Chapter 5 Emotions

We put the study of emotions in a broader context and use it as a way to introduce some ideas about evolution, how it works, and why it’s relevant to psychology.

  1. The foundations of modern psychology: Astonishing Hypothesis, the brain is the origin of mental life, the doctrine of physicalism
  2. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: where the brain comes from, where complex things (human, animal, plants etc.) come from
  • Argument from Design: Quotes from theologian and doctor, William Paley: “heath, stone, watch…”, human organs, the parts of our body, are just as complicated as a watch
  • there’s a rich parallel between biological structures and the structures made by people
  • The eye is like a camera, both have lenses that bend light, project an image onto a light-sensitive surface behind it, either the film or the retina. Both have a focusing mechanism, a diaphragm that governs the amount of incoming light. The big difference is, there’s no such thing as a camera anywhere near as good as the human eye.
  • So, Paley’s view is that, you see something so articulately beautifully constructed, it seems to cry out for a designer. [intelligent design] Cicero made the same argument.
    • It has huge explanatory advantages. For one thing, it really does explain where things come from, it explains it in a way we understand. Just as we know where watches come from, now we know where eyes come from.
    • Problem:
      1. appealing to a divine creator seems to push back the question
      2. Ultimately, we’ll want to know where such original creatures come from.
      3. there’s long been evidence for evolution. Long been evidence as seen in fossils and vestigial characteristics like the human tailbone and goosebumps, and all of the genetic and biological evidence for the continuity of other creatures. There’s a lot of room for debate over the details of evolution, but that evolution has occurred that we were not created in our current form seems reasonably indisputable.
      4. There’s poor design. our eye has a blind spot, the male urinary system, the urethra goes through the prostate gland instead of around it. This poor design seems incompatible with benevolent, and omnipotent God.