On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears (64 page)
Read On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears Online
Authors: Stephen T. Asma
7
. Steven Levy, “Real Artificial Life,” in
Artificial Life
(Vintage Books, 1992).
9
. Consult the National Nanotech Initiative Web site,
www.nano.gov/html/about/funding.html
(October 2006).
10
. See Marvin Minsky, “Will Robots Inherit the Earth?”
Scientific American
, October 1999.
11
. Bostrom’s 2005 lecture for the conference was entitled “Humanity’s Biggest Problems Aren’t What You Think They Are,” available at
www.ted.com/index.php/talks/nick_bostrom_on_our_biggest_problems.html
.
12
. See Kevin Warwick, “Cyborg 1.0,”
Wired
, February 2000.
13
. What does it all mean? Orlan’s own cryptic assessments of her work aren’t all that helpful. “My work is not against plastic surgery, but against the dictates of beauty standards which are impressed upon our bodies,” she says. “Skin is a mask, a source of strangeness, and by reforming my face, I feel I’m actually taking off a mask. My work is carnal, inasmuch as it deals with flesh; it is blasphemous” (see Stephen Asma’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Work in Progress,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, January 19, 2001).
14
. See Stelarc’s Web site,
www.stelarc.va.com.au/
.
15
. Quoted in the BBC news story “Making Cindy into Barbie,” September 21, 1998.
16
. The computational intelligence (CI) movement studies fuzzy-logic systems and computational evolution and may eventually articulate nonbinary theories that answer my objection here. Treating the variable values of a system as somewhere between on/off or true/false seems absolutely necessary in modeling anything like cognition.
17
. Perhaps the best evidence for this view is found in Antonio Damasio’s research. Damasio worked with a patient who suffered frontal lobe damage and discovered that emotion or affect was absolutely crucial in the correct functioning of decision-making cognition. Emotion assigns value to ideas and heavily influences the ability to reason and calculate. See
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
(Picador, 1995).
18
. Daniel Dennett, “My Mind Has a Body of Its Own,” in
Kinds of Minds
(Basic Books, 1996).
19
. The quote and the information about Ashley are found in Nancy Gibb, “Pillow Angel Ethics,”
Time
, January 22, 2007.
20
. See Russell Goldman and Katie Thompson, “ ‘Pregnant Man’ Gives Birth to Girl,” posted July 3, 2008, at
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/
.
21
. An interesting and contentious controversy has surrounded J. Michael Bailey’s book
The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender Bending and Transsexualism
(Joseph Henry Press, 2003). Bailey, the chair of Northwestern University’s psychology department, has argued that transsexual reassignment surgery is not, contrary to dominant views, a fulfillment of long frustrated gender identity. Instead of saying that male-to-female sex changes are done to correct a biological accident, Bailey claims that such transsexualism is about fulfilling specific sexual desires. Some transsexuals, according to Bailey, are extremely homosexual and want to be penetrated by a man; others are men who have autogynophilia, a sexual fascination with having a vagina of one’s own. Needless to say, Bailey’s views, which seem more conjectural than scientific, have aroused the condemnation of many transsexuals and advocacy groups. For a representative exchange of differing views, see Dennis Rodkin, “Sex and Transsexuals,”
Chicago Reader
32, no. ii (2003).
22
. This popular religious viewpoint really does ignore the true blending of sexual differentiation: confused internal and external genitalia and reproduction equipment and the confusion of chromosomal and somatic gender specifications. Does God privilege the external somatic differentiation, or does he want us to go with the chromosomal differentiation? Anyone who feels that they know God’s mind on this issue (and to be frank, any issue) is a subtler thinker than I.
23
. In “The He Hormone,”
New York Times
, April 2, 2000, Andrew Sullivan describes the “correction” that hormone injections brought to his masculine identity. Sullivan suffers from low testosterone and injects himself with supplemental doses. In a compelling description of his own psychological and physical transformation, he throws serious doubt on the social constructionist theory of gender. In addition to his own phenomenology of chemically based gender, he offers some additional data:
Testosterone is clearly correlated in both men and women with psychological dominance, confident physicality and high self-esteem. In most combative, competitive environments, especially physical ones, the person with the most Twins. Put any two men in a room together and the one with more testosterone will tend to dominate the interaction. Working women have higher levels of testosterone than women who stay at home, and the daughters of working women have higher levels of testosterone than the daughters of housewives. A 1996 study found that in lesbian couples in which one partner assumes the male, or “butch,” role and another assumes the female, or “femme,” role, the “butch” woman has higher levels of testosterone than the “femme” woman. In naval medical tests, midshipmen have been shown to have higher average levels of testosterone than plebes. Actors tend to have more testosterone than ministers, according to a 1990 study. Among 700 male prison inmates in a 1995 study, those with the highest T levels tended to be those most likely to be in trouble with the prison authorities and to engage in unprovoked violence. This is true among women as well as among men, according to a 1997 study of 87 female inmates is a maximum security prison.
24
. See Freeman Dyson’s provocative essay “Our Biotech Future,”
New York Review of Books
, July 19, 2007.
25
. See Bernard E. Rollin’s excellent study
The Frankenstein Syndrome: Ethical and Social Issues in the Genetic Engineering of Animals
(Cambridge University Press, 1995),
chapter 2
.
26
. Quoted in the excerpted text of Francis Fukuyama’s
Our Posthuman Future
, published as “Biotechnology and the Threat of a Posthuman Future,”
Chronicle of Higher Education
, March 22, 2002.
27
. See John Hedley Brooke, “Visions of Perfectibility,”
Journal of Evolution and Technology
14, no. 2 (2005) for a nice tour of some technology- and science-loving religious thinkers. Brooke critiques the simple dichotomy that Fukuyama and others continue to promulgate. Also see Brooke’s extensive treatment of the issue in
Science Religion: Some Historical Perspectives
(Cambridge University Press, 1991).
EPILOGUE28
. Robert Krulwich, interview with Francis Collins for a 2005
Nova
special on artificial life,
www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3214/01-collins.html
.
1
. “‘Witches’ Burnt to Death in Kenya,” BBC News Web site, May 21, 2008.
2
. Pilirani Semu-Banda, “Mob Justice in Malawi,” WIP (Women’s International Perspective) Web site,
www.thewip.net
, posted May 21, 2008.
3
. Andrew L. Wang and Courtney Flynn, “Mom Charged with Stabbing Daughter, 6, Told Waukegan Police the Girl Was Possessed,”
Chicago Tribune
, April 8, 2008.
4
. Associated Press, “Exorcism Is Protected by Law,” available at
www.msnbc.com
, June 28, 2008.
5
. See William Mullen, “Mythical Creatures on Display at Field Museum,”
Chicago Tribune
, March 18, 2008.
6
. Barry Grant, “Rich and Strange: The Yuppy Horror Film,”
Journal of Film and Video
48 (1996).
7
. Wittgenstein’s theory of family resemblance is sometimes interpreted as a harbinger of the social constructionist view of knowledge, and he is then claimed as a father of more extreme forms of epistemological relativism. There’s some good reason for this interpretation, in the sense that Wittgenstein and others were trying to break the old tradition of typological essentialist thinking. This is not the place to try to settle a question about how to interpret Wittgenstein, but I do want to point out that the metaphor of family resemblance, if considered carefully, actually speaks against a purely relativist reading. Families are populations, and populations are real metaphysical entities, albeit spread over space and time. See Michael Ghiselin’s compelling arguments that even species are individuals, in
Metaphysics and the Origin of Species
(State University of New York Press, 1997). What this means for the concept of monster is that, though there is no absolute essence, there can still be an objective population of entities to which such language refers. The death of typological essentialism does not mean the death of objective knowledge about the world.
8
. See Eleanor Rosch and Barbara Lloyd,
Cognition and Categorization
(Lawrence Erlbaum, 1978), and George Lakoff,
Women, Fire and Dangerous Things
(University of Chicago Press, 1990).
9
. Not all the protagonists in this natural history of monsters have been quick to light torches and cry out for blood. Remember that St. Augustine was not particularly xenophobic about monsters and exotic peoples. And it’s worth mentioning that the ancient historian Herodotus was so open-minded about the otherwise demonized Persians that Plutarch later called him
philobarbarus
.
INDEX10
. Pynchon, “Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?”
Note: Page numbers in
italics
refer to illustrations.
Abel (biblical),
88
Abel, Othenio,
31
–32
Abington, England,
108
abortion and reproductive rights,
201
abusive relationships,
209
–210
accidental monsters,
13
acephalous fetuses,
160
–161,
161
Adams, Mary,
143
adaptationists,
164
–165
Adolphs, Ralph,
224
Aeetes,
55
Africa and Africans
descendants of,
238
ghost-men of,
38
and Ham,
85
and medievals,
233
and orientalism,
37
–38
and Paré’s monster,
129
and phobias,
4
aggression
and children,
209
–210
and criminal minds,
208
–212
Freudian theory on,
191
,
192
,
202
,
209
–210,
243
male aggression,
24
and primates,
239
–240
aging,
177
Aho, James A.,
234
AI
,
267
albinos,
167
Alexander the Great
medieval reconfiguration of,
100
Qur’an on,
92
Al-Qaida,
249
Al-Qaida Reader
,
248
Al-Zawahiri, Ayman,
248
ambivalence to monsters,
5
–7,
184
,
194
–195
Ambrose,
85
American Museum in New York,
136
American Philosophical Society,
236
–237
American Psycho
,
241
Ames, Mark,
245
–246
Amis, Martin,
251
amygdala,
223
anacondas,
132
Anaxagoras,
42
–43
ancient monsters,
19
–60
Alexander’s encounters with,
19
–22,
21
and bones,
30
–32
and credulity,
32
–36