The Slave Market, Jean-Leon Gerome depicts an antique slave market, in which a fully nude, light-skinned slave girl is being evaluated by a potential customer. The buyers are presumably of Arab origin, dressed in layers of “Islamic” garb and head coverings. One of the buyers sensually sticks his two fingers into the girl’s mouth, as others look on unashamedly. In the background there are women watching children, covered from head to toe in the traditional Islamic coverings while other buyers rush the market behind them. This display of naked, powerless women to clothed, powerful men has a voyeuristic sensation to it, like that which might be found in the basement of a video store, not in an open-air market. Not to mention the implication of selling a light-skinned girl to dark-skinned men, the preconceived notion of darker races being barbaric, backwards, and immoral and light-skinned races as being moral and just. The work was given an Oriental setting as to divide, as Samuel Huntington has called, “The West and the Rest”, the Christian world from the Islamic world, respectively. It taps into touchy subjects such as the slave trade and womanly innocence so that the audience will be enraged at seeing such a sight and never be able to empathize with Islamic cultures, for they will have a preconceived notion of the Islamic world as a perverse, uncivilized society. (Ironically, the West (presumably Europe and America) has a long history of slavery, and didn’t give women equal rights until the 20th century).
The undertones of the Orientalist movement are simple. “Orientalizing in this case—is the certify that the people encapsulated by it, defined by its presence, are irredeemably different from, more backward than, and culturally inferior to those who construct and consume the picturesque product. They are irrevocably “Other” (Nochlin 51).
Hollywood’s Stereotype
Hollywood is the most influential entertainment industry in the world. It is the source of cultural identity and fame of Americans and viewers abroad. Yet, it has successfully defamed the Arab people for a century, unbeknownst to many audiences. What was once passively accepted is now being called into question, why Hollywood vilifies the Arab community.
“The popular caricature of the average Arab is a s mythical as the old portrait of the Jew. He is robed and turbaned, sinister and dangerous, engaged mainly in hijacking airplanes and blowing up public buildings. It seems that the human race cannot discriminate between a tiny minority of persons who may be objectionable and the ethnic strain from which they spring. If the Italians have the Mafia, all Italians are suspect; if the Jews have financiers, all Jews are part of an international conspiracy; if the Arabs have fanatics, all Arabs are violent. In the world today, more than ever, barriers of this kind must be broken, for we are all more alike than we are different. –Sydney Harris
Of all Hollywood’s films, “more than 900 feature films display Arab characters” (Shaheen 10), and of those 900 films, hundreds of them contain uncontested slurs, calling Arabs: “assholes”, “bastards”, “camel-dicks”, “Pigs”, “devil-worshipers”, “jackels”, “rats”, “rag-heads”, “towel-heads”, “scum-buckets”, “songs-of-dogs”, “buzzards of the jungle”, “sons-of-whores”, “songs-of-unnamed goats”, and “songs-of-the-she-camels”. Not including the slang “Ayrab”, which is the equivalent to kyke, WOP, nigger, chink, and Jap (Shaheen 11). Yet demonizing a race is nothing new for Hollywood. This can be seen in its treatment of Jews, Native Americans, African Americans, and Asians throughout the past century in popular film. Dr. Jack Shaheen poses the question, “Ponder the consequences. In February 1942, more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent were displaced from their homes and interred in camps; for decades blacks were denied basic civil rights, robbed of their property, and lynched; American Indians, too, were displaced and slaughtered; and in Europe, six million Jews perished in the Holocaust” (Shaheen 4). But why haven’t we learned our lesson about dehumanizing a people? Why do stereotypes of Arabs continue to be repeated?
The answer lies in the fact that the Arab is portrayed as “the other”, and this “other”, is inherently different from “us” (whatever ‘us’ may mean). The Middle East is eroticized in popular culture, as a place of mystery and adventure. Often, the setting for a movie in the Middle East is “a desert locale consisting of an oasis, oil wells, palm trees, tents, fantastically ornate palaces, sleek limousines, and camels” (Shaheen8). This venue greatly differs from the everyday suburban household in the Midwest United States, in which mum makes you peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drops you off in her minivan. The costumes provided in these movies further enhance the glamorous scenery, adorning actresses with “chandors, hijabs, belly dancers’ see-through pantaloons, veils, and jewels for their navels” (Shaheen 8). The whole ambiance of a film set in the Middle East is based on the fictitious reality that the Orientalists’ brought back from their Near East adventures. These films deny Arabs and Arab-Americans the right to be depicted factually and fairly. Not everyone in the Middle East rides on camels, just as not everyone in the South rides horses. But film directors deny this, because, let’s face it, “The Jewel of the Nile” just sounds so much more enticing that does “The Jewel of the Mississippi”.
Disney’s Aladdin is one of the most beloved American animated films to date. It grossed $60 million U.S. dollars, not including more money for international rights video sales, and rentals (Shaheen 50). Yet, its racism wasn’t foreseen by the public. The film recounts the tale of Aladdin, a “street rat” who is not only parentless but homeless. His only friend is a monkey named Abu, who helps him steal food to survive. Aladdin coincidentally falls in love with the Sultan’s daughter, Jasmine, but they cannot get married, because he is not a prince. The story sounds acceptable on paper, but when animated, demonstrated ethnocentricism at its best. Aladdin, Jasmine, and the Sultan are light-skinned, with wide eyes, and small, flat noses. Jaffar and the palace guards, considered the “bad guys”, are dark, with sinister eyes, heavy accents, and large noses. However when ethnocencrecism is absent, stereotypes re-emerge. When Princess Jasmine escapes the castle walls, and innocently gives a hungry boy an apple, a malicious, ugly merchant with a colossal nose violently grabs her hand and asks, “Do you know what the penalty for stealing is?!” Jasmine pleads with him to go get her father so that she may pay the man, but he doesn’t believe her and grabs a knife out of his jacket to cut her hand off. The message that this sends to children is, in the Near East, even if you want to help a starving child, you will get your hand cut off. Disney obviously ignores the fact that hand-chopping is only implemented in Saudi Arabia, not everywhere in the Middle East. This violence is further established in the beginning of the film, when a man riding a camel in the desert sings, “Oh I come from a land/ from a faraway place/ where the caravan camels roam. / Where they cut off your ear/ if they don’t like your face/ it’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home” (Shaheen 51). Why would anyone begin a children’s film with violence? In 1993, in response to public pressure, Disney deleted the lines “Where they cut off your ear/ if they don’t like your face” and changed it to, “where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense”, but the damage had already been done (Shaheen 51). A generation of children would grow up with these songs and images of the Near East engraved in their brains of what it was really like to live in the Middle East.
The News Media: Policies Impact Opinions
“Competing imperial powers invent their own theory of cultural destiny to justify their actions abroad”. -Edward Said
When analyzing Islam’s representation in the media, it is important to understand how the media works, respectively who owns it and what they want seen and heard. Oftentimes, the media has an “echo” effect. What one station says, another will repeat, sometimes verbatim. The information projected to the viewers is not based on researched, factual evidence, but opinions shrieked out from political pundits such as Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Rush Limbaugh. These opinions are repeated and repeated until what is being repeated is seen as fact. This undertaking fundamentally undermines and exploits democracy. The effect that such rantings have had on the Islamic community has been irreversible. A prime example of mainstream media distorting the truth and pointing their fingers at the Muslim community was the bombing in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. It was widely assumed that the attack had been “Middle Eastern” in origin, coming from threatening aliens abroad, not an American citizen. Throughout the investigation, the FBI and CIA investigated people by the color of their skin, the spelling of their name, and their religious beliefs, all under the false pretence that any act of terrorism is performed by someone of Middle Eastern origin (Findley 74). It seemed as though almost all Americans were in agreement, that the tragedy was the work of Muslims. These notions had been ingrained into public psyche after the events of the Iranian Hostage situation in the eighties and the bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City. All of the sudden, the “terrorist” crisis mushroomed. Images of bearded men, Arabic script, and Middle Eastern experts flooded mainstream television. The message, however, hadn’t changed since the Crusades. Muslims were portrayed as violent, religious fanatics, who suppressed their women and spent their lives preparing for jihad, that blood curling, menacing Arabic word that had a spine-chilling effect for many Westerners Outraged that such atrocities were inflicted upon “their own”, strands of violence proceeded between the Muslim and Christian communities. Later on, it was discovered that the perpetrator was Timothy McVeigh, a White, Irish, and Roman Catholic. So why was it so readily available to accuse the Muslim community of acts of aggression, instead of the Catholic community? The only answer lies in how Islam is portrayed in the media. The Ku Klux Klan is a home-grown American terrorist organization who has committed countless acts of violence against Jews and Blacks, but no one says that they represent the whole Western Christian community. So, just as one shouldn’t assume that all Christians are KKK members, one should also not presume that all Muslims are jihadists.
Additionally, the media was quick to misquote the Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stating that he “wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map”. After the speech, many translators refuted the English translation, saying that what the President had said could be interpreted many different ways, mainly “The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. But their cries were quieted with the media’s incisive response. They depicted the President as an anti-Semitic, who denied the Holocaust, and served as a threat to the American people. Following this massive outcry of the American people, worrying that Iran might attack Israel and then the United States, Mike Wallace interviewed the President on 60 minutes, and asked him why he wanted to wipe Israel off the face of the map. President Ahmadinejad said, “I think that the Israeli government is a fabricated government” (representative press), but most of his speech wasn’t aired on the program, it was left out. He continued, “…and I have talked about the solution. The solution is democracy. We have said allow Palestinian people to participate in a free and fair referendum to express their views. What we are saying only serves the cause of durable peace. We want durable peace in that part of the world. A durable peace will only come about with once the views of the people are met” (representative press). He further continued of democratic elections and hope for the peoples of Palestine, who had been oppressed by the Israeli government. But one would have to dig to find this information, because main stream media will not show it. They want to deny the American people any chance to sympathize with Palestinians, based on the United States’ undying support for the state of Israel, since its creation in 1948. This is the reason why no one ever sees pictures of the poverty and misery that the Palestinian people live through, day after day, under this regime. Regardless of whether one is a Jew or not, one cannot deny the inhumanity of the realities of the occupied territories. The media does not show the Palestinians missing limbs, being beaten while going through daily checkpoints, or the effects of the bombing of Lebanon in the summer of 2006. What they show are angry, American flag-burning protestors, shouting in Arabic, “death to America!” Then the camera usually moves to the veiled women, and children throwing stones at Israeli guard, giving the illusion that the Israeli army is retaliating against aggression. What is left out of the media is that Israel is in breach of the UN charter in which Israel was supposed to evacuate the occupied territories, but never did.
Rupert Murdoch is the main reason for this lack of factual news. He owns nine satellite television networks, one hundred cable channels, one hundred and seventy five newspapers, forty book imprints, forty television stations, and one movie studio. His television network reaches two hundred and eighty million people, his Asian satellite network reaches three hundred million people, his cable channel reaches three hundred million homes, and his magazines reach twenty eight million people, which totals to a total audience of 4.7 billion people, about ¾ of the entire world population (Outfoxed). Big brother government has honed in on Murdoch, and together, they have created the largest propaganda machine in the world. Every morning, memos are sent to network employees from John Moody, explaining what they should and should not discuss. Topics such as economics, medical care, and global warming are not discussed, but issues on gay marriage, school shootings, and anti-American sentiments are aired. The networks will not focus on anything that puts the government into question. A prime example is when Jeremy Glick, the son of a victim of 9/11 was interviewed by Bill O’Reilly. During the interview, Glick explained that he believed that 9/11 was a planned precursor to facilitate the government in executing the War on Terror. O’Reilly cut his mike, and promptly told him to shut up, several times, out of respect for Glick’s deceased father. But this type of negation of a diversity of viewpoints should not be surprising. FOX news CEO and chairman is Roger Ailes, the former media strategist for Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Sr.’s presidential campaigns.
Both Murdoch and big brother government know that the average American relies on the nightly news for an update on current events, and they use it to their advantage. They choose what is seen and what is not seen. If the news were unbiased and simply reported what happened, citizens could make up their own minds. But the government wants to feed Americans their opinions, spoon feeding them like babies until they are so full that they can’t speak. Their motivation is fear, and fear handicaps Americans into blindly trusting the government for protection. For instance, is it really that surprising that before 9/11, the Middle East was portrayed as a backwards, primitive culture? When Murdoch’s news networks had segments on the Middle East, it focused on Islam, women, and terrorism. The only interviews were videos from terrorist organizations, then inviting “experts” to comment on the tape. But where did these experts come from? And why would the media want to stereotype the Middle East in such simple terms? The Middle East is a vast, diverse area, offering many viewpoints, but those viewpoints are not welcomed on conservative networks such as FOX. It is easy to come to the conclusion that the media’s portrayal of the Middle East made it easier to enter into the War on Terror. The government played on the public’s view of the Middle East, and persuaded them into a war which has no legitimacy. Is it surprising that the government declared the War on Terror on 7 October 2001, roughly three months after the 9/11 attacks? In an interview, former CIA analysis Ray McGovern questions former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about the legitimacy of the War on Terror, and displays current American sentiments about the ongoing war.
Ironically, if Americans had a truly free press, they would know that the United States basically set up the War on Terror in the 1980s. During the Iraq-Iran War, over a million people were killed. Americans thought that it was a religious battle, but unbeknownst to them, the United States facilitated the war in order to profit from its ruins later. In 1982, the US sold arms to Saddam Hussein against Khomeini, and then in 1983 the US sold arms to Khomeini against Saddam. Previously, the US had helped the Ba’ath Party rise to power, and critics are saying, “One thing is for sure, the US will find it much harder to remove the Ba'ath Party from power in Iraq than they did putting them in power back in 1963. If more people knew about this diabolical history, they just might not be so inclined to trust the US in its current efforts to execute "regime change" in Iraq” (Representative Press).
In George Washington’s final address to the nation, he warned, “So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation” (Yale). Americans would be wise to think back on this founding father’s worries of government corruption by special interests. The only way to undo the manipulation is to re-educate, and there must exist a desire to understand “the other”, otherwise, we will continue on a “cultural war” with has no solution or ending. We must take mythology out of our psyche and humanize “the other” in order for peace to be an option. In the words of Mother Teresa, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other”.
Works Cited
Findley, Paul. Silent No More. Amana Publications, 2003.
Little, Douglas. American Orientalism. The University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Said, Edward. Covering Islam. Pantheon Books, 1981.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. Pantheon Books, 1978.
Shaheen, Jack. Reel Bad Arabs. Olive Branch Press, 2001.
Nochlin, Linda. The Imaginary Orient. Publisher Unknown.
http://www.democracynow.org/2006/5/5/retired_cia_analyst_ray_mcgovern_takes
Intelligent Design: The Argument from Ignorance (or, The Creationist in Scientist's Clothing)
According to the founders of the intelligent design (ID) movement, "Design theory promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions." (Discovery Institute, 1999) Intelligent design should be abolished as a viable educational alternative to evolutionary theory, because it is merely Christian theological speculation masquerading as a scientific claim. In recent years, school boards across the country have succumbed to pressure from ID proponents, applied toward the aim of having ID taught in biology classes as a legitimate alternate theory of the origin of Earth's species. Despite setbacks to the movement, such as the 2005 trial in Dover, Pennsylvania in which plaintiffs successfully challenged the legality of a public school district's mandate that ID be taught alongside the theory of evolution, efforts to establish intelligent design as a valid scientific paradigm have continued unabated. In its purest form, design theory proposes that life on Earth did not achieve the observed variance of species via eons of natural selection and genetic drift, as is the hypothesis of modern evolutionary theory, but rather that "certain features of...living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and are not the result of an undirected, chance-based process such as Darwinian evolution." (IDEA Center, 2004) Any such claim is merely a disguised form of creationism, religious in intent and unscientific in content, and any proposed inclusion of the ID paradigm in a public-school curriculum therefore violates the establishment clause of the United States Constitution's first amendment.
Though its origination dates to the turn of the 20th century, the term "intelligent design" came into modern scientific usage following the landmark Edwards v. Aguillard case heard in 1987 by the Supreme Court of the United States, in which the court ruled by a 7-2 majority that the teaching of creationism could not be mandated in Louisiana public schools "because the primary purpose of [Louisiana's] Creationism Act is to endorse a particular religious doctrine, [and therefore] the Act furthers religion in violation of the Establishment Clause." (Brennan, 482 U.S. 578) Following this decision, Charles Thaxton, the editor of a book called Of Pandas and People, decided to have over one hundred textual references to "creation" or "creation science" in drafts replaced by "intelligent design" prior to the work's publication in 1989, because he had heard the phrase from a NASA scientist and thought "That's just what I need, it's a good engineering term." (Witt 2005; see also Kitzmiller v. Dover 2005). Design theory as it exists today was thusly born from a need to repackage the concepts of Christian creationism into an ostensibly secular framework for inquiry, while also supplying a more palatable educational alternative to replace the initiative deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
The insidious goals of the ID movement were more recently and explicitly formulated in 1999 by a Seattle-based Christian think-tank called the Discovery Institute, in an internal manifesto called the "Wedge Document", the existence of which has since been denied by the Institute, dismissed as an "urban legend" by its contributing theorists, and ultimately acknowledged by the Institute's co-founder Stephen C. Meyer, though he claims it was stolen from his office. (Mooney 2002) In this document, the short- and long-term goals of the Institute are clearly delineated: to spur the debate involving ID and evolutionary theory with the goal of changing public school curricula in at least ten states by the fifth year of action, to address and reverse the social consequences of scientific materialism (such as abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality), and to promote a socially conservative agenda by "seek[ing] to build up a popular base of support among our natural constituency, namely, Christians. We will do this primarily through apologetics seminars. We intend these to encourage and equip believers with new scientific evidences that support the faith, as well as 'popularize' our ideas in the broader culture." (Discovery Institute, 1999)
There can be no doubt that the initial phases of the ID movement were political in nature, or that the broader intent of introducing ID as a legitimate educational alternative was present even in these nascent stages. Nowhere in the "Wedge Document" are any of these scientific pieces of evidence presented, nor does it discuss possible methodologies or future avenues of inquiry. Nevertheless, the whole of design theory rests on the false dichotomy that either evolutionary theory in its current form is true and complete (an obviously erroneous statement), or there are unexplained and therefore inexplicable modes of nature that necessarily imply the existence of an intelligent cause. Philip Johnson, one of the founders and chief architects of the ID strategy, neatly provides a summary of this fallacious line of reasoning: "If creation is admitted as a serious possibility, Darwinism cannot win, and if it is excluded a priori Darwinism cannot lose." (Johnson 1990) Having established that intelligent design theory began as a political statement and was always explicitly based on a repackaging of Christian creation stories, with the intent of inserting this theology into public school science curricula, it now remains to investigate whether the subsequent decades have produced any truly scientific claims on behalf of ID, or whether the movement has remained in ideological stasis.
Science is defined by two primary characteristics: the explanatory power of its formulations, and the falsifiability of its predictions. Evolutionary theory as it exists today is the single most well-supported scientific paradigm in the history of mankind, both by its description of speciation via natural selection and genetic drift (which is augmented by the action of punctuated equilibrium), and by its predictive power in such realms as microbiology and fossil archaeology. "[Darwinism] eats through just about every traditional concept, and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world-view, with most of the old landmarks still recognizable, but transformed in fundamental ways.” (Dennett 1995) By contrast, intelligent design theory offers no scientific explanations beyond the spurious claim that the Christian god is responsible for the origin of species (a statement that is, by definition, based on faith and tradition instead of logic), and contains no testable predictive capacity that could be falsified in the Popperian sense of the term. Instead, the pseudo-scientific claims of ID rest on such vaguely defined concepts as irreducible complexity, in the case of the writings of Michael Behe, or complex specified information theory as described by William Dembski.
Irreducible complexity is defined by ID proponents as "a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning." (Behe 1998) The existence of such a system in the biosphere would purportedly be devastating to the Darwinist paradigm in which numerous, successive, and slight modifications bring about all biological variance. Behe proposes that molecular-scale organelles such as cilia belong to this category, thereby inferring design, or "the purposeful arrangement of parts", as the primary force to which is owed the presence of such entities as cilia and protein-transport/synthesis systems in cells. This proof of impossibility is shielded, as is typical, by the hidden axiom: since current molecular biology does not know the precise sequence by which the addition, deletion, and duplication of proteins give rise to functional organelles, there must not be such a sequence -- ignoring completely the possibility that future investigative endeavors can expand the store of knowledge and theory available to science. (It should be noted here that a long-time favorite example of irreducible complexity has been the human eye, although that argument has been generally abandoned in the face of overwhelming evidence for an uninterrupted chain of visual systems that begins with single-cell light-sensitive spots and moves seamlessly up the evolutionary ladder to advanced eyes such as the frog's, which is so powerful it can detect individual photons! One imagines that the list of irreducibly-complex systems compiled by ID adherents will thusly continue to grow smaller in the future.) As Philip Kitcher notes in his flawless evisceration of this claim, "Behe has made up his own ideas about what transitional organisms must have been like, and then argued that such organisms couldn't have existed." (Kitcher 2001) This is a classic example of the argumentum ad ignorantiam fallacy, although it is not the most egregious violation of logic committed by the ID movement.
The concept of complex specified information (CSI) is another popular, and even more ambiguous tactic frequently utilized by design theorists. As initially formulated by William Dembski, the CSI argument holds that Darwinian natural selection cannot explain the existence of certain kinds of information (Dembski 1997), because the events that embody this information are highly unlikely to have arisen by chance. The essence of this claim is that natural causes, being a mixture of chance and necessity, cannot produce highly unlikely outcomes. However, "Darwinian theory makes probabilistic, not deductive, predictions" (Fitelson, Stephens, & Sober 1999) and as such cannot be scientifically evaluated on its own; we must compare the predictive capacity of evolutionary theory with that of a competing paradigm, in this case the design theory, which conveniently makes no predictions regarding the evolution of information in an intelligently-constructed system. Also predictably, the CSI argument postulates that chance and necessity alone cannot increase the information in a system (as if the mere presence of more megabits in a genome implies that the genome is necessarily more "complex and specified", whatever that means), although evolutionary science has repeatedly shown that gene duplication and deletion can alter the size of the informational content describing a biological system. (Dawkins 1998) In the final analysis, CSI is merely a way to recast the increasing complexity of life via natural selection as a highly improbable sequence of organization of genetic information, when a proper application of information theory to the question of speciation would simply require "numerous, successive, and slight modifications," in the words of Darwin himself.
We have seen the origins of intelligent design theory as a political movement designed to change the course of social progress and alter the educational paradigm of the life sciences, in order to establish Christian theology as viable science and "affirm the reality of God." (Johnson 1997) In addition, we have shown that the scientific claims made by ID proponents are entirely specious at best, and intentionally misdirecting at worst; no predictive capacity or explanatory power exists in the paradigm of intelligent design. As such, this "theory" is unfit for inclusion in the science curricula of U.S. public schools, since the words of ID's founders themselves have betrayed the thin disguise intended to fool laymen into believing the theory has probative and scientific value beyond the promotion of a decidedly religious agenda. The establishment clause of the United States Constitution has rebuffed, by the judgment of two federal courts including the highest bench in the land, two major assaults designed to insert Christian creationism into the secular public educational system. However, it is clear that the Discovery Institute and their ilk will not easily abandon their goal of tearing down scientific materialism in favor of theistic philosophy, given their shameless attempts thus far to force Christian theology into the minds of America's youth.
Works Cited
Behe, Michael. "Molecular Machines: Experimental Support for the Design Inference". Cosmic Pursuit, vol. 1, no. 2, (1998): 27-35
Dawkins, Richard. "The 'Information Challenge'". The Skeptic, vol. 18, no. 4 (1998): 22-25.
Dembski, William A. "Intelligent Design as a Theory of Information". Perspectives on Science & Christian Faith, vol. 49, no. 3, (1997): 180-190.
Dennett, Daniel C. Darwin's Dangerous Idea. (1995). New York: Simon & Schuster.
Edwards v . Aguillard. (1987). 482 U.S. 578 (Justice Brennan, William J. writing for the majority; Justices Scalia, Antonin and Rehnquist, William dissenting)
Fitelson, Branden, Stephens, Christopher, and Sober, Elliot. "How Not to Detect Design -- Critical Notice: William A. Dembski, The Design Inference". Philosophy of Science, vol. 66, (1999): 472-488.
Intelligent Design Theory in a Nutshell. (2004). Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness Center. http://www.ideacenter.org
Johnson, Philip E. Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds. (1997). Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press.
Johnson, Philip E. "Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism". First Things, no. 6, (1990): 15-22.
Kitcher, Philip. "Born-Again Creationism", in Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. (2001). Pennock, Robert T. (Ed.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District. (2005). 04 cv 2688
Mooney, Chris (2002). "Survival of the Slickest: How anti-evolutionists are mutating their message", The American Prospect 13(22)
Pennock, Robert T. (Ed.) Intelligent Design Creationism and Its Critics: Philosophical, Theological, and Scientific Perspectives. (2001). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wedge Document. (1999) Discovery Institute. http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.pdf
Witt, Jonathan. (2005). "Evolution News & Views: Dover Judge Regurgitates Mythological History of Intelligent Design". Discovery Institute.
Scott Mitchell
English 1b-12215
Professor Gallegos
July 30, 2008
Argument of Proposal: Evolution in Jeopardy
As a Western society, Americans value biological sciences and education to advance our society. The theory of Evolution, created by the famous naturalist, Charles Darwin, should be mandatory in every American school because children are not being properly educated just by learning about the Christian faith.
Evolution is the theory that species have changed through time by adapting to the environment around them. In my view, Evolution is supported by four main ideas: The Fossil Record, Homology, Biogeography, and Natural Selection. So why is Evolution so important? For millennia, humans have been asking the questions of how we got here and what our purpose is in life. People turned to religion as a way of understanding these questions. However, fundamentalists in Christianity and other faiths are making every effort to disprove what so many of us have learned in our science classes for the past one hundred years. “What is at stake is nothing less than America’s scientific soul” (Miller 12). America’s scientific soul is our universities and research institutions that have led the world in almost every category of science. The genius of our scientists has led to the domination of the Nobel Prizes in science for decades.
My personal experience in the matter is why I favor evolution in the classroom so strongly. Recently, I and a friend of mine debated our own opinions on the topic. He went to a private Christian school where a majority of his studies were on the bible, while I read biology books in science at my public school. His main point that took me for a loop was that he believed Earth was created around the same time as the bible was written. This made me real concerned because what is going to happen when my friend grows up and experiences the real world? Chances are he is probably going to experience forms of social inequality because of his ‘outlandish beliefs’ to some and this isn’t acceptable. As a friend, I value his opinions and respect his beliefs, but many would call him crazy for this. This is why evolution, which has been adopted by other religions such as Catholicism, must be taught to all children. Another example of the debate between creationism and evolution was recently shared by my Saddleback College Biology Professor. My professor taught biology in Bakersfield, California in his former days when this area was heavily Christian. When it was time to open up the chapter on evolution, the class went silent. Every student in the class dropped their pens and folded their arms giving this man a dirty look. My professor had no idea what was going on. Later that day, my professor’s colleague told him that “No one uses the ‘e’ word here.” So right before going to bed every night, my professor would try to trick his brain so he could teach evolution by teaching it’s principles but never even mentioning the word ‘evolution’. He succeeded in never using the word in class and every one of his Christian students learned evolution back to front without even knowing it. This proves some religious people lack the educational principles of evolution. If evolution is taught in classrooms, I believe this unfounded fear people have of evolution infringing upon their beliefs will disappear.
There is a sea of evidence supporting evolution in the classroom. Evolution explains the four questions we might want answered as humans: what, where, why and how? The fossil record is a clear indicator that Earth has been around for billions of years. Biogeography explains the distribution of organisms on earth. Next, the recent discovery of DNA structure unlocked new worlds to biologists. Most importantly, adaptations in organisms are centered on natural selection – individuals with certain inherited traits produced more offspring then individuals with other traits.
Evolution answers the what, where, when, why, and how questions humans have been asking since the dawn of science (Dennett 23). For instance, Evolution states that we are here in order to survive and pass on genes because the bottom line in biology is: Reproduction. A species will become extinct without this instinct. Religion likes to argue that “the universe was created by God, for God’s purposes, then all the purposes we can fin in it must be due to God’s purposes” (Dennett 24). So according to this argument by Religious supporters, we are living our lives not to better ourselves, but to satisfy God. Secondly, Evolutionists date our species, homosapiens, back to 5.3 million years ago (Campbell 515). Devout followers of Christianity interpret the bible as literal and believe that earth was created when the bible was written only a couple thousand years ago. Geologists have proven this to be untrue with the use of carbon-14 dating. Religion explains that humans are god’s instruments while evolutionists believe we’re organisms bent on survival. There have been five mass extinctions, proven by the fossil record that has wiped out life on earth (Buell 521).
Scientists have used the fossil record to prove their theory of evolution. “Rivers carry sediments (fossils) into seas and swamps. Over time, sedimentary rock layers form called strata. As erosion takes place and water levels rise, this strata and the fossils inside are exposed” (Campbell 453). This is how scientists have been able to piece together the history of organisms on our planet. How can a bible explain dinosaur fossils being found every day all over the world better than a biology textbook? The bible is a religious text and therefore should not be used to teach scientific principles Why do our prestigious museums hold hundreds of these fossils on display in their hallways? Are scientists making all this up?” Religious leaders have not published research on fossils in scientific journals, so they are no more qualified to write about fossils than they are qualified to write about auto mechanics or music theory” (Buell 16). I am not an atheist and believe its naïve to think that some form of a higher power does not exist. However, it’s unethical to teach children in today’s society that the fossil record is false and that ‘God put dinosaur bones in the ground to test his followers.’
Homology supports evolution by providing a common sense approach to an organism’s history. Homology is the study of how organisms share a common ancestor at one point in their existence. For example, mammals exhibit a similar skeletal structure between organisms. The human hand has the same forelimb bone structure as a cat’s paw and a whale’s fin has the same bone structure as a bat’s wing. These similarities are due to a common ancestor that adapted to its environment. Scientists say that human brain compared to a chimpanzee brain is 98% identical in structure. This makes primates a common ancestor of humans.
How have organisms that exhibit similar characteristics been found on opposite continents across the globe? According to Biogeography, organisms originated on the same land mass, called Pangae, billions of years ago. Through time, the continent broke up and drifted away distributing organisms all over the world. Charles Darwin, the founder of evolution, explains this phenomenon. “In considering the distribution of organic beings over the face of the globe, the first great fact which strikes us, that neither the similarity nor dissimilarity of the inhabitants of various regions can be accounted for by their climatal and physical conditions (Darwin 283).
The most important evidence in proving evolution is Natural Selection. “Natural selection is a process in which individual’s have certain heritable characteristics to survive and reproduce at a higher rate than other individuals” (Campbell 540). Natural selection occurs through interactions between environment and organisms. Let’s take humans for example. Humans were the first species to create fire. We adapted to our environment successfully, making us a superior species. Humans have been able to survive by passing these traits of conforming to our environments to produce more offspring. Since evolution is supported by facts and research, all Americans should be fully educated in the sciences.
Overwhelming evidence supports why evolution should be taught in every American school. The fossil record, homology, biogeography, and natural selection are the main focus in evolution. Any school that leaves out the teaching of evolution in the classroom should not be accredited as a school. Pope Benedict XVI has embraced evolution into Catholicism. He asks the question, “What came first? Creative reason, the Creator Spirit who makes all things and gives them growth, or Unreason (evolution), strangely enough bring forth a mathematically ordered cosmos?” Americans have the right to make up their own minds in the evolutionary war, but evolution should not be denied to students.
Works Cited
Buell, Carl and Prothero Donald. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. Columbia University, 2007.
Campbell a. Neil. Biology: Concept and Connections. By Beth Wilbur. San Francisco 2006.
Darwin, Charles. The Origin of the Species: By Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Bantam Classic. June, 1999.
Dennett C. Daniel. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life. Simon and Schuster. New York, NY. 1995.
Miller R. Kenneth. Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul. Penguin Inc. June 12, 2008.
Schonborn, Christoph. Creation and Evolution: A Conference with Pope Benedict XVI in Castel Gandolfo. Ignatius Press. May 2008
Ruchi Lamba
ENG 1B: #12215
Prof. Gallegos’ Class
DW #28 - Essay#5 – Research/Argument of Proposal – Rough Draft
August 5, 2008
Too Many Barriers for Working Mothers
Working mothers do not earn as much as working fathers because neither corporate America, nor the society at large caters to the needs of working mothers. The discrimination is inherent in the corporate structures which do not allow women the opportunity to progress in their careers and raise their families at the same time. These barriers include the lack of high-paying part-time jobs, lack of networking opportunities, and a male-dominated executive environment. The discrimination is also inherent in family structures where women bear the greater burden of domestic work than men, and also face greater social expectations in their roles as mothers.
Recent studies show that there are only two professions in the nation where women earn more than men and these are modeling and prostitution (Kinsley and Lambert, 39). In every single other job, women earn about 25 percent less than men, and are stalled a more or less 75 cents to each dollar a man earns. (Kinsley and Lambert, 39). To complicate matters further, this wage disparity increases when women have children. By choosing to take a longer maternity leave and spend a few years taking care of their infants, women forfeit chances of promotion, cash wages, and the ability to earn more wages. According to author and Wage Gap advocate Evelyn Murphy, a woman will lose between $700,000 and $2,000,000 over her working lifetime.
This disparity in wages earned by working mothers and the rest of the population is morally wrong because it hinders a woman’s ability to support herself and her children financially. It affects her liberty to earn on equal terms as men. And, it is not a desirable situation for American society, because this is not just a woman’s issue, it is a social issue. About 70 percent of American families with children have all adults in the workplace – and most women are working not because they choose to work but because they need the money for their families (Story, 79). So the issues need to be viewed not as a woman’s problem, but as a societal problem. Households earn more when women have husbands that participate at home and take action as fathers engaged in addressing their children’s needs. And companies do better when they put in family-friendly in order to retain their top female talent in this increasingly competitive world. Companies have to spend a lot of money training new staff when women leave to raise children. “The high rate of departure is a losing proposition for the firms since it takes four years on average to recoup the original investment in an associate’s training (Kolb, Williams and Frohlinger).” And the advantage of keeping a working mother on staff are numberous. “Mother rats nearly always beat virgins in competitions that involve multitasking” (Clark).
Corporate America creates a lot of barriers for working mothers and the chief among them is the lack of highly paid part-time jobs. Women are unable to find part time work in higher-paying fields – work that will allow them to make more money. Mothers are scrambling to find work that allows them to take care of children and still earn money, and are forced to work in low-paying fields. “Six out of ten women work in low paying fields of health, office staff, retail sales, food service, cleaning and childcare.” (Women At Work) “Only about 35-38% of married mothers, about 42% of mothers in general, work full time all year, indicating that the remaining majority are finding other flexible solutions and investments to bring in income” (Crittenden 57).”
Another corporate barrier that working mothers face is that they cannot put in the time needed to network and socialize outside work hours. Mothers cannot travel in circles where they can rise above the poverty level income. They can’t network over drinks after work because daycare ends at 6pm. They cannott travel overseas because their spouse may not be home full time to watch the children. And while they may want to do these things, or even know the value of networking in companies, they are too bound by family expectations to deliver what corporate America demands. Unless they go into traditional female fields, but then the pay is lower.
Another major barrier that working mothers face at work is that there are virtually no women in top management. Women are not in charge in corporate America. Men are. According to Crittenden, about 99 percent of the FORTUNE 500 CEOs are men. About 85% of corporate boards are men. Men control the means of societal influence by holding 70-90% of Congress, news editor and university faculty positions. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as of year 2003, although women make up about half of the workforce, men still dominate more mid and senior level positions. Women are only 6.4 % of the top earners in the Fortune 500.
As a result, the most powerful decision makers in corporate America are men and they do not see the barriers that working mothers face. The men are reluctant to make the necessary changes that will allow working mothers to have a career as well as raise their children. A Working Woman online survey in 2001 revealed that fully half of the women thought asking their employers for a more flexible schedule after they have children will appear as if they are not as serious about their work.
It is possible to blame women for choosing careers that pay less overall. For example, looking at the Bureau of Labor numbers from 2003, nursing (health care) and elementary teacher positions (education) pay less than x-ray technician and professorship positions. The first two categories are over 90% women while the second positions are over 90% men. All of these positions are hard work and still offer flexibility. The positions dominated by men pay more. However, those who make this argument fail to realize that what women don’t choose is to be paid less for the same jobs once they have children, or to face speculation about their commitment to work (or their kids), to be penalized for asking for flexible hours while the kids are infants, or to be side-lined to less important positions because of bias.
Working mothers also face other barriers in society and some of these are at home. Working women are still coming home to thirteen hours or more of housework per week (Aloi, 5). The disproportionate amount of housework forces them to take on part-time jobs. Only about 35-38% of married mothers, about 42% of mothers in general, work full time all year, indicating that the remaining majority are finding other flexible solutions and investments to bring in income (Crittenden 57). According to numerous university studies, men have not taken up shared parenting. This leaves women, working or not, to do most of the daily family-grind which cannot be put off to later, for example, getting the children from school to lessons.
Women are also forced to live up to an expectation of motherhood that is too high. ``We have this idea of what it means to be a mother. A mother is someone who should be available to her child 24 hours a day. But a worker is now someone who is supposed to be available 24 hours a day as well. Those are mentally irreconcilable” (Graff, 19). Men do not face the same kind of expectations.
Unless changes are made in our society, that allow women to have children and careers at the same time, the wage gap will continue. Companies need to offer women the flexibility of working from home, or working part-time and create networking opportunities that will not exclude mothers. At the same time, fathers need to take up a greater share of domestic work at home and society at large needs to re-examine its expectations from mothers. Unless, these changes take place in American society, women will be forced to take a path that may be altruistically fulfilling, but not financially.
Works Cited List:
1. Aloi, Daniel. Mothers face disadvantages in getting hired, Cornell study says. Cornell Chronicle Online. August 4,2005.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Aug05/soc.mothers.dea.html
2. Clark, Nancy. WomensMedia. The Case for Hiring Mommies. Deloitte Research. 2004. http://womensmedia.com/lunchtalk/2006/03/25/
3. Crittenden, Ann. The Price of Motherhood. New York: Henry Hold and Company, 2001.
4. Marriage and Divorce. Census 2003. U.S. Census Report. http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/marr-div.html
5. Mill, John Stuart, and Currin V. Shields. On Liberty. New York: Alpha Books, 1956.
6. Murphy, Evelyn, and E.J. Graff. Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It. New York: Simon and Shuster, 2006.
7. Story, Louise. Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood September 20, 2005. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/college
8. Women at Work. 30 July 2008
9. L A Times, by Molly Selvin, This Mommy Track May Go Somewhere
9. WomensMedia.com Site: Negotiating Work/Family Issues, by Deborah M. Kolb, Judith Williams, and Carol Frohlinger
10. Scientific American, January 2006, “The Maternal Brain” by Craig Howard Kinsley and Kelly G. Lambert
Andrea Pathiakis
English 1b
Illegal immigration and its effects on California’s economy and society.
Down in the south-western border, we are facing a huge crime that is committed daily and almost hourly. In the night they come in groups of sometimes over a hundred, with their family members, friends, and whoever else is willing to commit such a horrendous crime. They are not shedding blood or stealing money, but illegally coming into our country. (THESIS) With illegal immigration at an all time high, California is now affected greatly by the amount of money we lose catering to them, and the effects of its society. Illegal immigration is a huge problem that our government freely lets pass right under our noses and what does our country do about it? Nothing.
Based upon geographical placing, most illegal aliens come from the neighboring country of Mexico making the illegal’s more of a Hispanic or Latino ethnicity. This country is labeled a third world country, being based upon how underdeveloped their society is. They have mass amounts of poverty and a very high crime rate. Their governmental standpoint is corrupt and is usually run by criminals, making the country very hard to control or to have any traces of civil rights to their citizens. This is the main motivation for those who decided to abandon their homes and extended family, to travel to the United States to form better lives. However when they do arrive to the U.S. they do not go through proper procedure to gain legal residency in our country. With millions of other immigrants who come from various foreign countries doing it the legal way, what gives them the right to cheat the system.
To become a legal residence in the United States, immigrants must go through a multi step process that involves visa petitions, certification or green card, and also obtain valid visa numbers along with tedious paperwork. From the mouths of citizens that have gone through this process, it usually takes about five years while after your certification is completed, it takes another five years to be processed to then take your test for residency. The test usually includes questions based upon our countries history including how many stripes on the flag, first thirteen colonies, and other various patriotic facts. This is the right way, they way it should be done and they millions of immigrants have been legally getting residency.
Without legal residency in the country of the United States, you cannot receive a various amount of paperwork or certification. This ranges from social security cards, drivers licensees, to even signing their children up for Little League Baseball. This does not stop most of the illegals. Important paperwork is stolen and is used to the highest extent of identity theft.
Without a social security card they cannot be employed under a normal job that needs this information for tax purposes, and that is a huge problem right there, they don’t pay taxes. Most illegal’s are hired “under the table” meaning they are paid in cash or personal checks as a way to avoid proper payment. No medical taxes, social security or other government taxes that pay for public schooling and improvement of our roads and utilities. Therefore, us rightful, taxpaying Americans are funding for them to use our hospitals, roads, and other government funded rights for free. Without insurance, they go straight to emergency or urgent care medical facilities where policy is to not turn away anyone in need of help. From there they can duck under any medical bills or other fees that needed to be paid for the services we are providing. It is a constant circle of stealing.
The children that are either snuck in or born into our nation, are they catered to by providing free public education while their parents do not pay their dues for such a great opportunity that we provide. Schools are all at their ultimate high of overcrowded classrooms and not enough books for the needy, and there should be no sympathy for those who try to ride the education train for free. Assisted living is also another government funded programs in which our tax dollars again pay for discounted food, and other medical programs that should be used for the less fortunate, instead of the criminals.
If an illegal immigrant comes across the chance to get valid employment, through friends, family, stolen information whatever the case, most then choose to send their hard working checks outside of our economy. It is wire transferred, shipped, sent through the mail back to Mexico or any other country where they derivate from back to their less fortunate families. Here it is used to help any situation they may be in, but it is not circulated back through our own country. In times a slowing economy and the talks of recession, we need this cash flow to go through the United States where it should be used anyways if they are choosing to live in our country.
Not only are we forced to pay and blindly stolen from for their “needs”, most illegal immigrants do not learn the native language of English. You cannot pick up a document, flyer, or any written material without a Spanish translation is located on the back. There is a constant mental block when forced to communicate with someone who cannot speak our native language, and in fact it is quite frustrating. Most do not even choose to take the required English Second Language classes to come up to speed with our English speaking nation; in fact it is not required at all!
• Deportation
Felicia Lubienski
English 1b
DW33 Rough Draft
August 5, 2008
babybronco26@yahoo.com
Evolution
Evolution is thought to be impossible in some people’s eyes. It is thought that we come here from a being higher than a human. This is where evolution comes in to play. It is not what everyone believes, but it is for those people who do not believe we come from a higher power. Evolution shows more on how it is possible that we have been on this planet for several thousand years and our ancestors have evolved over time. I am proposing to give enough facts to show that it is possible that we did come from evolving throughout the years. There is a ton of facts that show this is possible and not one hundred percent impossible. There is Charles Darwin, the stages of Evolutionary Forces, a discovery of a biped, and even more evidence to prove that evolution is definitely a possibility to where we may have came from.
Charles Darwin was an English naturalist; he was a collector and a geologist who found scientific evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors. He is known as the “father of evolutionary thought.” He was not the first to come up with these theories however, he took different parts from earlier scholars to put them together and his just ended up being the most popular. Charles Darwin’s contributions were evolutionary biology, the philosophy of science, and the modern zeitgeist. In his thoughts on evolutionary biology one of the main notions of branching evolution imply the common descent of all species of living things on earth from a single unique origin. This meaning that we did not just evolve from most people believe by having a man of some higher power putting us here, but from species of earlier times that have evolved over time. This is where natural selection comes into play which was founded by not only Darwin, but from Alfred Russell Wallace as well. Natural selection is simply a mechanism that simply eliminated inferior individuals. Another philosopher Herbert Spencer described evolution as “survival of the fittest.” A Darwin quote on natural selection “that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all the good silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers…. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages.” Darwin did however right many books on his theories of evolution. On of the readers that is not a firm believe said this: “If the Darwinian theory is true,” wrote another clergyman, “Genesis is a lie, the whole framework of the book of life falls to pieces and the revelation of God to man, as we Christians know it, is a delusion and snare.” Wrote in remark to Darwin’s book The Origin of Species. “Catastrophists supposed that he earth had gone through a series of great floods and other catastrophes that successively extinguished different groups of animals. Only this, they felt, could account for the discovery that higher and lower geological strata had different fossils.” Chevalier de Lamarck studied fossil mollusks. He had a notion that fossils were not evidence of extinct species but of ones that had gradually been transformed into living species. Darwin’s view on evolution: successive slight modifications of species, if continued long enough, can transform it radically. The competition between each specie will impel them to become more different. Each creature tends to become more and more improved in relation to its conditions. This is true considering the fact that is has been proven that dolphins have evolved from a type of land animal, and frogs go from being water to land animals.
Darwin however is just the founder of evolution. His natural selection was put together into a group of evolutionary forces that unit together in making evolution possible. The evolutionary forces are the forces that can actually lead to a change in an allele frequency over time. The Evolutionary Forces are Mutation, Natural Selection, Genetic Drift, and Gene Flow. The process starts with Mutation which is when a new allele is introduced into a population, which will end up changing different allele frequencies to the point where the change over time. Next comes Natural Selection, which is the genetic variation. In this stage of natural selection is where certain characteristics allow individuals to survive in certain areas. This goes back to the mutation so that we can stand to survive in cold weather, hot weather, or even from certain animals to become sea and land animals. Without this, we wouldn’t have frogs. Frogs is a good example because they start off in the water and somehow end up being able to survive on land. They go through mutation. The next step is the Genetic Drift. The genetic drift is the random changes in allele frequencies from one generation to the next. Today we are seeing a lot of random changes in our lives. From having a simple problem with your heart or being mentally challenged when born. The mutations happen everyday, everywhere around us. The final step in this process is the gene flow. Gene flow is the movement of these alleles from one population to the next. This happens when we move and something is passed to someone new. This happens everyday in today’s world, whether it be a type of flu virus, or HIV. Things are easily passed from one group of people to the next. These changes alone show that we are evolving everyday in this world. No it does not prove that we have evolved from monkeys, but that is the next step in understand another possibility from where we came from.
It is thought that humans come from chimpanzee’s that evolved from an earlier species and that from an even earlier one. The reason why this is thought is because humans and chimps have 98% of the same DNA. Which shows that we are almost exactly like them. It is said that this two percent difference is the difference in the brain between human and chimps. The only real difference is that humans can speak and are more intelligent. Chimps also have the capabilities to learn symbols and be humorous when interacting with humans. However there is a small difference between the two brains according to a brainocentric neurobiologist named Robert Sapolsky. Although when looking at the genes, they tell us that humans and chimps might be even more similar than we might think. So with only this small two percent difference why do we not believe it is possible that we have evolved from them over time. Some might say because we are not still evolving today. This evidence has yet to be found exactly why it has stopped, but there are many other facts with good enough anaylsis to prove that we did evolve from a earlier ape like being, just maybe not a chimp; maybe that is where it stopped.
Another source to show how close we are to our ancestors is an Australopithecus Afarensis (a primitive hominin found in East Africa, dating between 3.7 million to 3.0 million years ago), also known as “Lucy.” Lucy was one of the first bipeds to be found in our world. Biped meaning that she moved around on two legs and had joints that could move just like humans have today. More describing towards biped is that it means to retain long arms, curved fingers, and curved toes. She also had a cranial capacity that was ape like, which eventually becomes human like through studies. She seemed to be very small almost the size of a child, but the new she was an adult when she died because her third molar teeth had erupted. She is an example of what people might think of some type of caveman or human ape. Although she is not the only biped to be found thus far, more have been found in the site of Hadar in Ethiopia, just not as many parts as “Lucy,” there are just similarities they have found between apes which could possibly been human like. This just shows that there are other possibilities where we could have came from and it shows in times sooner than Christ. It somewhat gives hope to those of us who do not believe in the high power than human, but gives us the opportunity to look at something that could be more natural. Evolution is that natural thing that we have gotten evolving from a biped to a what we are today, which is something magnificent.
The question that most people want to know is why we are not still evolving. The only answer to that is that we are still evolving, people are getting genetics that make the different than other people, who knows maybe there is a possibility we will evolve within the next million years, but no one will be here that is here now to witness this miracle. But maybe we wont, maybe the evolving is done and over with now, the only thing that I have to say is that I do agree with evolution and I believe it is possible that it is where we come from. Even if it was some sort of ape. Evolution is something that people should take into consideration, it is a possibility that we have evolved over time to become what we are today. Look at all of the technology we have today, we didn’t have this thirty years ago, our minds keep evolving and people keep becoming more advanced and intelligent. It just goes to show that we keep evolving, even if its not the apes that are changing, its our turn to change into something greater, they’ve had their turn.
Works Cited
It wouldn't let me publish my workcited...so its not included.
Lara Hafen - larahafen@gmail.com
Naked Evolution: Free From Falsity
Because of increased attacks on evolution from advocates of Intelligent Design and creationism, educators should actively seek to make explicit boundaries between evolution and religion, dispelling falsities perpetrated by each side of the debate. This will help to not only decrease theistic hostilities and preserve evolution in our schools, but open up the active learning of evolution to all students, both atheistic and theistic.
First, we must consider what both Intelligent Design and Evolution entail. Intelligent Design theory asserts that there are some biological things which are too complex to explain by natural means. Things which have this “irreducible complexity” prove that only a Designer, or God, could be responsible for them. Most scientists regard Intelligent Design to be the exact same thing as creationism, which is the literal interpretation of the Genesis story in the bible as scientific truth. Creationism was banned from public schools long ago on the basis of the separation of church and state. Intelligent Design advocates, predominantly Christian, assert that evolution is a flawed theory and that complex life could not have evolved from less complex life forms.
The theory of evolution is generally ascribed to Charles Darwin. Although numerous people had thought of parts of evolution up to that point, it was Darwin who put all the pieces together and published the definitive work Origin of Species. While evolutionary biology has come a long way since Darwin, for instance the discovery of DNA and genetics, the basic principles of evolution remain the same. Evolution states that all life forms descended from a single common life form. Because evolution is a scientific theory, it is necessarily limited to only those things which can be observed. Evolution is necessary to the study of the biological sciences. "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution"(Dobzhansky).
The hostility between the advocates of these two different explanations for the development of life has been rampant since Darwin first published his book, but has gone through ebbs and tides, and is currently at a high point. There have been numerous cases across the country where theist’s who advocate Intelligent Design want to put Intelligent Design into schools alongside evolution as an alternative explanation for the development of life on earth. At the very least, creationists want teachers to teach evolution as a flawed “theory” which should be religiously questioned and, in effect, not be accepted. As in the case of Kitzmiller vs. Dover School Board, these differences can result in vitriolic hatred, extreme positions, and divisive communities. Evolution as a scientific principle taught in our schools is threatened. The separation between church and state is threatened. Worst of all, the state of education is threatened.
All of this hostility adds up to threats to education. The battles of evolution and intelligent design only serve to undermine evolution and make people believe that evolution is a lie. At some point, it is conceivable that a school board or a court might side with intelligent design and allow it into our schools which would violate not only our scientific sensibilities, but the separation between church and state. All of this hostility also creates a poor environment for education of all students, of all beliefs. Peers are pitted against peers. Children are caught in a fight between church, school and parents. This is a bad learning environment; children who were already averse to learning evolution will be given an authority upon which to rest their aversion. This also creates a poor environment for teachers who have to fight harder to get scientific truth’s accepted as scientific truth’s.
In order to find a solution, we must try to pinpoint where this hostility stems from. From the Christians point-of-view, the biggest argument is that evolution leads to a moral decline. In their article, “Evolving Towards a Compromise”, Amy Binder and Josh Evans assert that this has been the major argument Christians have had against evolution since the beginning. They lay out a timeline and major arguments from Christians who believe that evolution leads directly into a godless society unbounded by morals; moral relativism. But how do Christians take the leap from evolution being taught in schools to moral degradation?
Many Christians believe that evolution promotes atheism and that it is atheism that causes moral degradation. While atheism is not a religion ( it is, in fact, the opposite of religion) many Christians see it as a religion in itself that is a direct threat to their own religion and has no place in schools under the guise of “evolution.” In a way, since Christians see atheism as a religion, then its presence in evolution consists of religion being promoted by the state. In some very specific instances, the court has ruled that atheism can be seen “as” a religion for “legal purposes.” While these cases are extremely narrow and tend to focus on providing people the right to practice atheism, it is not a stretch to believe that in time the recognition/ of specific types of atheism as a religion might take place. In very narrow circumstances, some experts view the practice of atheism as a religion. Atheism, for Christians, leads to moral degradation because it makes humans all “animals” with no sense of right and wrong and with no moral guidance from a higher being or a religious text. So are these fears of atheism as a competing religion founded? (Need to address moral degradation = atheism…why this belief???)
In some instances, yes. Michael Ruse, a prominent philosopher of biology and an evolutionist, says, “Evolution is promoted by its practitioners as more than mere science. Evolution is promulgated as an ideology, a secular religion — a full-fledged alternative to Christianity, with meaning and morality. I am an ardent evolutionist and an ex-Christian, but I must admit that in this one complaint — and Mr. Gish is but one of many to make it — the literalists are absolutely right. Evolution is a religion. This was true of evolution in the beginning, and it is true of evolution still today.”
While many evolutionists are men and women of deep faith, some of the most vocal and outspoken advocates of evolution are also outspoken atheists who actively work to “convert” people from religion into atheism. The most famous of these is Richard Dawkins. An Oxford professor. Richard Dawkins most recent book is Delusions of God. His website offers flyers, intended for distribution to promote his book, which say “Imagine No Religion”. He is a vocal and proud atheist who talks about how he became an atheist. “I toyed with atheism from the age of about nine, originally because I worked out that, of all the hundreds of religions in the world, it was the sheerest accident that I was brought up Christian. They couldn’t all be right, so maybe none of them was. I later reverted to a kind of pantheism when I realized the shattering complexity and beauty of the living world. Then, around the age of 16, I first understood that Darwinism provides an explanation big enough and elegant enough to replace gods. I have been an atheist ever since.” He has a DVD available which talks about the problem with religion and which has on its cover a cross inscribed with the title “The Root of All Evil?” Clearly, Professor Dawkins has taken the leap from the science of evolution to a conclusion of his own that religion and God are false. Because of his prestige as a professor and as an advocate of evolution, it is easy to see how the idea of atheism has become entwined with evolution. In his book, Haught states that, “Much of the ambiguity expressed in the various denominational reactions to Darwin can be explained by the fact that scientist’s themselves have often presented evolution as inherently atheistic” (40).
William Provine, another prominent evolutionist, has said “Let me summarize my views on what modern evolutionary biology tells us loud and clear -- and these are basically Darwin's views. There are no gods, no purposes, and no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I am absolutely certain that I am going to be dead. That's the end of me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning in life, and no free will for humans, either.”
This is the foundation for the religious rejection of evolution and is one of the greatest travesties ever put upon the American people. These scientists have bounded not only their methods and conclusions within science, but also their minds and philosophies, and are incapable of thinking beyond naturalism. While science must remain bounded in the natural world, there is no reason why the human mind shouldn’t be able to go further, especially in search of things as yet incapable of being explained by science. Messages such as these, which move beyond science into necessitated atheism, should necessarily not be allowed in schools. These scientists have moved beyond what science and evolution can tell us and into a realm of their own beliefs. The voices of moderation are not nearly so vocal. Kenneth Miller, a witness in the Dover case and prominent evolutionist, “cautions both people of theistic faith and scientists that science can neither prove nor disprove God.”
This atheistic vision of evolution implies to the uneducated mind, and even the educated mind, that science, and evolution in particular, has disproven God. That God is false. While Darwin’s theory has opened new worlds to those who do not believe in a God, the overarching implication that atheism is necessary to “believe” in evolution is a horrifying statement to those of deep religious belief. If this is the message they are getting from society and scientists, then it is no wonder that they do not wish their children to hear this same message. While it is a big assumption, perhaps this is also part of the reason why they try so hard to promote a literal interpretation of the bible and push creationism, as a way to scientifically assert themselves against scientific bullies who claim they have disproved God (totally speculative). Whether or not Christians know the falsity of this statement, it makes no difference as they cannot be sure that their children, who are young and impressionable, will be able to distinguish the falsity. The falsity is that science cannot prove or disprove God, and that claiming atheism as fact or undeniable based on evolution is a fallacy, perhaps as much as claiming Christianity as fact based on the bible. Educators may, consciously or unconsciously, leave this inferred truth in the minds of children who do not fully understand what science is, what religion is, and how the two intersect.
Allowing this false idea to lie implicit in our science courses and in our general public has further fueled an already burning hostility. Scientists and educators may overstep the bounds of science to imply that science is all there is, and that God has been disproven, or, at best, only exists as a construct of man. This is as unacceptable as Christians trying to assert the book of genesis as a scientific text for the general public to prove that God does exist. Christians, along with many scientists, have claimed the unfounded belief that evolution goes hand in hand with atheism.
In our educational system, in our entire society, we make attempts to accommodate religions of every kind. Whether it is special meals for Jewish or Buddhist children, or special dress codes for Muslim or Sikh children, or special allowances such as for Jehovah’s Witness who do not wish to say the pledge of allegiance, we should make every attempt to dispel this falsity from our classrooms and make our communities and classrooms better, less hostile places, for not only teaching evolution, but for learning evolution, for people of all faiths.
It is important that we clearly demarcate the boundaries of science and explicitly separate science from religion. This would help to not only affirm the scientific status and basis of evolution, but serve to decrease hostilities and create a better learning environment. This would allow all religions, not just Christianity, to remain intact in each individual. This idea is both simple and feasible.
A statement could be written by and approved by local school boards and biology teachers. This statement would similar to the one promoted by the Dover School Board, only this statement would work to affirm the status of evolution as scientifically sound, and then go on to state the explicit boundaries between science and religion. It would in some way include these necessities. First, Evolution is a scientific fact and is necessary for understanding biology. Second, that science is bounded by naturalism and science can only report on what is observable and must seek natural causes and mechanisms. Third, evolution can neither authoritatively prove nor disprove god and should not be used as a tool to promote either religion or atheism.
Hopefully, this statement will not only allow theists to feel more secure in their beliefs, it will also prevent any teachers from consciously or unconsciously stepping over the boundaries of science and implicitly asserting that evolution disproves god. Hopefully it will also open up educational attitudes for learning science. This statement will make knowledge about science explicit so that implicit arguments or inferences made in class cannot take hold. This statement will not only separate religion from science, but also church from state, while at the same time allowing religion to remain cleaved to each individual. There is no reason to abandon religion to pursue an education, and as a country that ensures religious freedom, we should ensure it remains so. Hopefully it will also open doors for religious students to not only learn evolution in a safe environment, but to begin integrating it, if they so choose, with their faith. To break down hostilities and barriers to science, education, and knowledge.
Some may argue that this solution “panders” to religion and religiously ignorant attitudes. For example, in his book Gordy Slack says that changing the title of a class from the “origins of life” to “origins of species” is somehow pandering to creationists, but I disagree. First, the “origin of life” is still disputed today, so truly science can only teach with any certainty the development of life and origin of species. Also, by explicitly recognizing the boundaries of both science and religion, we are washing away ignorance. Hopefully, it will quell flames which have been stoked by ignorance. We will hopefully open up the world of science to those who before might have thought they had to choose between religion and science. This will make a safer, more tolerant, more knowledgeable base of students. This statement and general set of attitudes I have proposed only reflects scientific facts and in no way panders to religion or compromises science. It only washes away ignorance and wrong inferences which have been propagated by parties on both sides of the debate.
Many have promoted the use of alternatives such as opt-out, home school or private school. However, I feel these solutions are not enough because they leave false assumptions, ignorance, and hostility intact. All children should be able to learn, if not embrace, evolution. We can make this a reality.
By adopting strategies to wash away ignorance, ease hostilities, and explicitly state the boundaries of science, educators can help ease theist students into a welcome environment for learning evolution. Both science and religion are important parts of American society and each deserve respect. Hopefully this compromise can lead the way to reduce hostility and attacks on evolution in schools.
Works Cited (not listed due to html tags)
Tammy L. Wood
Joe Gallegos
English 1b – [dw#33] Essay #5 – Research – Rough Draft
August 5, 2008
Evolution: Fact or Fiction?
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution has been the predominant theory of the origin of man since 1859. The strength of Darwin’s theory comes from the information and facts gathered to back it up. Since its conception, evolution has become the accepted scientific belief that all species have evolved through a process called natural selection, the process in which nature preserves and accumulates a species functional and advantageous abilities and kills off traits of lesser beneficial value. Even though Darwin’s theory has been widely accepted in the field of science, it has yet to be accepted in religious circles. Since Darwin presented his theory, it has been a topic of great and almost hostile debate between the Church and State. Concerns promptly arose surrounding the validity of Darwin’s research. With the current advancements in science, is it possible that scientists have found Darwin’s theory to be inaccurate? Have these same advancements allowed us to prove him right? Will Darwin’s theory of Evolution become the undisputed fact of man’s origin?
Science, in any form, is based on an accumulation of facts in which one may draw a theory or conclusion about a given subject. Is evolution a theory? Is it a fact? The definition of fact is a truth known by actual experience or observation; something known to be true. Facts have to be verifiable pieces of evidence, which can be proven over and over again by different people. (Wikipedia, Evolution as Theory and Fact). Proven facts then go on to become laws of science. The theory of evolution has not been concidered a law of science due to abnormalities in research data.
Since evolution has not been fully proven, how has the evolution theory become so popular and accepted without one hundred percent bullet proof evidence to back it up? Why has this theory, rather than other theories, such as Creationism, become the canon teaching for our science classes? It is because evolution offers the closest solid scientific research based idea of our origin. The theory of evolution has followed the process of scientific method to an extent which public schools can deem teachable. On the other hand, Creationism is a faith based concept which can not be supported by scientists. Creationism also falls into the category of the separation of church and state; therefore it is not allowed to be taught in our public school systems. Scientists are constantly searching for the undeniable truth, this will either prove evolution or debunk faith based Creationism. If proven wrong Darwin’s theory would leave the door open for many other ideas like a creator, a greater being, God. “Our faith in the doctrine of Evolution depends upon our reluctance to accept the antagonistic doctrine of special creation [creation by God]” (quoted by Francis Hitching, The Neck of the Giraffe, p. 109).
There are three proofs in which Darwinism is built. The first one is the fossil record. Darwin thought that he would be able to find the transformation of species in the fossil strata. This was a vital piece to his puzzle. Darwin states in his own book On the Origin of Species, “The number of intermediate varieties, which have formerly existed on the earth, must be truly enormous. Why then is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links? Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain; and this, perhaps, is the most obvious and gravest objection which can be urged against my theory” (p. 319-320). Through his own research, Darwin found that the fossil findings did not necessarily lend a helping hand to his theory. He surmounted that geologists would eventually uncover fossils remains that would provide facts for his theory, but there have been no conclusive findings as yet.
The second proof concerned natural selection. Darwin used Nature’s way of weeding out bad genes to illustrate how evolution would occur. This does occur in nature the strong survive, but how long would it take for one species to evolve into a higher being?
The third proof of Darwin’s theory was added after his death by his colleagues. They believed that random mutation mixed with natural selection would cause new species to form (Seiglie).
Since Darwin presented these proofs, none of them have been proven with any scientific facts. The only evidence that has been found is merely the fossils of sea creatures in certain layers of rock. There are no other layers that show these same creatures having evolved from one species to another. In fact, scientists have found that insects have remained the same throughout an entire geological column. Other findings have shown a layer of fossils that contain a wide variety of animal remains that are not present in other layers. This would suggest that there was a large occurrence of creation bringing these animals into being which could possibly support the Creationism theory. Those who believe in Darwin’s theory are at a loss as to how so many new forms appeared at once. “Orthodox Darwinism offers a plausible biological explanation for what might have happened, but is in conflict with the evidence of geology. And the alternative theory accepts the geological record, but cannot explain how species could arise so suddenly” (Creation and Evolution, p. 19). Creationists argue that no one has been able to find proof that one organism has changed into another organism and Darwinians argue that there are no facts that God exists or had anything to do with creation. Both parties have not been able to present facts to support either of their theories. However, science has made some progress they have recently found discoveries in the fossil record that might be able to prove that humans might have evolved from apelike ancestors.
The natural selection idea turns out not to be a strong proof because it doesn’t change the species. It has to do with survival and not the arrival of a new species. This part of his theory was pretty much swept under the carpet and discredited. As for the random mutation proof, scientists have changed their minds about that. They now feel it was a weak theory. With Darwin’s theory of evolution being so closely scrutinized, it is obvious that scientists are starting to reject it completely and are looking for a better one to replace it. They have not found one, but the creator theory has not been ruled out. They believe in some sort of creation or creator, but they feel that the Darwin theory should not carry so much weight. This theory was presented so many years ago and maybe we should take a closer look and reevaluate our ideas and come up with some real facts as to how creation happened.
Debbie K. Maxwell
Eng1B Class 12215
[dw#33] Essay #5
Rough Draft
Greek biographer Plutarch once said that “perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little.” It is important not to infringe on the rights of free speech that are so highly valued and honored in this nation; however, some situations are still in need of resolve. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) needs to take a step towards protecting the children of this country by the simple act of airing violent television shows after primetime hours, thus reducing the amount of violence seen by children through the media. Through the viewing of statistics on violent acts committed by young teenagers, examining in more detail this simple action’s benefits, and pointing out how it will impede the possibility of future government involvement, this proposal proves itself worthy of attention.
Television can be a powerful influence in developing value systems and shaping behavior in children. In the 1960’s and 70’s it was very common for schools to utilize what was known then as the “audio visual” aid, of movies in the classrooms to help students learn. Today it’s used more for entertainment. Television programming today, is very violent. Hundreds of studies have been done on the effects of Television violence on children and teenagers. The studies have shown conclusively that children who view these violent programs can become immune or numb to it as well as gradually believing that violence is the best way to solve their problems or disagreements. As any parent knows, children love to copy and identify with their favorite cartoon character. Children, who view these violent shows frequently, are more likely to imitate the behavior of what they see. (Josephson). It’s also been validated that children that already have emotional, behavioral or learning disabilities are even more influenced by the television violence. The evidence does not always magnify itself in the early years, but can be delayed and surface years later. For example, there have been literally hundreds of studies examining the connection between media violence and violence in real-life. The results from six of the nation's top public health organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Psychological Association, and the American Medical Association: "Well over 1000 studies… point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children. The conclusion of the public health community, based on over 30 years of research, is that viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children" (American Academy of Pediatrics).
The benefits of having the FCC move the more violent programs to a later time slot, which would typically then include a more adult audience, are staggering. We have only to look at those children who act out aggressively…. The results can be deadly.
Technological advances have dramatically increased the availability of violent entertainment today. When television was first introduced, it became a critical part in making violent entertainment more available to children. More recently, cable systems and video games have increased exposure. You can now view “actual crimes” in progress with the help from hand-held cameras. Not long after American households started viewing television, there was a dramatic increase in violent crime (Felson). Another experiment done where, television viewing and aggressive behavior were assessed over a 17-year interval in a community sample of 707 individuals. There was a significant association between the amount of time spent watching television during adolescence and early adulthood and the likelihood of subsequent aggressive acts against others. This association remained significant after previous aggressive behavior, childhood neglect, family income, neighborhood violence, parental education, and psychiatric disorders were taken into account as well (American
There are a myriad of news articles filled with children committing copy-cat crimes. After the crime lab and research has been completed, it has been found that the child was inspired by some horror film or violent video game. For example, the infamous case of “the Columbine murders.” in which some analysts argued “that part of the killers' problem may have been desensitized due to their constant exposure to violent imagery in such video games, as well as music and movies, theorizing that their obsession with these forms of media may have led them to depersonalization.” American media compared the massacre to a fantasy sequence from the 1995 film The Basketball Diaries in which protagonist Leonardo Di Caprio wears a black trench coat and shoots six classmates in his school's hallways. In a study done, the evidence indicated that a mass media violence triggers a brief, sharp increase in U.S. homicides. Immediately after heavyweight championship prize fights, 1973-1978, U.S. homicides increased by 12.46%. The increase is greatest after heavily publicized prize fights. After exhaustive findings and tests, the evidence suggests that heavyweight prize fights stimulate fatal, aggressive behavior in some Americans (Phillips). Another study showed that U.S. suicides increase after publicized suicide stories. These findings have been replicated again and again with American and Dutch data. The rise occurs mainly in the geographic area where the suicide story is publicized. The more publicity (television news), given to the suicide story, the more suicides rise thereafter.
Another great concern over the amount of violence on television and the increasing crime statistics among young people could potentially lure our Government into getting involved. Our country does not need one more government program or bureau to be implemented at our expense. Yes, I would certainly like to see the FCC involved in the management of the time frame adjustment for those violent programs, but not our government, as they have in some recent issues such as maintaining the weight of Americans. When television was first introduced to the American family in the 1950’s only 5% of American households had a television set. By 1960, that figure had risen to about 90% of American homes. With the arrival of television came the responsible groups like the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR), which sponsored journals and articles that focused on examining the various programs and classifying them by coding categories. The NCFR was initiated in 1950 and focused on content analyses of the material presented in television programs (i.e., habits, educational applications, etc). Each article was reviewed by at least two authors and assigned to one of the three categories. Agreement between the coders was achieved in all cases. Only 22 articles pertaining to television have appeared in the NCFR journals since 1950. Of these 22 articles, 8 were found to focus on effects of television, 2 focused on content and 12 focused on how television was used. After reviewing this account, it became quite clear that there was very little material devoted on the topic of content. There are no “watch-dogs” monitoring the media, for children who are usually home unattended and able to freely turn on any type of violent program. I am concerned that as the crime rate continues to increase among children and adolescents, and as the television shows continue to get more violent, it is a fact that our government will feel it necessary to get involved
We will begin seeing the headlines of more bureaucracy being put into action.
Today television sponsors play a significant part in determining what broadcast standards are. They have tremendous abilities to influence programming decisions, even greater than the FCC. If advertisers are willing to buy time on certain shows with more violence, the television stations will sell them the time. “Advertisers must use this unique position of influence to encourage greater restraint in the depictions of violence on prime time television “ (Parents TV.org).
By reviewing the statistics and acknowledging that violence on prime time television is damaging to our children, our cities and our world, is worth our time and perseverance in being willing to put forth the effort in what it will take to have the violent television programs moved to a non-prime time hour.
Works Cited
Felson, Richard B. Mass Media Effects on Violent Behavior . Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 22, (1996), pp. 103-128 Annual Reviews
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2083426
American Academy of Pediatrics. Joint Statement on the Impact of Entertainment Violence on Children. 26 July 2000. Congressional Public Health Summit
http://www.aap.org/advocacy/releases/jstmtevc.htm
Johnson, Jeffrey G. “Television Viewing and Aggressive Behavior during Adolescence
and Adulthood.” American Association for the Advancement of Science
295.5564. 2002: 2468-2471. JSTOR. 5 August 2008.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3076178
Josephson, Wendy L. Television Violence: A Review of the effects on Children of Different Ages. p 48.
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ncfv-cnivf/familyviolence/pdfs/tvviol.pdf
Fabes, Richard A. “A Time to Reexamine the Role of Television in Family Life.”
Family Relations. 38.3. 1989: 337-341. JSTOR. 5 August 2008.
National Council on Family Relations.
Phillips, David P. “The Impact of Mass Media Violence on U.S. Homicides.” American Sociological Review. 48.4. 1983: 560-568. JSTOR. 5 August 2008. American Sociological Association.
Re-Search / Argument of Proposal Rough Draft
Passengers under Surveillance
“The federal government is trying to build a surveillance society,” said John Gilmore, a civil liberties activist in San Francisco, CA, after he found out that the officer at the border control included a note in Gilmore’s file that he carried a marihuana-related book, “Drugs and Your Rights”(The Washington Post). Airline passengers are inspected by the so-called Automated Targeting System (ATS) which is operational since the late 1990s and used to collect records on millions of people, not just Americans, who fly, drive or take cruises heading in or out of the country. However, the public was not clearly informed about its existence till 2006. The U.S. Congress should revise the passenger screening policies because they are violating people’s privacy rights.
The stored records include information on one’s race, the phone numbers given as emergency contact, flight details, credit card information, and they even keep track of the books one is carrying. A Wired Magazine and Washington Post article revealed that the government not only uses a passenger screening program on airports, but they keep and store all the information for years. The ATS, along with the government’s other passenger screening project, known as the Secure Flight, are opposed by civil libertarians, who say that the government’s data collection effort violates the Privacy Act, “which bars the gathering of data related to Americans’ exercise their First Amendment Rights, such as their choice of reading material, or persons, with whom to associate” (The Washington Post).
The ATS was primarily designed to help border inspectors decide which passengers are suspicious. Russ Knocke, the spokesman of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that the Department is not interested in the passengers’ reading or other habits, however if the person’s behavior or the items he is carrying might become suspicious in any way for the border inspector, he is allowed to start some additional scrutiny, but it is “uncommon for the officer to document interactions with a traveler that merited additional scrutiny” (The Washington Post). Having said that and reading some data the officers were collecting about travelers reveals that the DHS database includes “Passenger Name Record,” PNR-information, which has the names of the persons connected with the traveler somehow, addresses, credit card information, telephone and e-mail contact details, itineraries, hotel and car reservations and according to Ellen Nakashima, a Washington Post staff writer, even the type of bed requested in a hotel.
Besides the PNR-information other notes taken by the inspection officers are also stored in a governmental database. This massive database just started to exist in 2007, when the government established direct electronic links between airline and governmental databases. The system connects data from intelligence, law enforcement and other databases and recognizes possible terrorists. This cause and purpose would even be worth to answer some random additional questions asked by inspectors and to let them go through one’s hand baggage three times at the same airport. However, people might be more outraged if they knew that the government will keep every record, inspection notes and every kind of detailed personal information in their database for at least forty years. Some already raised voice against this, arguing that for instance their family members’ phone numbers, who are not even travelling together with the certain passenger, end up being in a governmental database. “This is a lot more than just saying who you are, your date of birth” – said James P. Harrison, director of the Identity Project, a group established by privacy advocates (The Washington Post). You might also want to watch what you’re telling to the border inspectors because the government not just sees and hears everything, but it will also not forget easily.
The U.S. administration also wants to introduce some new security measures for international flights heading to the U.S. They demand to put armed guards on all flights from Europe (The Guardian). Giving out the personal data from all passengers, and even from the relatives or friends who are allowed to escort travelers beyond departure barriers, raise a dispute and opposition against the U.S. proposition. Most of the EU countries are against this idea, however Greece and the Check Republic are willing to sign the agreement, and this way they will be allowed to enter to U.S. without a visa. Michael Chertoff, Homeland Security Secretary said in a conference in August, 2006 that “if we learned anything from September, 11, 2001, it is that we need to be better at connecting the dots of terrorist-related information.” After September 11, they used credit card and telephone records to identify the terrorists’ connections, but their ultimate goal is to have the necessary tools that might help track down potential terrorists and those in connection with them. This is the sublime version which people also consider to be their government’s duty: to keep safe not just the borders, but also every citizen, and low-risk traveler.
Knocke, the DHS spokesman also confirmed that an additional program, called DHS Trip was also implemented “to provide redress” for those travelers who already had problems at the screening points (The Washington Post). David Sobel, senior counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation -whose goal is “defending freedom in the digital world”-, said that the problem with this system is that a DHS Trip agency decision cannot be challenged in court and travelers have no right to change false information collected about them (The Washington Post). There are many stories on different forums created by regular people who just wanted to discuss the difficulties and hassle they had to undergo while processing their data on airports. The Washington Post reported that Zakarya Reed, a Toledo firefighter has been detained at least seven times at the Michigan border since 2006. He told in an interview that the border officials were questioning him about those two “politically charged” articles he published in his local newspaper and were written on the U.S. policy in the Middle East (The Washington Post). Last time I checked free speech was a First Amendment right, so it seems that the government wants to track down possible terrorists, but also to control their citizens’ opinion.
Civil libertarians are against the passenger screening system. According to Bill Scannel, the spokesman of the Identity Project, “they [the government] want people to get permission to travel” (Wired Magazine). The Secure Flight Program initiated by the DHS wanted to screen domestic flight passengers inside the U.S. by comparing passenger information with the data purchased from private companies, but this plan finally changed under the pressure of civil organizations. All the information gathered by the screening systems end up in a governmental database and can be used for decades, which is just not right and maybe not even legal.
Several rules and regulations were introduced after 9/11 that violate privacy rights. It is expected from the government to protect the residents from possible attacks, but by keeping everyone under surveillance and having the right to look into everyone’s private information, the government is overstepping its bounds. People must know about these privacy issues, so let’s get more acquainted with the rights guaranteed by the Amendments, thus this was the government has a smaller chance to trick pr exploit the people.
Works Cited
Lauren Kulick
kulick414@cox.net
DW#33 Essay #5 Re-search/Argument of Proposal Rough Draft
Doodles are a great way to understand someone. Do they doodle with curves or rigid, harsh lines? This translates to whether they are relaxed and contemplative, or frustrated and stressed. Art has been a form of therapy for some time. There are many ways to understand the brain and change behaviors and thoughts. Some processes deal with current behaviors and thoughts; some deal with solely past thoughts and behaviors. One must consider the definitions of the unconscious, the types of psychoanalysis, and art therapy. It is also important to understand the positive aspects of art therapy: universal application to patients, inclusion of the past and present, and the filter-less nature of drawing. I advocate that art therapy should be used as the primary form of psychoanalysis because of its detailed representation of the unconscious.
To understand the effectiveness of any type of psychotherapy, it is essential to first understand what is meant by the unconscious. Our perception is split into two parts: a conscious and an unconscious. The first part, the conscious, is the part of our being that we are aware of at all times. It is when we know what is happening, when we can process information, and when we can collect information from within our brains, that we are conscious. On the contrary, the unconscious is a state of being during which information and events are not “remembered”. The brain does not process or recollect the actual occurrences. For example, many times people that have experienced extreme trauma as a child, suppress that memory into their unconscious. They have no recollection of the event, but their behavior is still affected by it. Carl Jung, in his book, Man and His Symbols, stated, “the unconscious consists of a multitude of temporarily obscured thoughts, impressions and images that, in spite of being lost, continue to influence our conscious minds” (1). These thoughts and images form part of our being. They are things that become suppressed and stored in the far reaches of our brain. Through therapy, one can gain access to the unconscious and not only understand one’s current behavior, but even change it. The unconscious is a powerful thing that can lead to great insight into a person’s behavior, personality and being.
Knowing the background and definition of psychoanalysis is equally as important as understanding what the unconscious represents. Psychoanalysis is a collective process of gathering information from a person’s unconscious, analyzing that data and deciding on an appropriate therapy to correct the person’s behavior, thoughts or ideas. According to the American Psychoanalytic Association, “there are currently diverse approaches to treatment within psychoanalysis, yet these approaches all share the aim of helping patients bring to their consciousness what is unconscious or difficult to acknowledge”(2). By utilizing therapy, psychoanalysts can determine what is first in the unconscious and then develop a plan to help the person gain more self awareness. By pulling the information from the unconscious to the conscious through psychoanalysis, psychologists are helping the patient towards self-actualization and behavior change. This is an important concept; it is the idea of the unconscious and psychoanalysis that help us to understand and correct behavior.
There are a myriad of psychoanalytical processes. Each has a unique style and purpose and some are more effective than others. There are two types of psychoanalysis: those dealing with the conscious and those dealing with the unconscious. The processes that affect the conscious correct the current thoughts and behaviors of a person. Cognitive therapy is a process that focuses on changing one’s patterns of thought. It is mainly a source of therapy for present problems, not including problems in one’s past (3). Similarly, behavior therapy focuses on current issues with behavior, correcting them by positive reinforcement and desensitization.
Besides the therapies that deal solely with the present, there are some that are designed to work on the unconscious or suppressed being. These processes include hypnosis, free association and art therapy. The first, hypnosis, is used to direct a person back into their unconscious and verbally communicate the thoughts, behaviors and ideas of their unconscious. Second, free association is a written process. A person enters a somewhat-hypnotic state, clear of conscious mind, and freely writes whatever comes out of their unconscious. Finally, there is art therapy, the process of representing unconscious thoughts and ideas through art. This includes drawing, painting, and even dancing. Each process appeals to a different sensory process: verbal, written and visual. These therapies each analyze the thoughts and ideas of the unconscious.
Art therapy is a specific psychoanalytical process that I propose to be the most effective. In order to understand and agree with that argument, it is first necessary to more accurately define art therapy. Art therapy is drawing, doodling, painting, or any visual, pictorial representation of unconscious symbols, feelings and behaviors. According to Mayo Clinic, the purpose of art therapy is to, “increase self awareness, cope with symptoms and traumatic experiences, and foster positive changes”(3). Art therapy, like any other form of psychoanalytical process is used to discover undiscovered, deeply-hidden thoughts and ideas within a person. Then, through pictorial or visual representation, the person can understand their issues and correct their thought process or behaviors. These symbols are a window into a person’s unconscious for the psychologist. Art therapy provides the therapist with information that the patient may be afraid of sharing or simply, completely unaware of its existence.
Similar to the idea that there are many different ways people can learn, there are also many ways a person’s unconscious can be understood. Some processes are better than others. Art therapy is the most effective and all-encompassing psychoanalytical process for unconscious discovery and understanding. According to Jung, “because there are innumerable things beyond the range of human understanding, we constantly use symbolic terms to represent concepts that we cannot define or fully comprehend” (1). By using symbols, doodles and art therapy, one can understand more about themselves and other people than is possible with simple verbal interaction. There are many reasons that art therapy is more effective than other processes. These include comfort levels of the patients, broad range of ages, races, and social status included, and the ability to work with the past as well as the present.
One of the most decisive reasons art therapy should be the principal process to discover unconscious information, is the incorporation of a variety of people. Art therapy is a process that is all-inclusive. It is a procedure based on symbolic representation, “Regardless of culture or geographic location, certain symbols have similar if not exactly the same meaning across the human spectrum” (4). Art Therapy is not hindered by language, education level, age or culture. There are no obstructing factors to doodling. Despite the person’s background or personal information, a symbol represents something specific: a desire, frustration, idea, or behavior. They are universal. On the contrary, the therapy process of free association is a problem for some people. According to www.abc.net, in their scientific research they found that, “a particular subgroup of teens, with problems such as low literacy, did not respond well to conventional approaches to cognitive behavior therapy” (5). Any person, unable to read, or having a low vocabulary, would be unable to effectively represent their unconscious thoughts. Art therapy, being drawing, painting and interpreting doodles, allows for no obstructions and a clearer view of the unconscious mind. Therapy should not be something that is limited to a certain type of person or distributed to the elite only. It is a process that should be considered for anyone willing to fully realize his/herself. Using symbols and doodles can include people such as the low literacy teens, aforementioned.
Another reason art therapy should be the premier psychoanalytical process is that it includes both the past and the present. Unlike cognitive and behavioral therapy, art therapy can be used to understand the consciousness of the person’s past and present. Cognitive and behavioral therapies aim to understand the present unconscious and change current thoughts and behaviors. Doodling and symbolic representations can give insight to the reasons a person’s behavior and thoughts are the way they are, by interpreting what the symbol means about the person’s past. This process is also free of personal restriction. According to www.enchandtedmind.com, “Doodling allows the unconscious to come to the surface without judgment or critical analysis from the conscious mind”(6). When simply discussing one’s problems, issues, or frustrations, there is always a certain amount of interruption by the conscious and feelings of guilt, unworthiness, or discomfort. By using art as a form of therapy, the patient is more likely to be comfortable and therefore, truthful. Honesty during therapy is essential, as it is the only way to truly uncover the unconscious.
Drawing or doodling is a simple task and not many people are aware of how much information can be retrieved through this information. There is no filter when drawing. Similarly, “doodling allows the unconscious to render in symbolic expression. Symbols have universal as well as personal meaning.” (6) The ideas represented in art therapy are not only ideas that are represented commonly, across cultures, ages and social status, but also on a personal level. A symbol can represent something, but the size, decoration and skew can represent something personal. For example, Steve Martin drew a doodle of an arrow. Typically, universally, an arrow represents direction, or knowing your direction. The arrow that Steve Martin drew was a funny arrow, like the one that can be put on your head to look like you have an arrow piercing through your skull: in one side and out the other (as seen below).
This symbol, not only represents the fact that Steve Martin has direction (as evidenced by his successful acting career), but that his direction is comedic (7). His arrow represents, through his unconscious, his inner desire to entertain. Symbols and doodles are filter-free representations of the unconscious; they have the ability to universally represent a person’s feelings or ideas without the barrier of past versus present.
Art therapy is effective for all races, ages, genders and social levels. It is a form of therapy that includes thoughts and behaviors of both the past and the present. Art therapy creates an open environment for the conscious to pull thoughts out of the unconscious, free from the normal filtering of the conscious mind. Unlike other psychotherapies, art therapy can be used for any personal case: young, old, illiterate, college educated, African, American and anyone in between. Its universality in discovering and understanding the unconscious is precisely the reason I propose that art therapy should be the primary therapy for psychoanalysts.
Work Cited
1. Jung, Carl. Man and His Symbols.
2. (http://www.apsa.org/ABOUTPSYCHOANALYSIS/tabid/202/Default.aspx#conscious).
3. http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/psychotherapy/MH00009
4. http://www.enchantedmind.com/html/creativity/techniques/art_of_doodling.html
5. www.abc.net
6. www.enchandtedmind.com
7. www.zorrapredictions.com
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