The World is Just Awesome

The most important theme I found in my reading was the last theme; Science, Technology, & Society. It state’s “Scientific research often leads to technological advances that can have positive and/or negative impacts upon society as a whole”. Basically Europe and America decided to put a leader in charge of the Congo because Africa couldn’t agree on one and since the leaders put in charge of both countries were working these two countries could make Africa work (the scientific research part). This new leader was given an army who were given rights to guns, bombs, and other artillery to use when needed; which they thought was whenever somebody spoke out about not liking the new leader (the technological advance part). The killing of innocent people, including children, caused the people of Africa to rebel and fight back essentially causing a war which had a negative effect on society as a whole. However there was a positive impact because now the Congo has a new leader and everyone seems to be working together with few complaints. So putting a new leader in charge of  the Congo helped the neighboring countries learn from that mistake but it also showed the Congo that they could have a leader.

Aundrea Wells

The Poisonwood Bible; Barbara Kingsolver

While continuing to read the Poisonwood Bible; written by Barbara Kingsolver, I continued to find more theme’s of biology. The first theme; Science As a Process, was used towards the end of the book after things started going terribly wrong for the family of white missionaries living in the Congo. The women of this story used the process of hypothesis testing to see if what their Baptist Father/Husband was telling them about God was true. He claimed that the righteous shall be rewarded and everyone else will be punished for their wrong-doing’s. However after seventeen months of praising God through good and bad situations the women stopped caring whether they lived or died, especially after loosing their youngest kin to a Mamba snake bite. God did not punish them for abandoning their father and leaving Kilanga, their home, nor did he punish them for scrounging up everything they earned. By the end of the book the women all decided to abandon their faith and belief in God because they wanted to test his faith to see what God would do to them. No God came to their rescue, or for that matter their Baptist Father’s who was expelled from the village and burnt to a crisp by his “follower’s”. No punishment came to the women for surviving either. This theme say’s Science is a way of knowing and through their testing of God they found there is no God.

Another theme I found was the third theme; Energy Transfer. While the women were fighting their conscience, famine, and malnutrition they found the will power to fight for life. Energy is the capacity to do work and these women did do work. They used their energy to walk for days to find salvation from the ruin they left behind, build crops, housing, and a semi-sanitary living space. They had little energy already and were fighting Malaria along with fifteen other diseases, but they used all their strength to make a place for themselves to settle in and rest upon until they could regain more energy. By using their energy to create a living space they created a warm environment that would work with the village and later become profitable to the villager’s after the women left.

Theme number five; Continuity and Change, was the theme of the whole book.  It state’s “All species tend to maintain themselves from generation to generation using the same genetic code” which explains the whole book. This book is about the United States and other countries coming in trying to change the Congo into something it could never be. Africa works together differently than other countries do, and the more outside “help” they get the harder it is to survive because they are constantly changing. Other countries keep stepping in and changing the leader, who changes the roads, which changes the food profit, which changes the money value, which changes the food amount per household, etc. Africa has maintained themselves from generation to generation using the same genetic code which is frankly to “love thy neighbor”. It might not have been as politically correct as America liked to think in the 60’s but in Africa they grew what ever food they could and shared it between the villagers, everyone did their share because if they didn’t they wouldn’t get a share of the food.

Aundrea Wells

The Poisonwood Bible; Barbara Kingsolver

It’s hard to say which one theme this book has in it because as i was reading the list i noticed more than one theme that could fit. The Poisonwood Bible is the story of a wife and four daughters dragged from their home in Bethlehem Georgia, into the African Congo by their Evangelical Baptist (psycho) father. The first theme brought to my attention was Evolution; theme number two. Of the four daughters two are twins; Leah and Adah and Adah is “blessed” with a physical disorder. Her right side drags, however she finds her own way to do everything everyone else can in the Congo finding inspiration in the other villager’s who are also disabled in some way from lack of proper utensils. Plainly, it’s survival of the fittest, the fittest in this case being the disabled who have gotten stronger than everyone else from trying to keep up.

This brings up the second theme i found, Relationship of Structure to Function; theme number five. As i’ve been reading i found that the heavy set African women aren’t supposed to be skinny for a reason. They have so much responsibility in the household and they have to use their bodies to provide for their families. They use their strong necks/backs/and upper bodies to haul water in their HUGE tubs to use for cooking, bathing, and watering the crops. They use their muscular arms and bulky legs to catch the dinner they’ll provide to their husbands and children and to tend to their crops (typically with one or more children on their bodies as well). They use their strong hands for teaching their young (however unethical), and preparing the meals, and their feet as the shoe’s we wear on our feet. They are built big because if they weren’t they would never be able to survive.

The third theme i found was Interdependence in Nature; the seventh theme. The book takes place in the 50’s when the Congo was “at war” for independence and white people believed they were better than black’s essentially. The Price family consists of six white folk who spend their first couple months higher than the other families of Africa who have been there for centuries. However as the Belgians take over the Congo the Price family finds that they have no more money, the nice congolese people provided shelter and nutrients for the Price family until this time but with no money and no food they see that they’ve been living inside the African’s not among them. They thought they were alone in Africa until they ran out of money, opened their eyes, and really looked at their neighbors.

Aundrea Wells

The Poisonwood Bible; Barbara Kingsolver

I chose to read the Origin of Species, this was Darwin’s original publication after his voyage on the beagle. The whole book was the basis for theme two, evolution.

The author, Jared Diamond, presents a question in the prologue.  Diamond is walking with a local politician, Yali, on a beach in New Guinea where Diamond studied bird evolution.  Yali asked, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had so little cargo of our own?”  The book, Guns, Germs, and Steel is Diamond’s attempt to answer this question. I am expecting an interesting mashup of history and science to emerge.

In Diamond’s anticipation of objections around race and domination, he expected only to understand what happened, not to justify.  He’s an evolutionary biologist, not a psychologist or historian, and wondered why Caucasian cultures (Diamond calls them white) built industrialized societies while nearby non-whites did not. It wasn’t intelligence, he reasoned, as his work with New Guineans showed him that they were at least equally intelligent.  His initial reasoning is that epidemics and murder did not wipe out portions of the population who then lived to pass on their genes. In New Guinea, only those smart enough to escape disease lived long enough to reproduce, while in “white” populations, one didn’t need to be smart to live through epidemics. (Ok, I’ve simplified the evidence here,)  Why, then didn’t the more intelligent New Guineans become a world power?  The connecting theme here seems to be evolution.  The themes I expect to emerge are Diversity of Organisms, Ecology, and Heredity.  I’m reading on……..