Word: human
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Samuel Chavkin's new book presents a series of ideas on quantifying and manipulating human behavior from chillingly over scientific thinkers like Mark, Ervin and Sweet. He is a muckraker--not in the present pejorative sense of needlessly digging out past personal scandals of celebrities, but in the sense of following the fine old tradition of the crusading journalist seeking out corruption or abuse of power wherever it may occur and exposing that evil to the timeless cure of fresh air and sunlight. His book brings out a creeping fascism: in what he sees as a slow rise in scientists...
...quest for muck to rake, twisting the much-misrepresented ideas of sociobiologist E.O. Wilson, to give himself a target for an assault on determinism. Chavkin writes, "Wilson's contention is that it is the genes and not cultural evolution or socioeconomics or political environment that are responsible for human behavior." In fact, Wilson simply says that genes play a large, but not solo, role in shaping human behavior; he would hardly be happy with Chavkin's characterization of his ideas...
...instrument much like an ice pick to sever the connection between the frontal lobes of the brain. But while the technique generally pacified patients for a while, it also frequently left them with new and unpredictable mental disorders. The crest of enthusiasm for lobotomies left behind thousands of human tragedies...
...brain's destructive from its constructive centers, it appears likely that effective, directed psychosurgical techniques, even assuming they are to be desired, will remain elusive for a long time to come. The aggressive, angry functions of the brain are too finely interconnected with other functions, like the human will, perhaps even creativity. In the fantastically complex circuitry of the brain, hard science may have reached the limit of its power to identify cause and effect. To go beyond the limit may be to court disaster. Restraint would seem to be in order, lest one day a surgeon will...
...Rebelle" depicts an abstract concept--rebellion. One black arm reaches high over the head of a figure not recognizably human. The other arm seems atrophied, dwarf-size. There is one red eye in the center of the face: a favorite Surrealist technical device symolizing both inner and outer vision. "La Fronde" harks back to the theories of Sigmund Freud, one of the great heroes of the founder of the Surrealist movement. A person with a tiny head and huge, bloated body curls around in an endless, crazy, frightened somersault--a Freudian might see it as a picture of someone...