3 result(s) tagged “Science”

In the fifth chapter of his 2007 book Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives, David Sloan Wilson writes:

“It turns out that something very similar to my desert-island thought experiment has been performed on chickens by a poultry scientist named William Muir.”

That probably sounds odd.

It will likely sound even odder when you find out what the desert-island thought experiment is: a set of three hypothetical situations to explore human morality through the lens of evolution.

In Davis Guggenheim’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a high-angle shot of George W. Bush is followed by a shot of Al Gore looking down out of an airplane window. The juxtaposition delivers a subtle but forceful message: Al Gore is God, gazing in harsh judgment on this Republican president.

You might quibble with my decision to focus on these two, seemingly throwaway images when the movie itself is dominated by Gore’s lecture on global warming. But this shot pairing is symptomatic; An Inconvenient Truth pretends to be about global warming, but it’s mostly a vanity project, a propaganda film supporting the future candidacy (or canonization) of Al Gore. This is a political document masquerading as altruism, an attempt to position the former vice president at the forefront of the environmental issue in spite of the Clinton-Gore administration’s mixed record. And it’s working.

It might sound like a lame excuse.

But if a man cheats on his wife, he might explain himself this way: “I couldn’t help it. My evolved psychological mechanisms made me have an affair.” And he’d be right.

Sort of.

David M. Buss, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has spent more than two decades studying sexual desire and behavior. And his research has led to one overarching observation: Across cultures, people’s mating strategies are universal.