CLINTON, THE ALPHA MALE, THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, AND WHY THE TESTES ARE OUTSIDE THE BODY

This is going to take some explaining. In the Feb. 9 _New Yorker_, MIT psychologist Steven Pinker provided an evolutionary explanation for why famous men gamble their reputations, their careers, and their marriages on reckless sexual encounters. He says "A prehistoric man who slept with fifty women could have sired fifty children, and would be more likely to have descendants who inherited his tastes. A women who slept with fifty men would have no more descendants than a woman who slept with one. Thus men should seek quantity in sexual partners, women quality." Pinker goes on to explain that your average Joe does not have the opportunity for fifty different women a year, and so has to suppress this drive. Powerful men, on the other hand, have the opportunity and can't resist it. In his short comment, Pinker does not carry his argument to its logical conclusion. Human societies should eventually be dominated, as are many animal societies, by the "alpha" male, the biggest, strongest, and smartest who passes on his DNA while the rest of the males slink off in the background. And this, believe it or not, brings us to the *anthropic principle*. This has become the latest argument by theologians for the existence of God. It seems the universe had to be exquisitely tuned to make it possible for our form of life to evolve. Slight variations if the mass of the proton, the strength of the electromagnetic force, and other physical parameters would have lead to a universe far different from ours and certainly no human life. Thus, the anthropic theologians say, there had to be a creator to choose the exact laws and parameters of physics to produce life. They do not say who created this finely-tuned creator. Of course, the logical flaw in this argument is that we have no idea what other combinations of laws and constants would produce *some* form of life. Load http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/monkey.html from your web browser to create your own universe and see that life may not be as unlikely as it seems. Now, what does this have to do with Clinton and the alpha male? One Internet wag who called himself "The Gus" has proposed an anthropic argument for why male testicles are outside the body. You would think they would be much safer someplace inside, where they would be better shielded from the swinging swords of the battlefield. This is something your editor has been meaning to ask his urologist, but he doubts that very capable physician has given the matter much thought. The anthropic argument, in somewhat modified form, goes something like this: In animal husbandry, it is necessary to castrate the majority of males so that the best DNA gets passed on succeeding generations. Similarly, sultans and kings always needed a large supply of eunuchs to carry on the business of the palace without any danger of spreading their inferior DNA around and producing illegitimate heirs. The process of castration would be far more dangerous, if not impossible, had the testicles been inside the body. And so, in order for human societies to thrive, men have to expose them both. This also explains the "flasher" phenomenon too, don't you see? Someday, in the inevitable future when the females of the human species finally take control of society, they will only need to keep a few alpha males around, like Bill Clinton and your editor. As for the rest of you guys, watch out for that lady with the knife! Actually, women may not need us alphas either, once they are able to scramble their own DNA and re-implant it back into their eggs. Surely this is not much beyond current technology.
 

POSTMODERN PSYCHIATRY Ian Pitchford reports from the University of Sheffield that postmodernism is already firmly entrenched within medical research: "For example, my department is a branch of the department of psychiatry and therefore part of the University of Sheffield Medical School. Our 'research methods' course outlines the research that one might undertake in studying psychiatry: theoretical, qualitative, quantitative, and emancipatory. The theoretical approaches include: Jurgen Habermas and the colonization of the public sphere, discourse analysis (rooted in the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), textual analysis (Lacan and Derrida), and the psychoanalytic case study. Needless to stay statistics, biomedicine and psychology are *not* mentioned as viable approaches - these positivistic disciplines are 'constituted by discourses of power', they 'privilege rationality' and form part of the state's apparatus for controlling and suppressing dissent and 'challenging behaviours'. He adds: "I would say that the majority of people in my department, including some of the medics, consider mental illness to be a social construction having nothing to do with the brain as such."

 
 

=======
A free, open newsletter on issues of interest to the University of Hawaii and international academic communities. To subscribe send the following message, with subject blank, to listproc@hawaii.edu subscribe hri-l first_name last_name. To unsubscribe send: unsubscribe hri-l Do not use reply, nor send requests to hri-l@hawaii.edu. To contact the editor, send email to vstenger@hawaii.edu This and earlier issues are archived at: http://www.phys.hawaii.edu/vjs/www/rati.html. Feel free to re-distribute this newsletter in full or in part, as long as it is not being done for profit and due credit is given.