Introduction to Candide (Ch.1 and 2)

Candide

By: Voltaire

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What were Voltaire's political beliefs?

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"Voltaire perceived the French bourgeoisie to be too small and ineffective, the aristocracy to be parasitic and corrupt, the commoners as ignorant and superstitious, and the church as a static force useful only as a counterbalance since its "religious tax" or the tithe helped to create a strong backing for revolutionaries.

Voltaire at Frederick the Great's Sanssouci. Engraving by Baquoy.
Voltaire distrusted democracy, which he saw as propagating the idiocy of the masses.[citation needed]To Voltaire, only an enlightened monarch or an enlightened absolutist, advised by philosophers like himself, could bring about change as it was in the king's rational interest to improve the power and wealth of his subjects and kingdom. Voltaire essentially believed enlightened despotism to be the key to progress and change.
He was, however, deeply opposed to the use of war and violence as means for the resolution of controversies, as he repeatedly and forcefully stated in many of his works, including the "Philosophical Dictionary," where he described war as an "infernal enterprise" and those who resort to it "ridiculous murderers." He also believed that Africans were a separate species, inferior to the Europeans, and that ancient Jews were "an ignorant and barbarous people" drawing examples of this from the Old Testament.

Voltaire's château at Ferney, France.
He is best known today for his novel, Candide, ou l'Optimisme (Candide, or Optimism, 1759), which satirized the philosophy of Leibniz. "

Taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

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CHAPTERS 1 AND 2

December 10th, 2007

6:44 P.M.

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.....As I read these first two chapters, I quickly realized that there are a bunch of absurdities and sarcasm mixed together to compose this satire.

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.....The first chapter mocks Candide's family feelings of "superiority". His mother would not marry his father because he had a petty family inheritance, yet the mother's family inheritance isn't that much different. Another example of the storyline's absurdity is the wonderful teacher Candide and his cousin had, Mr. Pangloss. He taught "metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology". By naming his curriculum such a long name that has a little bit of everything and a little bit of nothing, Voltaire completely mocks whatever credibility the curriculum could have. He just wants to show Pangloss as an arrogant known all that in reality knows nothing. Voltaire wants to show it's a meaningless and ineffective program, that doesn't really teach anything valuable. And education is the foundation for everything. If these people have such education then they aren't the "noble" family they want to appear to be.

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......The second chapter was weirder than the first. The first was full of absurdity and everything but at least it was somewhat realistic. However, the second just seems absurd all the way around (at least that's what I thought at first, as I write I'm realizing it does make sense). At first I was going to say Voltaire was completely out of his mind, but that isn't the case. I think he was to critisize the army's brutality and cruelty. Once Candide is kicked out of the Baron's house, he becomes "enlisted" (because we soon learn it was more like enslaved) in the army with the promise of money, ego feeding, and survival. However, once Candide has regained strength and confidence he decides to leave without notice, not realizing that he doesn't have that freedom. "One fine spring morning he took it into his head to decamp and walked straight off, thinking it a priviledge common to man and beast to use his legs when he wanted. But he had not gone six miles before he was caught, bound, and thrown into a dungeon by four other six-foot heroes (24)." The whole absurdity in this is that as punishment he has to choose "between being floggerd thirty-six times by the whole regiment or having twelve bullets in his brain." How cruel is that? Human instinct is to survive, so obviously he would choose the flogging even if it implies over four thousand floggings. Voltaire ironically called this decision "Liberty." In conclusion, this chapter critisizes the way the army use cruelty and lack of mercy in order to threaten real liberty.

Hamlet Personifications

Funny Hamlet Production: Character list

Hamlet: Chris Tucker
Ophelia: Natalie Portman
Queen: Queen Latifah
Polonius: Will Ferrel
Claudius: Dr. Phil
Hamlet's father/ghost: Morgan Freeman
Laertes: Ben Stiller
Rosencratz: Owen Wilson
Guildenstern: Luke Wilson

Final Selfish Gene Blog Entry

The Selfish Gene

P. 250-266

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...... I didn't understand what "built in unfairness" or "asymmetry in the cost of living." Just as well, why does Dawkins dedicate so much of this chapter on the significance of parasitic coexistence?

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Bottlenecking the life cycle: Restarting the building of a body each time. In other words, each time a new person is born the drawing board of humanity is reset.

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....In my opinion the "bottleneck life cycle" can be both, good and bad. For example, by starting over the genes have a chance to perfect previous models and make the body more efficient and effective in its functions. However, if by some chance they make a terrible mistake, this could lead to the self destruction of the body they formed; the probability of these same genes being passed on is considerably lower as the body could die before it has reached the reproductive state of its life. Therefore, the "bottleneck life cycle" is somewhat flaw proof, and it allows more perfection than mistakes. This theory, or system allows genes to perfect themselves as they pass on from one generation to the next, rooting out flaws very early on.

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Excerpt from RICHARD DAWKINS'S EVOLUTION By: By Ian Parker: (http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins/WorldOfDawkins-archive/Media/dawkny.shtml)

......Like so much of Dawkins's enterprise, the inspiration for "The Selfish Gene" was rebuttal: the book was designed to vanish an infuriatingly widespread popular misconception about evolution. The misconception was that Darwinian selection worked at the level of the group or the species, that it had something to do with the balance of nature. How else could one understand, for example, the evolution of apparent "altruism" in animal behavior? How could self-sacrifice, or niceness, ever have been favored by natural selection? There were answers to these questions, and they had been recently developed, in particular, by the evolutionary biologists W. D. Hamilton, now at Oxford, and George Williams, of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. But their answers were muted. Dawkins has written, "For me, their insight had a visionary quality. But I found their expressions of it too laconic, not full-throated enough. I was convinced that an amplified and developed version could make everything about life fall into place, in the heart as well as in the brain."

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......Essentially, their insight was that altruism in nature was a trick of the light. Once one understands that evolution works at the level of the gene--a process of gene survival, taking place (as Dawkins developed it) in bodies that the gene occupies and then discards--the problem of altruism begins to disappear. Evolution favors strategies that cause as many of an animal's genes as possible to survive--strategies that may not immediately appear to be evolutionarily sound. In the idea's simplest form, if an animal puts its life at risk for its offspring, it is preserving a creature - gene "vehicle," in Dawkins's language--half of whose genes are its own. This is a sensible, selfish strategy, despite the possible inconvenience of death. No one is being nice.

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.......Starting from this point, "The Selfish Gene" took its reader into more complex areas of animal behavior, where more persuasion was needed--more mathematics, sometimes, and more daring logical journeys. Dawkins assumed no prior knowledge of the subject in his reader, yet was true to his science. He made occasional ventures into ambitious prose (genes "swarm in huge colonies, safe inside gigantic lumbering robots"), but mostly relied on sustained clarity, the taming of large numbers, and the judicious use of metaphor. The result was exhilarating. Upon the book's publication, the Times called it "the sort of popular science writing that makes the reader feel like a genius." Douglas Adams, a friend of Dawkins's and the author of "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," found the experience of reading it "one of those absolutely shocking moments of revelation when you understand that the world is fundamentally different from what you thought it was." He adds, "I'm hesitating to use the word, but it's almost like a religious experience."

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.......The last thing that would have crossed my mind was to think that this book was a rebuttal to the usual misconceptions of evolution. I guess that thinking about that way makes sense; however, it's not the first thing that comes to mind. I actually thought this book was a tool for Dawkins to show and teach any average joe about the intricacies behind the whole process of evolution. (Funny to say average joe, though, it's not one of the easiest books I've ever read.) For someone interested in the field of science or sociology or evolution this is probably a very interesting book, but, personally, for me it wasn't. It was a bore having to go through all the technical terms a million times until I kind of understood what was going on. It was very tedious reading that required 200% of my attention in order to understand a very disproportional amount of what was actually being said.

Hamlet Vocabulary for Scene

Hamlet

Act V.ii 239-449

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Definitions taken from www.m-w.com:

Stoup: a beverage container
Dally: to waste time; to act playfully
Wanton: hard to control; inhumane, cruel
Springe: a noose fastened to an elastic body to catch small game

The Long Reach of the Gene

The Selfish Gene

P. 233-250

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......I really didn't understand much about the begginning and I thought as the chapter progressed Dawkins was scattered all over the place; the chapter had no winding thread that gave it fluency. For example I did not understand what point Dawkins was trying to make with the "t Gene" example, or the snail shell one. [How is it possible that having a harder shell is a detriment (to the genes of the snail) and not a quality of a snail? Doesn't a harder shell mean more survival for the genes and more future generations to carry those same genes?]

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.....This is what I understood: There have been cases when one gene that is good for the being is also a detriment to other genes. However, if a gene is good to the being then why does it matter if it's bad to other genes? I mean, it's doing the being good isn't it? Why should it be prevented? Maybe, it's better to sacrifice some other genes for the well-being of the whole community of genes. Survival of the fittest I guess; whichever gene has the upperhand, then that gene is the one that will survive. But isn't this kind of ironic? A being was made by genes that were struggling to survive, and found that the easiest way is by joining together in a community to form a gene machine. I guess that is the selfishness in the whole process. In reality, each gene is selfish in their own way: each gene is willing to do whatever it takes in order to insure their own survival.

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.......Was the Caddis example just meant to point out how we look at evolution as physical and genetical changes, but don't give importance to other developments such as customs and behavior? From a scientific point of view you probably perceive evolution as a very to the point thing, however, it has so many branches that are usually ignored. Evolution is looked upon as the man that used to crawl but learned to walk with time. The cultural and social aspect of it is usually left out. Evolution includes learning, education, mathematical improvements, arts, government and interpersonal relationship. Even if evolution includes all these other aspects, they are usually left out in the teaching of the term. But, after all, Dawkins is a scientist which means these are probably just assumptions.

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VOCABULARY (definitions taken from http://www.m-w.com/):

Phenotype: the observable properties of an organism that are produced by the interaction of the genotype and the environment

Genotype: all or part of the genetic constitution of an individual or group

Protozoan: any of a phylum or subkingdom (Protozoa) of chiefly motile and heterotrophic unicellular protists (as amoebas, trypanosomes, sporozoans, and paramecia) that are represented in almost every kind of habitat and include some pathogenic parasites of humans and domestic animals

Viroids: any of two families (Pospiviroidae and Avsunviroidae) of subviral particles that consist of a small single-stranded RNA arranged in a closed loop without a protein shell and that replicate in their host plants where they may or may not be pathogenic

Plasmids: an extrachromosomal ring of DNA especially of bacteria that replicates autonomously

RNA: any of various nucleic acids that contain ribose and uracil as structural components and are associated with the control of cellular chemical activities