Editorial Reader

Phineas Upham uses a close reading of Aristotle’s thoughts on...

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 11:11:38 -0400

Phineas Upham uses a close reading of Aristotle’s thoughts on human happiness to draw conclusions about the function of descriptions and classifications.

Amartya Sen, in Inequality Reexamined, made the distinction between capabilities and functionings. He says “Capability is primarily a reflection of the freedom to achieve valuable functionings” (3.5). His analysis in this passage and the way he differentiates between these two is very important for his argument, and interesting. It is not enough to have the ability (functioning) to do something, you must also have the substantive aspects of that ability such that doing that act is acceptable and thinkable. In other words, a maximization of raw freedom, in this formulation, is not enough to add value unless you are knowledgeable enough and substantively able to use that freedom. This is important, though arguably incorrect, because it casts doubt on a mainstream view that freedom, in other words an expansion of your choice set, actually adds real benefit to your life. If taken seriously, the amount of freedom a government allows has will no longer be a measure of the country’s freedom. A way to index substantive freedom should be formulated if possible.

In Book X, 1101a 14-17 of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle says, “If [that the future is uncertain] be granted, we shall define as ‘supremely happy’ those living men who fulfill and continue to fulfill these requirements, but blissful only as human beings.” It is unclear in the passage what Aristotle means by this. Perhaps another translation of a close look at the Greek would resolve the dilemma. I will discuss what I understand to be his very subtly and very interesting distinction. I do not think he is necessarily incorrect, but such a judgment could easily be made unless his sentence is understood in a certain way. I will explore this path.

Perhaps Aristotle is saying that people are supremely happy as “living men” qua living men, but only blissful as “human beings” qua human beings. In this case he is drawing some sort of distinction between living humans and human beings. In order to make the terminology more clear I have changed “living man” to the equivalent “living human,” Even with this change, it is unclear what Aristotle means, and a problem arises. Clearly all living humans are living beings. It is equally clear that all human beings are living humans (the soul unattached to the body, I do not think Aristotle believed to be a human being in the proper sense). But if the two groups are identical how can he attribute something to one and not the other? His distinction may be one of focus or grouping. Imagine, for example, that we could see all the planets in the universe shinning in the sky, and that was all the objects we saw in the sky. We could categorize the objects as “all the shiny objects we see in the sky” or as “all the objects in the solar system of significant mass.” In both cases the group being discussed is identical but nevertheless, I think different statements are being made. The planets being able to be seen is not what makes them planets, that is a byproduct (though a necessary byproduct) of their being a planet. But being a certain mass is a crucial fact of their being planets. That is the fact without which they would not be planets. It is the “planetness” of their planethood.

Thus as far as the group of living men are living men they can be considered supremely happy, but in as far as we consider them within the group of human beings they are merely blissful. In this formulation, human beings is being used as an abstract, more basic, categorization that living beings. It is the fact that we are human beings that makes us what we are, and a quality, though a necessary quality, of our being in that state is that we are living. A prisoner who cries “you cannot do this to a living being” is making a substantially different claim than the prisoner who cries “you cannot do this to a human being.” In the first case the crucial fact is that they ought to stop because he is living and a person - thus there is some fact about his being human with the quality with a certain quality - that of being alive - that they ought to take into consideration. In the second plea, he is making a more philosophical claim. He is appealing to his status as a certain type of being. He is a human being and this status, this classification, entitles him to a kind of treatment he is not receiving. It is not some facet or some quality of his that he is appealing to, it is to raw fact , that he is appealing.

Once this distinction is made, Aristotle’s claim becomes more sensible. In as far as we are living humans we may possess the quality of being supremely happy along with the quality of being alive. But in as far as we are human beings, we are blissful. Blissfulness is a state, but a quality. I believe Aristotle’s distinction between living humans and human beings is one of perspective. Within different perspectives, different characterization, or labels, may be appropriate or not appropriate. To return to our old example of the planets in the sky: It would be appropriate to say that the “the celestial objects visible in the sky are beautiful”, but it would be less appropriate to say that “celestial objects with a certain mass are beautiful” even though the sentences, according to our assumptions, are the same. The sentence “celestial objects with a certain mass are beautiful” is as disturbing to the reader as a sentence containing a mixed metaphor. There seems to be something inappropriate about saying that the mass of a planet confers the quality of beauty to it. The mass of a planet is a fact, being visible in the sky is a quality. To link a quality to a quality seems natural. Thus, the fact of being a human being, like the fact of having a certain mass, is more naturally linked with a state - such as the state of being a planet or being blissful. Similarly, the quality of being visible in the sky, like the quality of being a living human is more natural when linked to other qualities such as being beautiful or being perfectly happy.

The most general point to be drawn form this analysis is one about the function of description. The function of categorizing something according to a crucial fact is in order to classify it. The function of saying something has a certain quality is, with additional facts, to be able to derive another quality from that information. So a flower with the quality of having a certain scent also has the quality of causing pleasure to a human being. This is only a beginning of the analysis to unpack this sentence, but it does suggest, at least on the intuitive level, what Aristotle’s distinction between “human being” and “living human” might have been to warrant the two such different treatment.

About the Author

Phineas Upham graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was awarded for his research and served in leading community service roles. Upham published a successful book in 2002 that was translated into Mandarin and sold in the US, Europe and China, and has since edited two more. He has also written a nationally syndicated newspaper column and had his work published in numerous scholarly journals. He is a regular contributor to blogs like Thought Suite.

Phineas Upham currently works as an investor in New York City and San Francisco, where he has previously worked doing financial research and analysis for a bulge-bracket investment bank and most recently in macro-economic and technology investing at a leading hedge fund. Upham’s community service involvement includes serving as a member of the Board of the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s Young Friends, where he led major aspects of its community outreach in West Philadelphia and was responsible for all graduate student involvement in the Museum. Phineas received his undergraduate degree with Honors from Harvard University. He is a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Wrong Way to Shake Up Congress

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:55:40 -0400

[From the NY Times]

Incumbents in Congress usually have a huge fund-raising advantage over challengers. Big donors correctly assume they will probably be in office for years, and curry favor with contributions that only wealthy challengers can match. So why not try to neutralize this advantage by spending money on behalf of challengers?

It’s a seductive notion, and a group of well-heeled activists decided to take action, raising money to help defeat selected incumbent House members — of both parties — in competitive primary races. They say they are doing it in the name of good government.

And for all of its populist talk about being “the equalizer” in these races, 95 percent of its money so far has come from just four wealthy men with conservative bents: Leo Linbeck III, a Houston builder who has campaigned against national health care reform; Eric O’Keefe, who helped found U.S. Term Limits; Tim Dunn, chairman of Texans for Fiscal Responsibility; and J. Joe Ricketts, founder of TD Ameritrade, who has crusaded against earmarks and federal spending.

Twitter's Tales of Sexism

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 12:56:44 -0400

Twitter's Tales of Sexism:

On International Women’s Day last week, Linda Grant tweeted her thoughts about why feminism still matters. Thousands of shocking responses – from women and men – proved her point

"Age and Wisdom" by Phineas Upham

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:28:53 -0500

From contributor Phineas Upham

Research suggests that after the age of 25 (to the age of 75) wisdom does not seem to increase with age (Baltes). Further, our ability to remember facts and recall them seems to quickly declined sharply over those years. IQ may indeed by stable over a lifetime because knowledge increased as speed of recall decreased - thus leaving a well balanced IQ test largely stable over time. Must it not be true, then for the Wisdom test, in which memory is a factor, if it decreases, that some other aspect of wisdom increases? Perhaps there is some deeper value to this other aspect of wisdom, i.e. something that we can learn from this increasing old-age associated aspect of wisdom (a balance, a patience, a perspective) in a way that we cannot learn from younger wise men (who have the quality of quick memories, which is of limited usefulness, perhaps). Perhaps, though wisdom remains invariant to age, there are types of wisdom (which are not differentiated in the meta-term “wisdom”) that we value more and types we value less. Or rather, types we learn from more, and types we learn from less. Or perhaps different problems necessitate different types of wisdom. It seems disturbing to think that one’s wisdom does not increase much with age (which is one interpretation of the data as presented, though the data is insufficient to do more than suggest this).

What makes a life good? The researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – M.C. - (“Flow”) linked a dedicated life to a happy, meaningful one. I would prefer a more substantive definition of a life with meaning. Misplaced meaning (being dedicated to a bad cause) seems insufficient for any kind of full life except from a purely structural perspective.

Aristotle and “the Examined Life” both discussed the idea of Wisdom. In Aristotle, a differentiation between practical wisdom and non-practical, theoretical wisdom was proposed. In the examined life an understanding of wisdom as a deeper perspective of the world (though a synthesis with the Value and Meaning Chapter and the Importance and Weight chapter, one might doubt whether one objective deepest understanding is possible.). Wisdom is seem as one of life’s outcomes. Similarly, it is seem as one of the most important attributes that people can have. The question becomes, can you seek it? Can you maximize the amount of it you can get? In the Examined Life, the answer is yes. This is what philosophers, to an extent, attempt to do. The value of wisdom is deeply related to ones understanding of reality. I would emphasize that it is a very personal understanding that is finely tuned to what experiences one has had and what paths one has pursued. Thus one’s life can be seen mapped onto reality through what wisdom one has (those parts of reality (i.e. what wisdom you have)) is the part that develop on the “photo-paper” of truth, those other areas in which one is ignorant are never exposed. Thus an incomplete, but meaningful final picture results that is intimately connected to the shape of your life. Like a negative and a photograph, it is a matter of what light has been exposed. In this way individuality can be maintained in the face of objective standards and absolute truth.

You can read more from Phineas Upham on his website, PhineasUpham.com.

The Guardian: You told us: the funniest Tumblrs around

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:26:15 -0500

The Guardian: You told us: the funniest Tumblrs around:

guardian:

In response to our selection of 10 of the funniest Tumblrs, you told us where you get your laughs from:

trainsleep.tumblr.com was nominated by reader Mistermatt - does that guy know he’s the sleepy star of his own Tumblr?

selleckwaterfallsandwich.tumblr.com nominated by reader

ShortFormBlog: Are Republican presidential candidates killing voter morale?

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:23:35 -0500

ShortFormBlog: Are Republican presidential candidates killing voter morale?:

shortformblog:

12.2% voter turnout during six 2000 GOP primaries or caucuses before Super Tuesday

13.2% voter turnout during the same period in the 2008 Republican primary and caucus cycle

11.5% voter turnout during the 2012 election cycle in the contests ahead of Super Tuesday source

»…

The One-Person Funded Super PAC: How Wealthy Donors Can Skirt Campaign Finance Restrictions

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:32:24 -0500

With many outside political groups able to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Citizen United decision, a new type of independent expenditure has popped up: ones bankrolled completely by just one donor. These funds allow wealthy contributors to dump large amounts of money into whichever races they choose — often with very little transparency — essentially rendering the old rules limiting individual political contributions a joke.

There’s also Taxpayers Against Earmarks (TAE), a new nonprofit “dedicated to educating and engaging American taxpayers about wasteful government spending and the misguided practice of earmarks.” While its mission is educational, it has an affiliated political arm — what’s known as a “super PAC” for its ability to raise and spend any amount it wants — called the Ending Spending Fund, which just put nearly $600,000 into the Nevada Senate race against Majority Leader Harry Reid (D). The “taxpayers” against earmarks is actually just one man named Joe Ricketts, founder of Ameritrade and owner of the Chicago Cubs, who is also the sole financier of the Ending Spending Fund.

Full story here.

Anti-Jackson SuperPac Couldn't Ignore Negatives

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:28:11 -0500

A Texas-based Super Pac involved in Chicago’s 2nd district Congressional race defended its purpose Wednesday saying the only goal is to encourage more people to vote.

The Campaign for Primary Accountability spokesman Curtis Ellis say the Jesse Jackson Jr. and Debbie Halvorson race is the only Democratic race the Super Pac is involved in Illinois. Ellis says it’s all positive.

One of the largest donors to the SuperPac is Joe Ricketts, the father of the Cubs owners. He has contributed $500,000 dollars so far.

theatlantic: More Than Human? The Ethics of Biologically...

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 10:24:57 -0500

theatlantic:

More Than Human? The Ethics of Biologically Enhancing Soldiers

If we can engineer a soldier who can resist torture, would it still be wrong to torture this person with the usual methods? Starvation and sleep deprivation won’t affect a super-soldier who doesn’t need to sleep or eat. Beatings and electric shocks won’t break someone who can’t feel pain or fear like we do. This isn’t a comic-book story, but plausible scenarios based on actual military projects today.

In the next generation, our warfighters may be able to eat grass, communicate telepathically, resist stress, climb walls like a lizard, and much more. Impossible? We only need to look at nature for proofs of concept. For instance, dolphins don’t sleep (or they’d drown); Alaskan sled-dogs can run for days without rest or food; bats navigate with echolocation; and goats will eat pretty much anything. Find out how they work, and maybe we can replicate that in humans.

As you might expect, there are serious moral and legal risks to consider on this path. Last week in the UK, The Royal Society released its report “ Neuroscience, Conflict and Security.” This timely report worried about risks posed by cognitive enhancements to military personnel, as well as whether new nonlethal tactics, such as directed energy weapons, could violate either the Biological or Chemical Weapons Conventions.

While an excellent start, the report doesn’t go far enough. The impact of neural and physical human enhancements is more far-reaching than that, such as to the question of torturing the enhanced. Other issues also pose real challenges to military policies and broader society.

Read more. [Image: US Marine Corps]

Experience America

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:47:19 -0500

By Phineas Upham

As debate about Afghanistan and Iraq rages in the US, and Radio Free America tries to spread free market ideas and encourage democracy in the former USSR and Middle East, it is often left out that experience is the best teacher. We should be welcoming the best youths of the world to visit and spend time in America. The Arab Spring, perhaps the most successful movement for (so far) positive change of the last decade, was built by youth who demanded more. In 1959 at the height of the cold war Nixon and Khrushchev passed by a working model of the average kitchen in America – and it blew the Soviet leader away, putting him immediately on the defensive.

Seeing and experiencing America – on TV and especially in person – shows others the great wealth and freedom most US citizens enjoy. Rather than restricting travel of others to America on vacation and schooling, or making it very difficult to get short term work visas, we should be using it as a key foreign policy - encouraging the next generation of influencers to spend time here and return home to improve their nations, to “go and do likewise.”

We should identify and encourage young people from abroad who are likely to be influential as media workers or political and academic leaders to spend time studying in the United States. These students, primarily from troubled countries with uneasy relations with the Unites States, would return to work in their homelands and, in speaking of their U.S. experiences, help dispel myths. Candidates from Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Saudi Arabia, for example.

Whatever the shortcomings of the Peace Corps, it has in many ways proven to be an appealing and powerful organization to US youth and shaped many lives for the better. A similar program might be implemented to mobilize a small U.S. civil service corps of volunteer college graduates could work off their government college loans for two years in foreign service. These volunteers could expand their horizons and work on a worthy cause when they are both reasonably mature and largely unencumbered by family or career considerations. They would identify promising and open-minded young students in selected countries, particularly those interested in careers in journalism, government and the academy, and help them apply for exchange programs, admission and scholarships to U.S. schools. People should be encouraged to host students and young activists who want to visit the US for a time.

The premise of this program is that ignorance of the United States is partly responsible for anti-democratic attitudes abroad. People who have never lived here cannot effectively screen out caricatures and lies presented by their closest sources of information – biased local and regional media, politicians playing to the worst in people, academics who may not know any better. Offering future opinion shapers direct experience of the United States might go a long way in providing a framework for more discerning and open minds in the next generation of people who create the climate of opinion of other nations.

Education is one of our greatest exports, and in doing foreign service and offering opportunities for a U.S. education, these volunteers would present the young and vibrant face of the United States to the people of these other nations. In gaining familiarity with the cultures of the countries they visit, those U.S. volunteers would also bring experienced voices to cultural and political discussions back home and become more involved with national service throughout their lives. This program would thus benefit our own young while improving relations with others.

To read more from this author, visit his website at PhineasUpham.com or read more at the Academic Ledger.

inothernews: Who says there are no more great public works...

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 11:43:40 -0500

inothernews:

Who says there are no more great public works projects? Here’s the new, 1,200-foot-long subway station of the 7 line extension beneath West 34th Street in Manhattan. Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin got an awesome sneak peek which you simply must see now.

"The State has failed to provide any explanation or evidence as to why a public advertisement or..."

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:40:56 -0500

“The State has failed to provide any explanation or evidence as to why a public advertisement or offer to assist in an otherwise legal activity is sufficiently problematic to justify an intrusion on protected speech rights.”

- The Georgia Supreme Court • In a unanimous ruling on a 1994 assisted suicide law that said two things — one, it didn’t fully make assisted suicides illegal, and two, it blocked legal forms of free speech, meaning that the law ran smack-first into the First Amendment. As a result of the incident, members of the Final Exit Network, who were facing charges over allegedly helping a cancer-stricken man die, won’t face trial for the incident. The 1994 law, passed in the wake of Jack Kevorkian, made it a felony for anyone who ”publicly advertises, offers or holds himself or herself out as offering that he or she will intentionally and actively assist another person in the commission of suicide and commits any overt act to further that purpose.” source (via • follow)

"Creativity" by Phineas Upham

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:24:00 -0500

By Phineas Upham

Many people embraced freedom of thought, and freedom of constraints as a unilateral means of achieving creativity. “To raise new questions, new possibilities, regard old problems from new angles, requires imagination… meaning, respectable meaning was identified was identified with the logical thinking of humankind, while human imaginative thought was identified with the animalistic, the irrational, the illogical, the instinctual, the repressive, and ultimately the dangerous.” (“Creative Cognition” Ward. Smith, Finke p217). But it is forgotten that many creative innovations are made in highly structured and goal oriented situations. It is the few geniuses such as Freud and Darwin and Einstein that are lionized that are such iconoclasts. But it is often unrecognized that the majority of creative thinking exists in everyday business life, in science, in everyday R & D, and in order to create novels for mainstream publication or broad domain acceptance.

How does the studying of creativity matter? Is it a purely intellectual exercise or can knowledge gained serve to be useful? In “Implications of a Systems Perspective for the study of Creativity” Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi lists structural characteristics of the society, the domain and the family that would encourage creativity. But he leaves open the question whether we can manipulate the system such that it incorporates more of there characteristics. Surely a conscious decision to store information in a better, more accessible way could be arranged thus making the Culture more receptive to change.

But it is not clear what, other than providing the conditions for creativity a conscious, powerful ruling body could do to influence the creativity of a society. Could the Soviet System not direct the efforts of its scientists such that the soviet system was a first world military power (including the innovations and inventions that allowed them to get into space first) while remaining a third world power in other ways.

Surely, the US could encourage physicists in WWII to develop the bomb and scientists in the 1950’s to develop a rocket to the moon.

But though these examples, however limited, show that a government can influence creativity which already exists (i.e. channel it), it is not clear: 1) if this channeling has negative effects in other fields, that is it inappropriately allocates creative resources to a field to which they are not best suited or 2) if such a body can effectively encourage or enlarge the amount of creativity in the society on aggregate.

If the study of creativity can allow us to help structure society such that creativity is maximized, that would be a valuable reason to study creativity. More persuasive, certainly, than Sternberg and Lubart’s unpersuasive introduction to “the concept of creativity” which bemoans the lack of research on creativity based on the assertion that it is an important body of knowledge.

Certainly the US government hopes to encourage arts through the NEA, an attempt to encourage creativity. The common view is that the government steps in to prevent such performers from either disappearing or from being “tainted” by corporate influences or from having to pander to popular culture at the expense of “art.” It is interesting to note that popular culture and business is seem as in some ways antithetical to creativity. Yet, in a free market, with complex incentives, seems the best vehicle for the encouragement of creativity ever invented, companies are extremely interested in creativity in certain directions. Many of the most creative technical inventions have been produced in such R & D laboratories as Bell Labs. Yet, somehow, the goal directed nature of such companies seems to be an inhibition to “pure” research and “pure” creativity. Similarly, popular culture seems to encourage movies and music which simply re-mixes past successes. It is assumed that the real breakthroughs come from the alternative worlds of film and music where a specialized crowd can appreciate the creativity of the performer.

Such a dichotomy between business and the mainstream vs. co-called ”true” creativity is troubling. On one level, it seems justified, on another it begs the question whether government encouraged creativity is any less tainted and any less warped. Perhaps only the conditions for creativity ought to be encouraged in society and such micro efforts to increase creativity are largely futile.

If the value of truly “pure creativity” is to enrich lives (verses the monetary interest of business and the goal of immediate pleasure that seems to be the ruling motivation of popular culture) then it is hard to imagine a system that can judge and encourage this end without being itself a warping influence with biases and motivations that are served. Perhaps an Einstein and a Darwin must have some individual drive to make a difference to humanity and find the truth that will foil any effort to increase it directly. Perhaps all society can do is set up conditions that will do as little as possible to foil such people and then step aside and hope. The diversity and creativity of humanity is then likely to step forward with a few shinning beacons.

Because the creativity of others can enrich ones life both through art, the understanding of new truth, and through invention that change ones life. Similarly, the individual being creative gets some satisfaction through conceiving of and sharing with others his ideas and gifts. Change is not necessarily progress. Nevertheless, without creativity there could be no real individuality and life would be quite dull.

To read more from this author visit PhineasUpham.com.

Brooklyn Mutt: Is it time for political journalists to change their behavior on Twitter?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:18:19 -0500

Brooklyn Mutt: Is it time for political journalists to change their behavior on Twitter?:

muckrack:

A recent New York Times article revealed that politicians are using Twitter to monitor the press, raising the question should political journalists change their behavior on Twitter?

The article, written by Ashley Parker of The New York Times, describes how Republican Mitt…

Amtrak - Allow bicycles on Michigan passenger trains

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 15:16:41 -0500

Amtrak - Allow bicycles on Michigan passenger trains:

thegreenurbanist:

It’s a petition which I know doesn’t mean much, but I want this to happen for my Chicago - Kalamazoo trips.

Opinion: Disrespecting the president

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:39:29 -0500

nbclatino:

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer points during an intense conversation with President Barack Obama after he arrived at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, Wednesday, Jan. 25, 2012, in Mesa, Ariz. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari)

BY ESTHER J. CEPEDA

CHICAGO — It is a stain on our nation’s character when even our representatives and heroes can’t suck it up and muster a modicum of respect for our president.

Read More

Making Latino education "everybody's" issue

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 17:39:06 -0500

nbclatino:

Ensuring students attend and finish college is the Latino community’s most pressing issue, said leaders at a conference today. Photo/Getty

Read More

OFFENSIVE PLAY: How different are dogfighting and football?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:51:50 -0500

OFFENSIVE PLAY: How different are dogfighting and football?:

By Malcolm Gladwell

One evening in August, Kyle Turley was at a bar in Nashville with his wife and some friends. It was one of the countless little places in the city that play live music. He’d ordered a beer, but was just sipping it, because he was driving home. He had eaten an hour and a half earlier. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of heat. He was light-headed, and began to sweat. He had been having episodes like that with increasing frequency during the past year—headaches, nausea. One month, he had vertigo every day, bouts in which he felt as if he were stuck to a wall. But this was worse. He asked his wife if he could sit on her stool for a moment. The warmup band was still playing, and he remembers saying, “I’m just going to take a nap right here until the next band comes on.” Then he was lying on the floor, and someone was standing over him. “The guy was freaking out,” Turley recalled. “He was saying, ‘Damn, man, I couldn’t find a pulse,’ and my wife said, ‘No, no. You were breathing.’ I’m, like, ‘What? What?’

Click here for the full article

The Evolution of Evolution by Phineas Upham

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:42:00 -0500

By Phineas Upham

The word evolution has changed its meaning over the past century with the introduction of Darwinian theories. Despite this shift in usage, many of the connotations and shades of meaning of older usages have carried over to today. The word evolution is sometimes used today as a crude amalgamation of two usages of the word and is thus often misused. In The Anthropology Journal Herbert Spenson uses one of the word evolution’s contemporary meaning. He mistake of assuming that Darwinianesk evolution is a forward, upward moving force is typical of the common misuse of the word.

Keywords, by Raymond Williams, analyzes the history of the changes in usage of the word evolution. Evolution, Williams explains, is derived for the French word évolution, which is derived from the Latin evolutionem. This Latin root word means unrolling a book (the Romans used scrolls as books). This rather limited definition was soon broadened to mean the revealing of an unknown but already complete plan. In 1762, the word became popularized by Bonnet in his theory of evolution. Evolution came to mean the development “from [A] rudamentry to mature [state]” (Williams, 120). This transition connoted a move from a lower to a higher level of development. When Darwin formally introduced his theory of evolution in The Origin of Species in 1854, he used the word in a different way. Evolution for Darwin was not progress but adaptation. Thus an animal evolved to better suit its circumstances, its new state was not inherently better. In fact, two animals in different circumstances can evolve in opposite directions without contradiction. The definition of evolution thus had competing meanings.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Evolution in many different ways. The first definition given is “The prosses of unfolding, opening out, or disengaging from an envelope.” I have never run across the word evolution used in this way, and this is certainly not a dominant meaning. One must go to definition number six before the standard usage is introduced. The dictionary clearly separates the different uses of evolution and delineates their appropriate use. In common language these distinctions are not always respected.

Herbert Spenson wrote an article in The Anthropology Journal which uses evolution in a way which mixes the preDarwinian and Darwinian aspects of the word. “The opposable thumb evolved, through natural selection, as a superior tool for the advancement of the species.” His reference to natural selection gives evolution a distinctly Darwinian flavor, and yet his ideas of ”advancement” and “superior” also brings in the idea of evolution as a progression form a lower state to a higher one. He is thus mixing different definitions.

The word evolution has gone through many changes in definition. The OED seems to incorrectly order its definitions in terms of contemporary importance but includes all the historical usages of the word. The one of the common contemporary usages of the word evolution is a combination of the two latest meanings of the word, that of Bonnet and that of Darwin. Words change meaning gradually, often with each new use overlapping the old uses. Thus, as in the case of the word evolution, words often have more than one meaning at a time.

Works Cited:

“Evolution.” Oxford English Dictionary. 1970.

Williams, Raymond. Keywords. (1983). New York: Oxford University Press.

Herbert, Spenson. (1992, Sep). The History of Man. The Anthropology Journal. 23-34.

About the Author Phineas Upham is a New York City and San Francisco investor who has written numerous opinion and philosophy pieces. He received his PhD from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and as an undergraduate at Harvard he edited the Harvard Review of Philosophy.

Income Inequality is Bad for Society. REALLY BAD.

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:21:05 -0500

Income Inequality is Bad for Society. REALLY BAD.:

gjmueller:

The mysterious SocProf, who writes The Global Sociology Blog, offered a nice review of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett‘s book, The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. Wilkinson and Pickett offer transnational research showing how, exactly, income inequality is related to bad outcomes on average. In other words, as SocProf puts it, ”…egalitarianism is not a bleeding heart’s wet dream but rather the only rational course of action in terms of public policy.” The 11 graphs, available at the Equality Trust website, speak for themselves.

Societies with more income inequality have:

Higher infant death rates

Higher rates of mental illness

Higher incidence of drug use

Higher school drop out rates

Imprison a larger proportion of their population

Higher rate of obesity

Individuals are less likely to be in a different social class than their parents

Trust others less

Higher rates of homicide

Give less in foreign aid

Worse child well-being

If you’re in the USA guess where your numbers skew…