Family Planning

It is crucial for the understanding of the diagram that I have created to understand the defenition of altuistic behavior and selfish behavior. The first one is when an individual will self sacrifice for the benefit of another individual, possible of the same family or of the same species. The former is when an individual will behave in a way designed to help him or her advance and survive, without caring for other individuals. The Selfish Gene explains that in species, the reproduction is restrained and animals do not reproduce as much as they possibly can, instead they control the births in a population. The question that was asked was wether or not this happened because of altruism or selfishness, and I have created a ven diagram with both points of view to help understand the arguments for both sides.

A More Language Oriented Response

Reading a biology book in English class is not a very common thing to do. I would even go to the extent of calling it an eccentric action. To be honest, when the book started out I felt a monotonous tone, a very scientific way of explaining things. However, as I read more and more each page shows me that there is not only one reason why we are reading this book but many that are hidden throughout its many pages. My responses were usually very prone of going on tangents about topics that were not related to English or to biology, so I decided that this entry would be more about the lingual part of the book. As I admitted a little back, the book has many interesting aspects that I had not imagined could be found in a book that explained a genetic theory. The monotonous tone that I had felt at the start of the text was lost as I read, and a very good example of this is the following passage of the book: “In particular, it is certainly wrong to condemn poor old Homo sapiens as the only species to kill his own kind, the only inheritor of the mark of Cain, and similar melodramatic charges.” (Dawkins, pg. 67) Dawkins’ tone is very clearly loaded with irony when he states that “men are old and pitiable” and also full of irritation at the “melodramatic” tendencies of most people. Risking surrender to the trait of stereotypical thinking, Dawkins being a scientist is probably a very methodical person who does not hold drama and “myths” in high regard, and I think that is more than obvious looking at his word choice and the way his idea is put on paper. As a scientist writing a book about how different individuals and species survive in their environment he knows that man is the best doted species, and that we are, at least in the biological core, far from “poor” and “old”.

The word choice in the book is also a remarkable aspect, and one in which I would like to comment. It is amazing to see how in a book that pivots around a very specific topic as genes words are not used in an overly large amount where it is infuriating to see the word written down. This has happened to me in other texts, the most fresh example being in Sabato’s Sobre héroes y tumbas where the world “paulatinamente” was used with such a frequency I would picture it in almost every paragraph. In the present text, instead, Dawkins tries to use synonyms and metaphors to get around using the same images all the time, and as a reader I am eternally grateful for this.

The Amazing Power Of Genes

As I read along the book there is one topic that keeps on popping into my head. I guess more than a topic it would be a feeling, a specific reaction to all the information that we get in The Selfish Gene. This feeling is awe. There is no other way to say it, because no other word can capture the glaze I go into when I start thinking about the perfection not the human body. Tiny parts function in ways that are so simple yet come together as the most complex and perfect process known to man. It is impossible to imitate, not only because of the amount of required pieces, or the accuracy of every movement, or the precise timing in which it all happens, but because we have not yet fully understood how everything works. In the Gene Machine, Dawkins describes the brain and its function in the following way: “The main reason why the brains actually contribute to the success of the survival machines is by controlling and coordinating the contractions of muscles. To do this they need cables leading to the muscles…” Clearly, this process is not an easy one, and the creation of a system that coordinated everything so that the body functioned the way it does was a lucky happening of cellular evolution and cooperation. The ability to understand, communicate, and learn was an added bonus, but to us it is probably the most important part of the brain. How is it possible to read this book and study biology and not marvel at the wonders of life? I can never think of anything as perfect as the human body and the way everything inputs into it to form a thinking and healthy human being.

Another topic that was very interesting to me was that the genes are like programmers, and they judge their programs based on the survival of their machines. To me it sounds as if the genes were the scientists and we, the machines, were their guinea pigs. Maybe it is not the process that reminds me of this image, but the wording used in the text: “the genes are like master programmers, and they are programming for their lives. They are judged according to the success of their programs in coping with all the hazards that life throws at their survival machines…” The genes experiment and we show them if what they are doing is a good tactic or a bad one. In reality they never get to know how their experiment turned out, but if it worked the gene will theoretically be passed on and its change will become an active member of the gene pool. All this makes me think, however, that humans are really not that important as individuals. If genes use us as their guinea pigs then we are not vital to the master plan and if we die, “so it goes”* We have developed feeling and attachments to other people, and as these pass away our heart hurts with sorrow. Should it be this way? Were love and friendships concepts that humans were supposed to have, or should the attitude be more of a happiness that a certain non beneficial gene has died? Again, then, the question that hunts humanity comes up: Why are we here and what is life all about?

* A common phrase in the book Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut.

The Soccer Metaphor

The architect metaphor is a very interesting way to explain genes, chromosomes, DNA, etc. I thought that it was a effective way in which to clarify the complex organization of a chromosome. As I read I wanted to challenge myself, and so I decided that I was going to try to come up with my own metaphor to explain this same organization of the nucleus of the cell. Here is what I have come up with, and although it is not as clear as the one in the book, I believe what I try to show can be understood.

A cell nucleus is like a soccer stadium, everything that is going to happen in a game will happen there. The stadium contains two teams, we will be focusing on one specifically for this metaphor. This team has one coach, who is just like the chromosome, holding all the instructions of what is supposed to happen during the game and in every situation. Each part of his brain that is used under the different circumstances are like genes, because they work for specific occasions in places that are not well defined in the brain, as the genes division in the cell is not clear cut. The purines, pyrimidines, and enzymes are the players, each of them is vital to the functioning of the team, making everything happen. A change in one of them can change the dynamics of the whole game. Any small mistake that is made and the outcome of the game (process) will be affected, just like in the cell.

The Role Of Luck

The chances that the replicator molecule was formed were not that big, despite the fact that there were thousands of molecules forming and that this was going on for hundreds of years. In my eyes, it was luck. Would I put anything on a replicator molecule forming? Definitely not. Maybe it is me as a very cynical person, but I don’t usually trust that the one vent in a million that you want is going to happen. Luck or whatever you want to call the good fortune that comes to a person when something they desire does effectively come true, does not mean much to me. Is luck something that a person is doted with or completely scarce of? Is it mere coincidences of good fortune that people have adopted as a trait in ones self to give them hope? I really don’t know what luck is. I do know however that through time luck has given people hope that good things will happen to them. It has also helped many others cope with their hard realities. Personally, I think it is just a device for humanity to deal with the many issues that it has present within, and I think it is a very good way to keep the world on moving. Back on topic, though, I would say that luck was without doubt an active member in the creation of the first replicator molecule. Of curse, humans were not around at that time to witness this and keep their dispositions up. Today, nonetheless, when we look back in time and see that out of the billions of possible molecules that could have been formed in that one instant, a replicator molecule that basically gave birth to life on the planet was created. If this quantity of good came from a small coincidence, then why won’t it come again? As humankind has been doing for generations and generations trying to explain the things that are not understood and grant most of these to supreme beings, unbelievable coincidences are attributed to luck. So what are the chances of evil disappearing, what are the chances of a efficient and renewable energy source being discovered, what are the chances of corruption evaporating and of good intentions to come over everyone clouding selfishness? They are very small, but maybe one day this utopia can be reached, just as one day life started.

Will Genes Take Over Or Will Humanity Stop Them?

Ideally, I would be posting a reflection on the content of the book. I would talk about how interesting this topic was because just 3 months before I had been wondering why some species were altruistic and others were not in biology class. However, my activist mind has gotten me off topic once again, because as I read the following passage all I could think of were the politicized principles that I have about the environment. "He might even admit that if only the individuals in a group had the gift of foresight they could see that in the long run their own best interests lay in restringing their selfish greed, to prevent the destruction of the whole group." (Dawkins, pg. 8) How could this not be related to the situation humankind faces today? The conflict we have is clear: Do we remain living the comfortable and environmentally chaotic lifestyle we have, or do we change our ways to ensure that Earth and our species will not be destroyed in a matter of decades? I have no question about this, we have to change. There is no other way to protect our survival, nor the survival of the planet that has provided us with everything we have. Regardless of the efforts of millions of scientists, environmentalists, politicians, etc. the path of the world population has deviated even less than a negligible amount. If this selfish gene concept is true, then a lot would be explained. It would be easier to understand why people don't care about the imminent fate that awaits the future. I wish that the gene theory wasn't true, because if it is the there is just one more justification to why the modern world can't "go green" and one more delay to making the world aware of the changes that must be made. However, if the genes are the selfish ones, then we can't let them crash our world into oblivion, we must fight against them and take control. As Dawkins states, each of our best interest lies in the survival of our species, and if everyone understood that then maybe it would be easier for us to drop our selfish and comfortable behavior and secure the good and healthy lives of our descendants. There is a way to change for the benefit of our own. It only takes a little effort and time to create a sustainable living of the planet, but for these patterns to be set everyone needs to help and to care. There is no other way.

Romeo And Julliet With A Different Ending

I read this poem about 5 times because I think it is hard to understand what is happening and the meaning of it at first. Now, I understand some parts very well and others not so well, and I will be analyzing the parts that I did feel like I understood.

The first 10 lines are talking about a couple that is running away. Elliot writes about leaving at night, which probably means that the couple is doing so clandestinely. A reference to an etherized table, like one a patient is being examines, available for all to see and vulnerable. The last passage that made me think the couple is running away is the fact that they will have to stay in cheap hotels and eat in any restaurant they fid which indicates they have few resources available to the, which is common during an escapade. I imagine this is a cliche, but when I read this I thought of Romeo and Julliet who could not be together and had to run away. Then, until line 50, I am not as clear on what is being said but there is talk of time to make decisions and to chose and to be each other separately, and I think that this might have to do with the fact that the woman is not very sure about running away because she feels it will commit her immediately, and that the speaker is telling her that there will be time and that their individuality will not be lost. Lines 70 to 75 have a different tone than the rest of the poem because where before the tine was persuasive and gentle, here the tone shoes bitterness and sadness at the loneliness the speaker has felt, and his skepticism of life. Until line 110 I think the passage was talking about the fact that everything they had to go thorough would have been worthwhile if only she had not had second thoughts or decided that she did not want to run away any more. The last part of the poem, I think, referred to the fact that he had no will to live anymore, because of this change in their relationship. He then goes to drown, but I don’t think this is meant literally, I think it means that he will drown in sorrow and in desperation.

Epictetus and Descartes: Related?

Epictetus (55 AD) and Descartes (1596) are two philosophers that lived in very different time periods. Nonetheless, both have very similar philosophies, and as I read Epictetus's Handbook of Epictetus I was constantly reminded of Descartes’ Discourse on the Method. At first I thought that there was no way that a Stoic Greek philosopher thought along the same lines as a "liberal" 17th century French philosopher. Going over some of Descartes’ thoughts, though, are very clear and concrete examples that this is so. The first item that was present in both their ideals was the fact that both saw fortune as related to wishes and to desires. Descartes says that fortune cannot be changed, and that this is the order of the world, how things are meant to be in other words, and so it is better to change one's wishes than try to change reality to get what you wish for. Epictetus states that misfortune is when one falls into an aversion that one does not want, while being unfortunate is not being able to do what one wants. Both of these are followed by the ideas that desires bring nothing else than sorrow because things have been planned out from the start and only the things that are bound to happen will happen. Another shared concept ties into this and it is the concept that we are to focus on what is OURS and what we can control. They both narrow this down to our thoughts, because everything else, they say, cannot be controlled, and so we should let go of the other things (i.e. feelings) and focus all our attention on our thoughts. Is this far fetched connection possible? Can Descartes have a little bit of what before I would have thought a complete different philosophy in him?

The Threat to the Essence of Life

When I was reading the first part of the introduction, and then the four first aphorisms of the Handbook of Epictetus, I was aware of the fact that Stoics believe that having no feelings or emotions is better because then you will not allow these uncontrollable emotions to reign you. However, I don’t agree with this basic philosophy. Although I can’t argue against the argument that emotions can not be controlled many times, and that they lead one to commit rash judgments and actions, I can argue against the statement that excluding these forces from one’s nature is a better way to live. What is life for? Why are we here? What are we supposed to do in life? These questions have been asked for thousands of years, and today they still cannot be answered. I believe, nonetheless, that when we are here and when life is given to us, we should maker the best out of it, we should be happy. Happiness is the top priority on my list, and it always will be. The reason for this is that it encompasses everything else: family, friends, love, health, and whatever else it is one would like to do. If one is happy, then I think that life is worth everything, all these unanswered questions vanish. Who cares why life exists as long as you are happy? If you can’t have feelings though, then happiness will not come. There is no way to feel really happy if you can’t feel love from others, if you can’t feel pride in accomplishing your ambitions, if you can’t feel sadness when something goes wrong. Life would become a big blur of actions and facts that had no meaning, and I personally believe that you can’t live a good life without emotions (as Stoics propose) because there wouldn’t be anything good about it. It would be a state rather than a reality. This is why I think that although eliminating some emotions from the realm of possible ones might be a good change to allow humans to focus more or to be better people, eliminating all feelings and all the variables in one’s disposition would endanger the very essence of life.

An Excuse For Humanity

In this chapter I found evidence of a hypothesis, actually more like a theory, that was discussed in class about why Billy Pilgrim's story was important, and why Vonnegut decided to write this book about the war in the way he did. After a lot of discussion in several classes, it was explained that everything in the book, form it's purpose to the tone of indifference that is used, is due to the concept of fate. This meant that because of what he had learned from the Tralmafadorians, which was that everything that happened at any point in one's life had always been happening and always would happen, Billy did not feel any strong emotions of any kind towards what was going on because he knew that it was the way things were meant to be. I have heard the argument that this creates a what could be called uncomfortable tone, however I think that the fact that Billy knows that things are the way they are because they have to be gives the story a very impartial tone that allows the reader to make his or her own conclusions.

When I looked into the concept of fate more in depth, I thought that there was more to it than met the eye. When I read the following passage, it was like something in my brain clicked, and I understood why Vonnegut wrote from this point of view. "<<><><><><<" (Vonnegut, pg.<><>) Billy doesn't care about what happens in the war because he knows that nothing different could have been done, and all this is done, in a way, to excuse humanity. How could humanity chose, out of the millions of options available to them, to create such a web of destruction, such a massacre, such a horrid event? To someone who knew nothing about our planet it is probably impossible to understand why humans rather go to war and have millions of their siblings killed if they had the option to do otherwise. A good example of this is the reaction of Lilu (the female lead) in the movie The Fifth Element when she gets to the letter "W" and sees the images of war. There is no justification for the horrors that it brings along. No one should ever defend war. It has never been the right thing to do, it isn't right today, and it never will be right. To someone who had to witness the horrors of this abomination, the only way to get past it and not hate humanity forever is to create an escape, a way in which society is excused for their behavior. Somehow, everything that has happened must become justifiable, or even more so, unimportant. How can this be achieved? By stating that everything happened because it was meant to be. All the situations people found themselves in, all the deaths, all the cruelty, were meant to happen from the start and there was absolutely no way to change any of it. I think that Vonnegut used this setting because it was both his way to get over his war trauma, but also as a way to help himself get over his probable hate for humanity, and in a way get his readers to notice how ridiculous and absurd many of the things that we have to witness and that we ourselves do are.

Showing Hope One Way or Another

I wouldn’t open for business, or would I? Would I close to pay respect to the thousands of people that had just died or would I open my business to survive in hard times? This is one of the questions that is very hard to answer, similar but not as hard as the typical question: If you were starving to death on a deserted island and the other person that was there with you was much weaker and could not fight back and you had one more day to live if you did not eat, what would you do? When I read that the innkeepers had opened the inn, had polished the silver, had turned down the beds, my first reaction was that of anger towards them because they were going about like a normal day. However, later on I reflected upon this and thought that maybe the reason they were acting like any other day was because it was their way to show hope. If they were open it was because they thought that maybe people were going to show up, kind of as if they were keeping their doors open to survivors they hoped were out there. I think that in grim situations there are probably more than one hundred ways to show hope and strength, and to keep one self going even when the circumstances are trying hard to tip the balance the other way. Again, Vonnegut probably had some motive to include this, and I think it had to do with the fact that everyone, even the keepers of an inn, was affected by the bombing of Dresden.

War is Not For Babies, Not For Anyone

“Werner Gluck, who had never seen a naked woman before, closed the door. Billy had never seen one, either. It was nothing new to Derby.” (Vonnegut, pg. 159) As the narrator mentions in the beginning of the book during his conversation with Mary O’Hare, the men fighting in the war were simply babies. I think the importance of this passage is to show that Billy and the other men were just that, babies. For men, sexuality had always been very important since they are very young, and if the men in the war have never seen naked women then this means that they are very young. This proves, in my way of seeing it, that the book IS an anti-war book because it keeps on hinting that men like Edgar Derby, who was a middle aged man, where more apt for the war, and that using small kids like Billy and Werner was not appropriate. I think that what Mary said about war books and movies encouraging war is very true. When I see a movie that shows middle aged men, experienced men, wise men, fighting in a war I get sad and I get angry, but I also understand that the people that are there are ready to fight in the war. Very few show the cruelty of the situation and not the romanticized part of history, and in these such as The Patriot by Mel Gibson, I start to cry with anger at the atrocities that humans allow to come upon them and their equals. I wish this book was somewhat harder on the war descriptions because I think that with real, strong imagery of what was going on it will be possible for humanity to realize how utterly crazy and terrible wars are, and that dialogue is the real way to solve conflicts, not violence.

Death, Hopefully

What would life be like if people knew how they were going to die? I think it is very interesting how Billy Pilgrim remains calm when he knows he is going to die in no time, because even if I knew that I had always died and that I always would die I still believe when the moment of my death came I would not be tranquil at the time. I also believe that if I knew how I was going to die I would live my life in a very different way than how I have, but I understand that because every moment of one’s life has already happened and always will happen there is no way to change the things that have happened or to do anything in the future in a different way that the way the thing is supposed to be done in. When I analyze what is going on in the book I think Vonnegut has a purpose by saying that Billy Pilgrim knew how he was going to die, and I think this was probably to allow Billy to have a “better” war experience where he is not suffering every moment because he’s afraid he will die. If Billy already knows that his death will come years after the war then he has no reason to worry about being killed in the war and he focus his attention in other events that should be observed so they can be told to other people. On the topic of death, I also think thought that the description Vonnegut gave of it was very interesting as it was different from most descriptions of death that I’ve read. “So Billy experiences death for a while. It is simply violet light and a hum. There isn’t anybody else there. Not even Billy Pilgrim is there,” (Vonnegut, pg. 142) I have always imagined, maybe it could be said that I hoped, that death was a state of the soul where it could observe what was going on in the world without being able to take any part in it. I guess this is what I want because it scares me to think that one day you will just be…nothing. What is nothing? What does nothing feel like? Sadly, we won’t ever be able to know. Reading this description of nothing, though, takes away most of the hope I have that death won’t be boring, that I will be able to see how life goes on, the changes that take place, and if the many problems that humanity has will ever be fixed.