I have decided to begin publishing the selections of my college essays seriatim, a personal experiment in writing in second language perhaps as I had been at the end of the tether with my first: a medium through which thoughts are confined to the concreta and the sensory, the prosaic and the mundane, through which things are yapped about rather profusely but not much said (see also: language speed and information density), where feelings replace sentiments, and emotions reality, words manners, slapstick subtlety, self-equilibrium truth, and order justice — a language to which its highest and primary, if not its only, but ineffective, purpose is to assay at resolving and maintaining tension and affinity by way of equilibrating individuals in their own meagre selves and in relation to even more meagre others.
Here is my list:
1. Singling Out Darwin (Biology 101, Nov 2018)
Link: https://salisa-lohavittayavikant.com/2023/03/30/college-essay-seriatim-1-singling-out-darwin/
A personal commentary on one BBC editorial as the end-of-the-term essay. I could no longer find the aforementioned article on the web, but it surely contains the sentence: “Every single person who died before Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859 was ignorant of humanity’s origins, because they knew nothing of evolution.” It was not presented as a misguided or begrudged opinion piece that the publisher voluntarily lets astray in order to boast of their liberality and intellectual diversity, but came out officially as a kind of eulogic fascicle in their yearly annals of science worship, which prompted this pillory of mine.
Around a year or two later after I composed this assignment, I summarised my then thought in a correspondence which could be taken as a brief sketch of what I attempted to say but ended up opining with a needless sprinkle of citations:
I believe there is a strand of thought that posits that since the ascendency of science in roughly the eighteenth century, especially in the intellectual sphere, nature and science have splintered off from one another. Scientific materialism, an epistemology which views nature as consisting of mere matter, aids in the devaluation and destruction of the natural world, that full of living and dynamic processes and entities is now thoroughly exploited and colonised for the most inane human activities and consumptions. And how remarkable the intelligence inherent in lower forms of life! Octopuses are increasingly known for its cognitive intelligence and ant colony has its own complex social division and organisation. Equally tiny brains such wasps display what recent researchers believe to be a skill in logical reasoning. I am not quite convinced that such complexity of life and cognition emerges from mere Darwinian natural selection, which amounts to survival from a pool of divers genetic variations. There is such thing as an intelligent design. How such things are I am reduced to or rather stupefied into immediate silence
I agree with you that evolution is less a theory in the sense in which the term is often used. It is indeed a hypothesis. In my view, the theory of evolution is an old chestnut established to glorify the triumph of scientific paradigm over and above its oppositions, which without a latitude of thought one would seek to include only religious fervent and superstitious shamanism. I believe there is a more nuanced and logical view, perhaps with a small vitalist tint, that can satisfactorily explain the evolution of life and its diversity compared to the one offered by darwinism. In the same manner and spirit as you I believe, I did out of indignation and grievance decide to take down a notch what I deemed to be supercilious thinking in the sphere of science, which in that particular occasion was a veneration of the said scientific idea in vogue. It was however not in the form of a verbal confrontation but a written essay in my biology class which sought to dispel the myth that the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species suddenly heralded the age of enlightenment and the certainty of scientific truths. His theory of natural selection still remained a controversial doctrine at the closing of the century and it had been rejected and questioned on various grounds by scholars of the period.
2. TBD
3. TBD
Salisa lohavittayavikant 