The Saunterer

E. O. Wilson’s method of teaching

    In his new little book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, E. O. Wilson distills his success as a teacher of biology into five principles. Copyright law allows us to quote no more than the first. Would that all teachers of all subjects followed it:

Teach top-down. If I learned anything in four decades of experience, it is that the best way to transmit knowledge and stimulate thought is to teach each subject from the general to the specific. Address a large question of the kind already interesting to the students and relevant to their lives, then peel off layers of causation as currently understood, and in growing technical and philosophically disputatious detail, in order to teach and provoke. Explain, for example, aging and death as best can be done with knowledge of evolution, genetics, and physiology, then explore the consequences in demography, public policy, and philosophy. Finally, proceed laterally, if wished, into the consequences of the phenomenon to history, religion, ethics, and the creative arts. Do not teach from the bottom up, with an introduction such as “First, we’ll learn some of this, and some of that, and we’ll combine the knowledge later to build the bigger picture.” Don’t paint the picture in pointillist dabs to easily bored students. Instead, put it up whole as quickly as possible, and show why it matters to them and will matter for a lifetime. Then dissect the whole down to the foundations.

    Besides “Teach top-down,” Wilson’s headings for the four other principles are “Reach outside biology,” “Focus on problem solving,” “Cut deep and travel far,”and “Commit yourself.”

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    For a brief biography of E. O. Wilson, click here.

Anne Shannon Monroe on being cheered by the brave front

    In seriously troubling times, we can put on either of two fronts. One is the false front, one  the brave front, with between them all the difference in affecting the world, wrote Anne Shannon Monroe:

I have never been much cheered by the “stenciled smile,” the false front, the pretending that there was no trouble when trouble stalked, that there was no death when Death laid his cold hand upon one dearer to us than life: but I have been tremendously cheered by the brave front; the imagination that could travel past the trouble and see that there were still joys in the world. . . . (From Singing in the Rain, by Anne Shannon Monroe, Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926.)

    A publication of The Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission notes that Singing in the Rain is “one of twelve books, mostly novels, this Lake Grove resident wrote between 1900 and 1941.”

Robert Henri on universal artists

    Robert Henri once wrote that anyone could and should be a universal artist: one who, most anywhere in the universe of vocations and avocations, works as artists do:
    Art when really understood is the province of every human being.
    It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside, extra thing.
    When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for a better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it, shows there are still more pages possible.
    The world would stagnate without him, and the world would be beautiful with him; for he is interesting to himself and he is interesting to others. He does not have to be a painter or sculptor to be an artist. He can work in any medium. He simply has to find the gain in the work itself, not outside it. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 242.)
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    Robert Henri is known for his portrait paintings. We are thinking of two in particular we’ve spent time with, one in the collection of The Museum at The Art Institute of Chicago, and one in the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, in Pittsburgh. For a brief biography of Robert Henri, click here. For an essay about his painting, click here.

Edna St. Vincent Millay on parents who inspire their children to follow their own paths

    Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote the following to her mother:

I was telling somebody yesterday that the reason I am a poet is entirely because you wanted me to be and intended I should be, even from the very first. You brought me up in the tradition of poetry, and everything I did you encouraged. I can not remember once in my life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else. Some parents of children that are “different” have so much to reproach themselves with. But not you, Great Spirit. (Quoted from The Life of the Creative Spirit, p. 234.)
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    For a brief biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay, click here.

Lydia H. Sigourney on the importance of wild nature

    Why preserve the little bits of wild nature that remain? Of dozens of reasons, Lydia H. Sigourney wrote of this one more than 150 years ago:

Dark passion and debasing crimes, destroy the fine edge of the soul, and eat into it, like a corroding canker. Assuming, therefore, that a pure taste is one of the tests of a healthful moral condition, we shall prize it, not only as a source of pleasure, but as an adjunct to virtue, an ally of religion. . . . The fragrant flower, the whitening harvest, the umbrageous grove, the solemn mountain, the mighty cataract, are they not all teachers? or text-books, in the hand of the Great Teacher? (Quoted from The Natural Paradise: Painting in America 1800-1950, The Museum of Modern Art, New York.)
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    For a brief biography of Lydia H. Sigourney, click  here.

Frederick Crews on why creationism is foolish

    Frederick Crews puts it this way:

Why, we must wonder, would the shaper of the universe have frittered away some fourteen billion years, turning out quadrillions of useless stars, before getting around to the one thing he really cared about, seeing to it that a minuscule minority of earthling vertebrates are washed clean of sin and guaranteed an eternal place in his company? (Quoted from Follies of the Wise, Frederick Crews, page 264.)
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    For a recorded interview with Frederick Crews, click here.

Arthur C. Clarke on the proper size of the human population

    Arthur C. Clarke puts the proper size of the human population at one six thousandth of the present size. Here is why:

The astronomer Fred Hoyle once remarked to me that it was pointless for the world to hold more people than one could get to know in a single lifetime. Even if one were president of United Earth, that would set the figure somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand; with a very generous allowance for duplication, wastage, special talents, and so forth, there really seems no requirement for what has been called the global village of the future to hold more than a million people scattered over the face of the planet. (Quoted from Arthur C. Clarke’s Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds!: Collected Essays, 1934-1998.)
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    For a brief biography of Fred Hoyle, click here.
    For a brief biography of Arthur C. Clarke, click here.

Mark Twain’s hostility to vivisection

    When the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science meets next week, October 15-19, in Salt Lake City, the animal rights movement will be on the 4,000 expected attendees’ minds. An article previewing the meeting in the October 2006 issue of The Scientist quotes B. Taylor Bennett, associate vice chancellor for research at the University at Chicago, saying: “There is a movement afoot to give legal standing to animals. The activists are trying to equate racism, sexism, and speciesism.” (The Wikipedia defines speciesism as “a prejudice against taking the interests of members of other species into account or not giving other species their due based simply on the fact that they belong to another species.”)

    To Mr. Bennett, vivisection is profitable to the human race, and therefore it is justified. Conversely to Mr. Bennett, if vivisection is curtailed, its profit to the human race will be curtailed, which is unjustified.

    Mark Twain had his answer to Mr. Bennett’s profit worries. He put it in a letter to the secretary of the London Anti-Vivisection Society, May 26, 1899:

I believe I am not interested to know whether Vivisection produces results that are profitable to the human race or doesn’t. To know that the results are profitable to the race would not remove my hostility to it. The pain which it inflicts upon unconsenting animals is the basis of my enmity towards it, and it is to me sufficient justification of the enmity without looking further.
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    For a brief biography of Mark Twain, click here.

James Fitzjames Stephen on the talent of guessing right

    James Fitzjames Stephen put the talent of guessing right as worth all our other talents:

In nearly all the important transactions of life, indeed in all transactions whatever which have relation to the future, we have to take a leap in the dark. . . . When we are to take any important resolution, to adopt a profession, to make an offer of marriage, to enter upon a speculation, to write a book - to do anything, in a word, which involves important consequences - we have to act for the best, and in nearly every case to act upon very imperfect evidence.

The one talent which is worth all other talents put together in human affairs is the talent of judging right upon imperfect materials, the talent if you please of guessing right. . . . All that can be said about it is, that to see things as they are, without exaggeration or passion, is essential to it; but how can we see things as they are? Simply by opening our eyes and looking with whatever power we may have. (Quoted from Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: And Three Brief Essays, University of Chicago Press.)
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    For a brief biography of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, click here.

John Muir knew the danger of gradualism

    John Muir naturalists are those with John Muir’s beliefs, as extracted from his collected writings and applied to today. I have spoken for them in The Life of the Creative Spirit, p.159:

   John Muir naturalists want people to wake up to the danger of gradualism. Gradualism is how things get beyond shocking without shocking us. A string of small degrading steps, with pauses for acclimation, and by grains we land without protest in a condition that a full step to would repulse us.
    Gradualism threatens every area of morality. People slightly descend from a moral principle, and that eases the way for another slight descent, and that to a third, and so on until they have descended entirely. Think of the man who cannot bear to think of killing his wife, but for some while yells at her. Once reconciled to that, he sometimes hits her lightly. Reconciled to that, he comes to knock her down regularly. Reconciled to that, he shoots her. Gradual reconciliation happens to the wife too. At the start, she would have left him if he had knocked her down once.
    Outside the home, gradualism is behind our acquiescence to heinous crimes done to persons and animals. It is why we sit on our hands without outcry at the irreparable ravaging of species and wild places. How to strip the Amazon forest bare? Don’t do it overnight while we are sleeping, or tomorrow there will be hell to pay. Do it as it is being done now. Pilfer it.
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    For a brief biography of John Muir, click here.