That’s the thing - I think people DO need humanities classes… it’s right there in the name, after all. It’s the sum of things that make us human. It’s all rooted back in our creative drive, our desire to understand the world. Ultimately, all human knowledge is part of the humanities, and it’s not just something that’s tangential to our lives, it’s a driving purpose of it. I mean, just look at some of the threads here on the BBS, our food thread, our creatives thread, hell, even our silly gif-versation thread… it’s all about being creative, ultimately.
My argument is that we’re not just cogs in a machine working to reproduce capitalism, but we are humans driven by a need to understand ourselves and the universe, and pretty much all we do comes from that drive… what’s Sir Terry’s quote? Where the rise ape meetings the falling angel? Yeah… that.
I seriously don’t see why you think those two statements are in conflict. My point is that in order to understand how biology knows what it knows, you need to have a grounding in underlying fields like chemistry and mathematics (which is why biology majors generally have to take several semesters of chemistry and mathematics at least up to calculus and many biology courses can’t be taken without these already been taken). The sorts of biology survey courses that I’m complaining about are shallow fact-dumps because the typical non-science majors haven’t taken these requirements that would allow understanding of how biology knows what it knows.
I mean, I feel like there are lots of fascinating things in biology you can teach without leaning too heavily on those, including some of the key evidence that lets us know about them.
Oh, I find this stuff fascinating – I took a couple of semesters of history of biology and have actually read several of Darwin’s books. And I agree that at least some of a survey course in biology should deal with how Darwin (and others) figured out natural selection and a rough idea of the history of evolution based on comparative anatomy. Still, a biology course and a history of biology course aren’t the same thing, and especially since the 1950s with the advent of molecular biology, biology has gotten a lot more quantitative and chemistry-based.
If you want to argue with a Republican, you’ll have to find somebody else.
I should have been clearer. When I said that the government was spending more and taking in less, I was specifically talking about the jump in 2020 due to COVID. Repeated tax cuts are indeed the cause for the long term upward trend in the debt/GDP ratio since 1980. The growth in spending and decline in revenue during recessions mean that it isn’t a smooth line, but the long term upward trend is definitely tax cuts.
Actually the largest sucker of taxpayer dollars at 22% is Social Security. Which is mostly paid for by a regressive payroll tax that the rich largely avoid. The rich make most of their money as capital gains or dividends and most of their income is above the cap on payroll taxes. Net Interest and Defense both come in at 13%. Source: Fiscal Data Explains Federal Spending And before you try to imply that I am denigrating Social Security, I have always been perfectly willing to pay in to support the elderly. Because it is largely the case that today’s payroll taxes are paid out to today’s retirees.
Sure it has. But then for instance even a molecular time tree still needs to be calibrated using fossils, and for vertebrates those are placed by looking at comparative anatomy. It’s not just history at all, it’s still an active part of biology, and I don’t think you need to understand the statistics used to appreciate the principles involved.
Why would you think that’s all that matters, rather than the longer history there? And sometimes, yes, spending by the government IS necessary to save lives. We should have done far more than we did during the height of the pandemic to save lives. The economy should be in the service to us, not the other way around. At the end of the day, the economy is a made up thing made by people, and so can be shaped by and for people. It’s not some magical thing that exists without us. If we all disappeared tomorrow, so would the economy, so we should shape the economy in a way that provides the maximum benefit to all us.
[ETA] It also strikes me that part of the reason for the increased reliance on social security for retirement is very much tied to the decision by corporations (and later to parts of the public sector) to shift from pensions to 401ks at around the same time we started a huge round of deregulation of wall street. Corporations very much walked away from that postwar social contract and hence far more people found themselves depending on their SS savings, especially after the 2008 crash.
Okay. Good, as it should be. I’d like my mother to have a roof over her head and food in her stomach and health care. That’s how we SHOULD be spending on our money, not in maintaining empire. So, if we want to shore that up, we cut defense more and tax the rich.
I totally agree we need humanities clases. Though that’s not really my point. I should have remembered to say that I was in school for a BFA program, so the bulk of my classes were arts and humanities courses. Unlike someone going in for a business degree being forced to take an art class, I am taking mainly art classes, but on my own I would have focuses on only SOME of the arts, vs a wider net that I ended up getting.
In my specific case, I wanted to focus on primarily graphic design and painting. I could see classes like Illustration, drawing, and to a degree lithography being related to the field I wanted. But I especially didn’t want to focus on 3D art like sculpture and ceramics (I didn’t do great in either, but I did enjoy my ceramics teacher). I liked jewelry/metal smithing only because I had done it in HS, but it really was tertiary to the field i wanted to go into.
I know some of my peers groaned about taking the “normal” classes you need, like media studies, science credits, math, history, etc , but I saw that as being part of being well rounded. IIRC, it did seem like the last 2 (well 3 in my case) years I had less of those requirements to fill, even though I still ended up working some in. Like a class on the Ice Ages because I thought it sounded interesting, and Riflery counted as a PE class! Some of the history classes were art history, so there was overlap with my degree.
I took a beginning recorder class instead of music appreciation in college. Decades later, i took it up again for mostly mental health reasons. I’m not great, but good enough to enjoy it. It has made a huge difference in my life. I didn’t know i needed it at the time, but i do now. You just never know what will pay off.
But seriously, exactly that. Far too often, we’re reduced down to the thing we do to make a living… all of us are so much more than that, even if we don’t believe it. Studying the humanities contributes to us being able to think past the ideology of capitalism that demands we shape ourselves to the needs to capital rather than explore multiple ways of being… That’s why a solid liberal arts education includes the humanities… because it’s not just about making money and being a cog, it’s about trying to live a full life. We’ve only got this one chance here, so we should make the most of it…
Is it really that important to understand how biology knows what it knows, though?
As a humanities major, I took an overview biology course that did a very good job of explaining the mechanics behind evolution and genetics without going too deeply into things like the chemical composition of DNA. If you can understand how evolution and genetics work (even if you don’t fully understand the math or chemistry behind them), I think that is a big step in one’s knowledge of the matters at the heart of biology.
And in any case, I think that you have to learn how evolution and genetics work at a basic level before you can get into the minutiae. It’s the same with the study of history; introductory courses paint in broad strokes (key events and themes) before upper level courses start getting into the minutiae (the underlying social, political, religious, ideological and economic forces whose interplay shaped history).
Thinking of biology I wish more people understood, here are some key points that come to mind:
All living things are related and the differences generally developed gradually
Descent is a key part of understanding an organism, but it also matters how it’s adapted (there is too such a thing as a fish, dinosaurs would not all taste like chicken, etc.)
Living things exist in complex relationships with their environments involving both competition and cooperation
Disease is caused by germs that your immune system can be trained to recognize
Differences within human populations are much bigger than differences between them
Sex development involves a complex series of steps that naturally gives bimodal rather than binary outcomes
Lots of species have non-reproductive individuals and they aren’t worse off for it
So many things to do with pregnancy I’m not even going to try to break it down
Here’s one more: it’s not just a matter of “survival of the fittest” or even “adaptability.” There is always an element of randomness (luck if you will) when it comes to survival.
