An analysis of the rhetorical precis form

The son of Shimon Simon Yehiel Velikovsky — and Beila Grodensky, he learned several languages as a child and was sent away to study at the Medvednikov Gymnasium in Moscowwhere he performed well in Russian and mathematics.

Cognitive Flexibility Evolutionists insist that genes constrain and direct human behavior.

Language, Tone and Verbosity

Cultural constructivists counter that culture, embodied in the arts, shapes human experience. Both these claims are true, but some evolutionists and some cultural constructivists have mistakenly regarded them as mutually exclusive D.

Some evolutionists have either ignored the arts or tried to explain them away as epiphenomenal to the basic processes of life. In the past few years, evolutionists in both the sciences and the humanities have broken through this impasse, arguing that the imagination is a functional part of the adapted mind.

Revising that model makes it possible for us now fully to integrate the evolutionary human sciences and literary study. Cognitive modules—the neural machinery dedicated to sight, for example—are characterized by automaticity and efficiency.

The idea of massive modularity thus carried within itself a general sense of humans as adaptation-executing automata. The idea of massive modularity over-generalizes from the most hard-wired components of the brain.

It is a massive oversimplification of human cognitive architecture, and it is already fading into the archives of intellectual history Geary; Sterelny.

As he sees it, natural selection shaped human motives to maximize inclusive fitness within a hunter-gatherer ecology. Sociality and language were part of the human adaptive repertory. Imaginative culture was not.

To illustrate the by-product idea, Pinker draws parallels between art and pornography, psychoactive drugs, and rich foods like cheesecake. He acknowledges that fictional narratives might have informational content of some utility in providing game-plans for practical problems that could arise.

All the other features of the arts, he suggests, reflect only the human capacity to exploit evolved mechanisms for producing pleasure. This sort of pleasure, detached from all practical value with respect to survival and reproduction, would be equivalent to the pleasure derived from masturbation.

The distinguished sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson offers a very different vision of human cognitive evolution. The Unity of KnowledgeWilson poses the same question posed by Pinker: If the arts are steered by inborn rules of mental development, they are end products not just of conventional history but also of genetic evolution.

Were the genetic guides mere byproducts—epiphenomena—of that evolution, or were they adaptations that directly improved survival and reproduction? And if adaptations, what exactly were the advantages conferred?

The adaptive value of high intelligence is that it provides the means for behavioral flexibility—for generating plans based on mental representations of complex relationships, engaging in collective enterprises requiring shared mental representations, and thus producing novel solutions to adaptive problems.

Behavioral flexibility has made of the human species the most successful alpha predator of all time, but achieving dominance in this way has come with a cost. To the modern human mind, alone among all minds in the animal kingdom, the world does not present itself as a series of rigidly defined stimuli releasing a narrow repertory of stereotyped behaviors.

It presents itself as a vast and potentially perplexing array of percepts, inferences, causal relations, contingent possibilities, analogies, contrasts, and hierarchical conceptual structures. The human mind is free to organize the elements of cognition in an infinitely diverse array of combinatorial possibilities.

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And most of those potential forms of organization, like most major mutations, would be fatal. Freedom is the key to human success, and it is also an invitation to disaster.

If instincts are defined as stereotyped programs of behavior released automatically by environmental stimuli, we can say that in humans the arts partially take the place of instinct.“The Delano [Kern County] grape strike was a labor strike by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the United Farm Workers against grape growers in California.

The strike began on September 8, [this is when Filipino pickers first walked out of the fields; Bardacke marks September 20 th as the official beginning of the coordinated strike action], and lasted more than five years.

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Semiotics is the academic field dedicated to the study of signs. A sign (for example, the word "ship") may be recognized by the presence of its constituent parts, which in semiotic theories based on Saussure's, at least, are the signifier (the container, or the sign's perceptible form: the letters s-h-i-p) and the signified (the meaning or content; the notion conveyed by the signifier: 'a.

Confusion over avoiding the passive. Many grammarians and commentators on usage and writing have delivered themselves of truly fantastic statements about the passive construction. The well-known model of the functions of language introduced by the Russian-American linguist, Roman Jakobson (, pp.

), can be disputed on several grounds from a theoretical standpoint. The Design of Writing and the Writing of Design - No one will ever escape the necessity of writing.

Even entering a career dealing with math and art – like architecture – does not mean that a person will not need writing skills.

Semiotics is the academic field dedicated to the study of signs. A sign (for example, the word "ship") may be recognized by the presence of its constituent parts, which in semiotic theories based on Saussure's, at least, are the signifier (the container, or the sign's perceptible form: the letters s-h-i-p) and the signified (the meaning or content; the notion conveyed by the signifier: 'a.