Food for Thought #6

Michael Dowd stands by his evolution machine, the motor home in which he and his brilliant partner travel the country preaching the reconciliation of religion and science. I have never understood the conflict, myself.

Photo source The Great Story

Suna and I went to see Michael Dowd’s lecture Thank God for Evolution last Tuesday. She had a wonderful post in her blog about it, and I decided not to post a redundant one here. And while Dowd didn’t really say anything I hadn’t already thought through, that lecture got me thinking about the long-standing argument over nature versus nurture. (And I bought his book.)

Appetizer: Read the appetizer in full before acting. Focus on this screen. Then close your eyes and turn your head to the right. What is the first thing your eyes focus on when you open them?

The little clock and electronic picture frame that Suna gave me for Yule. (I’m at the office doing this on lunch on Friday—not ahead of time like I usually do. Busy week!)

Soup: When something good happens to someone you work with, how do you react?

Honestly, it depends. If it happens to someone I like and care about, I’m happy for them, no matter what. If it happens to someone I don’t like, I wonder at the injustice of the world because if I don’t like them, I usually thought they were unproductive mooks before I decided I didn’t like them.

Salad: If something happened in your career that doubled your income, what is the first thing you would do?

Tell Suna. Then I’d pay off things. Then I would stimulate the economy with a massive celebration—OK, I’d take a few friends out to dinner at a reasonable restaurant.

Entré: How do we acquire our drives, the parts of us that make us want to accomplish one thing versus another thing?

This answer proves me to be a true moderate. I think what drives us comes in almost equal parts from our heredity (musical talent, for example) and our experience. I have known overbearing stage parents who completely killed any musical appreciation in their very talented offspring. I once heard that Mozart played a complicated piece the first time he sat down at a keyboard.

I have also known people who were directionless until something happened in their lives to provide a clear direction—unfortunately, it was usually something bad. But that just shows that good results often come from the icky side of life. Our lives are what we make them. Hmmm…maybe I should write a series of questions on locus of control.

Dessert: What made you happy today?

Answering questions for my former boss and having her refer to me as “Oh, WBT master.”