Up@dawn 2.0

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Quiz June 27

We've not all been posting weekly essays and contributing to the quizzes. Do we need to take a bit more class time for that at the beginning, when we're not all tired and in a hurry to leave?

Skipping every 10 pages or so... but if you have a good question from elsewhere, post it.
SG 5-6
1. What "anti-democratic notion" did Nicholas Murray Butler accuse Tennesseans of perpetrating? (111) [jpo]

2. What did the president of Princeton "resent"? (121)

3. What became the prosecution's single-minded objective by the time of the trial? (131)

4. What pre-trial courtroom renovation was symbolic of the trial itself? (140)

5. With what kind of prayer did Scopes say the court opened? (150)

6. What local practice governed jury selection? (151)

7. To what main point did Prosecutor Stewart repeatedly return? (161)

8. [Sarah]

9.

10. 

... (post more in comments)

TM 12-16
1. What was John Whitehead's millennial warning? (134) [jpo]

2. Why does Jim McKenzie think he survived being shot? (144) 

3. What daily courtroom routine did Darrow object to as "clearly prejudicial"? (154)

4. What kind of evil haunted Kurt Wise? (164)

5. Why did "no serious trouble" come of Chapman's truancy at boarding school? (174)

6. Chapman lost his faith in God at what age? (183)

7. What's Chapman's description of the Mountain Morning News? (193)

8. [Sarah]

9.

10. 

...  (post more in comments)

DQ
  • Was Burbank right about the trial "educating the public and reducing the number of bigots"? 116 How do we do that?
  • "We have to live in the universe science gives us." 118 Do we?
  • Can science address and inform "man's intelligence, his moral and spiritual being"? 120 [see Sam Harris's "The Moral Landscape" for a strongly-expressed affirmative reply to this question.]
  • Does evolution "improve" humanity? Can it? 136
  • What do you think of Malone's analogy of science and religion to mother and wife? 138
  • COMMENT on Darrow's rhetoric (eg, "brainless prejudice of soulless religio-maniacs" 146) - too much?
  • Chapman says, after speaking with Kurt Wise, that his intellectual view but not his feelings are unchanged. What do you make of this? 169
  • Why do you think Chapman tells us so much about his youthful sexual obsession?
  • What do you think of Chapman's concern about the "absolute" credulity of people in our region ("what else might they be persuaded to believe in"?)? 189
  • Can a democracy balance majority sentiment with minority rights? Is a republican form of government capable of that result?
  • Any comment on the Vanderbilt scientist who was confident that Lamarck's theory was probably correct?
  • Will older people always and inevitably criticize the values (or lack therof) of younger people? Do you worry about becoming an "old fogey"?
  • Are you a fatalist? (Do you believe there's a proverbial "bullet" with your name on it?) Or do you think survivors are just lucky? Is there an evolutionary implication in your response?
  • Do we have to choose between science and religion, in order to maintain intellectual integrity and consistency? If not, are there still reasons why we should?
  • Should scientific witnesses like Winterton Curtis have been allowed to testify?
  • Was it good for America that the Scopes Trial received the huge worldwide publicity that it did? 
  • Why do you think the court was so blatant in endorsing Christianity (opening with a pointed prayer) and the prosecutor so peremptory ("We are not a heathen nation")? Could a Tennessee courtroom get away with that behavior today? 
  • Are you more disturbed by one or another form of "evil"? Are are they all equally problematic and challenging?
  • Philip Roth, the famed novelist who first gained attention with the onanistic "Portnoy's Complaint," died recently (I'm reminded by reading Chapman's account of his own such youthful obsessions). Why is this subject considered appropriately literary?







Congratulations! By being here, alive, you are one of history's winners -- the culmination of a success story four billion years in the making. The other 99 percent of species who have ever lived on earth are dead -- killed by fire, flood, asteroids, ice, heat and the cold math of natural selection. How did we get so lucky, and will we continue to win? In this short, funny talk, paleobiologist and TED Fellow Lauren Sallan shares insights on how your ancestors' survival through mass extinction made you who you are today... (transcript)
==
The questions of "heyall" and Satan came up in discussion last time. The religious scholar Elaine Pagels addresses the question of The Origins of Satan...


...and here's one teacher's interesting experience of encountering heated resistance when proposing the thought that Satan is metaphorical and mythical.

The more interesting issue to me, still, is Bertrand Russell's insistence (quoted last week) that it's immoral to believe in such a malevolent being and destiny for any of our fellow humans. We speak casually of going to hell, and frighten the daylights out of children in the process. To me, that's the ultimate sin.
==
Bart Ehrman on heaven & hell... "eternal life, for Jesus, Paul, and the earliest Christians, was a life lived in the body, not above in heaven, but down here, where we are now..."
==
Also mentioned again last time, "the missing link"-really a red herring, I think.

What About the Missing Link?
The concept of a "missing link" between humans and apes arose in the 19th century, when the fossil record was largely incomplete. Large gaps separated species, casting doubt on the theory of evolution. But in the last 130 years, a plethora of fossils have been discovered, greatly narrowing the gaps between species. The Australopithecus afarensis fossil known as "Lucy" is considered to be a key fossil bridging the gap between humans and primitive hominids. http://evolutionfaq.com/
==
The quirkily entertaining 1931 pop/social history Only Yesterday places the Scopes Trial in the wider context of its "roaring" decade, though Larson warns us of its "cartoonlike simplicity." But an earlier section on anti-immigrant/minority "undiluted Americanism" is eerily relevant to our time.
==
Darrow reflects on turning 61
I have always yearned for peace, but have lived a life of war. I do not know why, excepting that it is the law of my being. I have lived a life in front trenches, looking for trouble.

If I had known just what I was to run into here I would have worn a gas mask. A man is never painted as he is. One is either better or worse than the picture that is drawn. This is the first time that I have felt that I was worse. No one ever gave me a dinner like this before, and I really do not know how my friends happened to take into their heads to do it this time. I am sure it has been pleasant, although in spots more or less embarrassing; still on the whole I prefer the embarrassments incident to this dinner, rather than the ones I often get.

Like most others who reach the modest age of sixty-one, I have hardly noticed it. Still this morning for the first time in more than twenty years I felt a twinge of rheumatism, a gentle reminder on this birthday that I am no longer a "spring chicken." On the whole the years have passed rapidly. Some of them, it is true, have dragged, but mainly they have hurried as if anxious to finish the job as soon as they possibly could. So quickly have they sped that I hardly realize that so many have been checked off, in fact I have scarcely thought about it as they went by... (continues) The Clarence Darrow Home Page...
==
From famoustrials.com-The early 1920s found social patterns in chaos. Traditionalists, the older Victorians, worried that everything valuable was ending. Younger modernists no longer asked whether society would approve of their behavior, only whether their behavior met the approval of their intellect. Intellectual experimentation flourished. Americans danced to the sound of the Jazz Age, showed their contempt for alcoholic prohibition, debated abstract art and Freudian theories. In a response to the new social patterns set in motion by modernism, a wave of revivalism developed, becoming especially strong in the American South.

Who would dominate American culture--the modernists or the traditionalists? Journalists were looking for a showdown, and they found one in a Dayton, Tennessee courtroom in the summer of 1925. There a jury was to decide the fate of John Scopes, a high school biology teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution. The guilt or innocence of John Scopes, and even the constitutionality of Tennessee's anti-evolution statute, mattered little. The meaning of the trial emerged through its interpretation as a conflict of social and intellectual values... Continued, http://www.famous-trials.com/scopesmonkey - includes a useful link list of "other resources"
==
While Darwin Sleeps (video)
A massive insect collection reimagined as ‘a mescaline vision dreamt by Charles Darwin’ - reminiscent of those dream scenes in The Creation...==


The Moral World in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt for Now

Nothing is helping us more right now, as we watch human tragedies unfold on the U.S.-Mexican border and elsewhere, than a conversation Krista had last year with literary historian Lyndsey Stonebridge — on thinking and friendship in dark times. She applies the moral clarity of the 20th-century philosopher Hannah Arendt to now — an invitation to dwell on the human essence of events we analyze as political and economic. Our dramas of exile and displacement are existential, she says — about who we will all be as people and political community. What Arendt called the “banality of evil” was at root an inability to hear another voice. On Being

@osopher

8 comments:

  1. SG 5-6 2. What was Albert Einstein's opinion on the
    Tennessee law? (112)

    TM 12-16 2. How many churches were in Dayton and what was the population?

    ReplyDelete
  2. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Atl quiz question Jun 27
    SG 5-6
    1. How did the world-famous horticulturist Luther Burbank describe the trial? (116).
    2. In discussing the trial, Roman Catholic newspapers warned the parishioners against what? (126).
    3. What did Darrow tell the Progressive Club attendees about the country? (136)
    4. Who and what did Darrow say was not and was on trial? (146).
    5. Why did Darrow declare that it didn’t matter where the scientists came from regarding the meaning of evolution, because ? (156).
    6. Darrow did not object to the jury or anyone else praying in secret or private, but he did object to what? (166).


    TM 12-16
    1. What do the marijuana growers in Rhea county use to identify the exact location of each marijuana plant? (139).
    2. Who was the most respected lawyer on the ACLU executive committee and was their official representative at the trial? (149).
    3. What was Kurt Wise’s official title at Bryan College? (159).
    4. All of Matthew’s adult life he despised religion, in particular because of its resistance to what? (169).
    5. What was the name of the street in London that was the place to be in all England? (179).
    6. According to Matthew, “The depth and pervasiveness of religious faith is overwhelming. Everyone believes what?” (189).
    DQ
    1. In 2025, we will celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the Scopes Trial. Is it possible that we will have legislation introduced in the legislature to ban the teaching of human evolution? What do you think the outcome will be this time?
    2. Do you feel that the sexual exploits depicted by Matthew Chapman in Trials of the Monkey could have been omitted without seriously detracting from his memoir recreating his visit to Dayton?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. 2. From my point of view, yes, definitely. I read much more about the self-abuse of English schoolboys than I ever want to know! But, from the author's POV, perhaps it wouldn't have been an honest memoir if he omitted an obsession that so definitively shaped his early life. I wonder if he thought it important thematically as well, in terms of the de-evolutionary "descent" he thinks his lineage has been tracking.

      Delete
  4. TM 13-18
    1. What were modernist Christians saying to the fundamentalists? (131)

    2. What written words from WJB did Dudley Malone use against him? (141)

    3. What recurrent dream did Kurt Wise of Bryan College have and what did in mean according to him? (151)

    4. What street in London was the place to be in all of England in the 1960s? (161)

    5. What famous person did Matthew meet on a return flight from L.A.? (181)

    6. Which prosecuting attorney had a lackluster performance and was continually asked to speak up? (191)

    ReplyDelete
  5. SG 5-6
    1. Why did Scopes make public appearances in New York with three of America's best known evolutionary scientists? (113)

    2. During the 1920's what did the American public become fascinated with? (123)

    3. What did Governor Peay communicate to the court shortly before the trial? (133)

    4. What did the prosecution decide to oppose at the trial that gave WJB a sure way to proclaim his message? (143)

    5. Why did potential jurors want to be selected for the jury? (153)

    6. In Darrow opening, he introduced his main point - what was it? (163)

    DQ
    1. Should intelligent design be taught in the public schools?

    2. What's the difference between evolution and Darwinism?

    3. Should legislators control public education?

    4. What are your thoughts on individual liberty versus majoritarianism?

    ReplyDelete

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