One of the things I noticed immediatly upon opening Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene, is that he refers to Darwin as the first to "put together a coherent and tenable reason of why we exist" (p.1) This brought back the memory of Slaughterhouse Five, where the Tralfamadorians were interested in Charles Darwin, because of his supposed belief that "death was an improvement". I found this very interesting that so far two books in English class have refered to, or presented me with, Charles Darwin and his theories. I think it is a pretty funny coincidence.
I have to disagree with the author when he describes the fetus of a human having "no more feeling than an amoeba" (p 10). How can anybody prove that the fetus cannot feel? However, I do agree with him that other animals should have some rights, like not being test on in a lab, or similar. But do chimpanzees need certain legal rights, and to learn the human language? I think they would prefer if we just left them alone.
An excellent example of a person with pure altruism is Mother Teresa. (Click here for more information) She gave her time, effort, and pretty much entire self, towards the care of the sick, hungry, poor and dying.
Chapter two wasn't very fair. I felt like I was in science class again, and I though I was reading an english book! The author described many different scientific-observances and -names. He goes on to describe how exactly he believes life was created. By a couple of molecules. I am not sure, but could he maybe be being a little bit satirical with his novel? He seems to be protraying the message that life came from molecules, but where did the first building blocks come from? Is the author trying to answer the questions "is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man?" (p.1).
No comments:
Post a Comment