culture

 Dennett caught my attention when he discussed what we as humans saw as the point of life. A life of exploring, learning new things is not exactly the way Mother Nature sees it. Instead he mentions that,  "a life of sleep is as good a life as any other and in many regards better --- certainly cheaper --- than most (p.340). Now that I believe is a great motto to live by considering the lack of attention many of my peers seem to pay to the subject of sleep. Wouldn't be interesting if our bodies worked similarly to bears and other mammals that hibernate all winter? Now that would be an interesting experiment, could we sleep through winter? what kinds of changes would our bodies go through?

Chance is defined as  the unknown and unpredictable element in happenings that seems to have no assignable cause. In the Origin of Species, Darwin's view on this topic is that those occurrences that we recognize as chance are in fact a pattern and our ignorance which makes it impossible for us to acknowledge its existence. To think that stories of evolution that exist today (in my years of education and schooling) incorporate the aspects of chance within them makes me think about the way in which science and literature are very much connected. 

 One thing I found really interesting when reading Darwin's text was the incursion of ideas regarding the cultural superiority of Europe/the West into Darwin's discourse on the nature of evolution. "If it has taken centuries or thousands of years to improve or modify most of our plants up to their present standard of usefulness to man," writes Darwin, "we can understand how it is that neither Australia, the Cape of Good Hope, nor any other region inhabited by quite uncivilized man, has afforded us a single plant worth culture" (118). Darwin's use of the word "culture" is particularly interesting here.

The Commercialization of Clinical Trials:  An Examination of Resulting Ethical Issues