Wolfe Exercise

CRTW 201 (08F)

Dr. Fike

Do you find any problems with the following quotations?  Use the elements of critical thinking to express your answers.

Par. 12:  “The Violence Initiative was compared to Nazi eugenic proposals for the extermination of undesirables.”

Par. 18:  “We now live in an age in which science is a court from where there is no appeal.”

Par. 20:  “This is also known as the ‘ghost in the machine’ fallacy, the quaint belief that there is a ghostly ‘self’ somewhere inside the brain that interprets and directs its operations.”

Par. 24:  “But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says ‘Thou shalt’ or ‘Thou shalt not.’”

Par. 31:  “Marxism was finished off even more suddenly—in a single year, 1973—with the smuggling out of the Soviet Union and the publication in France of the first of the three volumes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago.”

Par. 32:  “Freudianism and Marxism—and with them, the entire belief in social conditioning—were demolished so swiftly, so suddenly, that neuroscience has surged in, as if into an intellectual vacuum.  Nor do you have to be a scientist to detect the rush.”

Par. 38:  “The male of the human species is genetically hardwired to be polygamous….  Women lust after male celebrities, because they are genetically hardwired to sense that alpha males will take better care of their offspring.  …  Teenage girls are genetically hardwired to be promiscuous and are as helpless to stop themselves as dogs in the park. …  Most murders are the result of genetically hardwired compulsions.”