Jours Improductifs

The man who spoke to us Tuesday stood before us and donned a white lab coat that read "The Wizard of TUNA." I don't know what that means, but I do know that he tricked us into thinking he froze his finger in a bin of nitrogen and then struck it with a mallet, sending shards of blackened appendage flying.  Don't worry, it turned out to really just be a hot dog.  He was a cool old dude who not only knew what he was talking about, but managed to make it relatively interesting.   

Human values is somewhat the theme of our class, and Mr. Tuna said he initially had some trouble relating his field in chemistry to our forum.  It turns out, however, that values intersect science in three primary ways.  Also, from the first point I learned a new word, which is always exhilarating:

• Epistemic values guide science itself.  Interestingly enough, epistemology is a branch of philosophy.  It deals with the origin, nature, methods, and limits of knowledge itself - "how we know what we know."  

For example, one law called Occam's Razor says that if more than one explanation can equally well satisfy a set of observations, scientists adopt the simplest explanation.  That was surprising, because I thought science was always unbiased and calculating.  I mean, is the easiest explanation always more right than the others?  Nope.  And yet it's a part of science to choose just one easy explanation and leave out the rest.  See what values do?  They weed things out due to pure preference.  Then Tuna goes off on this long list of things that scientists like - reliability, universalism, statistics, an observation's ability to generate new ideas... It was a very, very long list, and all the points support the premise of SCIENCE, but some of them make the field seem a little less cold and more subject to humanity. 

• Even TUNA went on to say that values enter science through cultural values of individuals.  These impact what studies are pursued and how much they are funded. 

What kind of people do you think put so much work into making guidelines for ethical treatment of lab animals?  Certainly not the people who don't care about the animals.  Now, the outcomes of values studies don't always paint a pretty picture, and sometimes the approach a practicioner takes to come to his conclusion isn't as a complete blind man.  He takes the approach that he believes will hand him the most conclusive evidence.  For example, the Tuskegee syphillis study targeted black men in a rural area.  That's just the way the bread bakes.

• Values can play reverse, emerge from science itself, and be redistributed into culture or society. 

Some of our beliefs wouldn't have been brought to question if it weren't for science.  The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physiology went to Robert Geoffrey Edwards, who came up with in-vitro fertilization.  Some people thought the resulting test tube babies wouldn't have souls or something to that effect, but I'm pretty sure Edward's first IVF result back in the 70s, Louise Joy Brown, probably had a soul.  It's not like her parents' egg and sperm were made in a plastics factory.  But that brings up the whole cloning issue, which I believe is today a much more controversial issue.  Actually, that is very, very interesting.  The next time I'm forced to write a paper, I'll do it on human cloning.   

Anyway!  It's reasonable to say that some of the things scientists come up with will stir up some drama in the values department later on, and that is fairly awesome.  It's exciting to hear about something new that I can disagree with, even if it is sometimes angering/confusing/alarming.

• I just watched that youtube video TUNA wanted to show us, "The Comeback: Coal Will Power America's Economic Recovery," and it is one of the most legendary commercials I have ever seen. 

Last night, some of us went to the last part of the poetry slam in the GUC.  Now, I'm pretty open-minded for a Christian (definitely politically incorrect to say), but here is my question: Where do you draw the line between accepting the fact that not everyone lives like you, and being offended at someone who publicly traipses around in timeless sin?  Is it close-minded to be affronted by something?  I'm inherently upset when I notice my own sin, and I'm upset by others' too, I guess. 

If you're wondering, the poet we heard was very, very homosexual.  It's not like he said anything I hadn't heard before; I was just disgusted by it.  I would parallel the "poetry" to insight into the exploits of a kidnapper or thief, but I can honestly say those scenarios would have been much more fascinating.  This guy was just going after shock value.                  
 
Today I wrote a compare-contrast essay in English Comp class about trick-or-treating as a child versus trick-or-treating as a college student.  The end result is always free candy. 

"Along the way, we learn things too hard... Whisper out the way to stop my heart." - Drist