Charles Kay Smith

This book has two parts. The first half is about style in writing. I define style as the traits of language, as well as habits of mind and organization that create an individual writer’s character. New writers usually lack knowledge of the many linguistic, grammatical and organizational resources that are available to her and how these might be combined to give character to writing. I have chosen four very different styles to analyze rigorously enough to offer several diverse ethograms of writing and thinking behavior, for the way we characteristically write is the way we characteristically think. A new writer can immediately try out each of these diverse writing programs. The purpose is not to recommend any one right style but to offer an easy way for the new writer, in the least amount of time, to master many alternative writing resources and how they work together. In time, new writers will begin to choose their own writing characters from the many alternatives they have learned.

      The last half of this book is devoted to explaining many alternative ways of thinking and organizing. My goal was to enable anyone who reads these last chapters, and tries the exercises, to think and organize interdisciplinary academic material both critically and creatively. Critical thinking is encouraged by chapters on ways of probing definitions, assumptions, perceptions and criteria. Creativity is a human attribute of combining two or more ideas into a new hybrid. Once we practice hybridizing ideas, creative hybrids will begin to happen intuitively. The more clear ideas from every discipline we learn, the more creative we can become. This book is not written only for English majors, nor only for the brightest scholars. It uses clear and interesting examples from many different disciplines. One kind reviewer said the book was “a liberal arts education in 436 pages.” I hope so, for my intention was to help all who read it to think at a high level, both critically and creatively, in whatever disciplines they choose. I wrote this book many years ago but still think it works.

Monet and Renoir, friends collaborating in open air about 1865, discovered that sunlight filtering through a canopy of tree leaves does not produce the splotches and dapples that studio artists conventionally represented at the time but circular disks of light in comtrast to shade under trees. Sometimes these circkes of light punctuating the shade are clear, separate and crisp, as though light is being propagated as particles, but if the pin-hole gaps between leaves are very close together, they will project compound or superimposed circles that look like the waves that Thomas Young saw in his double slit experiment in 1803-4. Newton’s Opticks published in 1704 had convinced most scientists during the eighteenth century that light traveled  only as corpuscles. However, after Young showed in 1803-4 that light behaved as waves, most scientists for the rest of the nineteenth century were convinced that light behaved as waves. Not until the twentieth century did scientists understand that light was pro;pagated as both waves and particles. Because Renoir and Monet were not burdened with optical theories but closely observed the nature of light filtered through leaves with acute eyes, they began in 1866 to represented light under trees as both single particle-like and compound wave-like circles. The circular disks of light were images of the sun being projected through pin-holes between leaves from the tree canopy overhead. Leafy branches with pin-hole lenses were nature’s cameras reversing circular images of the sun onto the ground. The discovery of sun-circles represented in the paintings of Monet and Renoir has until now been ignored. It is time we recognized their achievement.

I have conceived this session as a kind of 'workshop session" rather than the more usual discussion of opinions. In other words the value of this session will be the effort each participant puts into it. With a little experimental work, each of us can feel the thrill of scientific discovery. We can each discover smething beautiful in nature that most of us didn't even know existed when we began this session. This next week I am going to give you time to experiment on some sunny mid-day under the shade of a tree lined sidewalk or roadway. Or you can walk into a park and experiment with a blank paper along the edges of a bush (the shape of the leaves doesn't matter). I often grasp a branch and gently shake it back and forth to see a myriad of tiny images of the sun dance on my paper as I hold it at right angles to the sun. Try to remember the emotions you felt during your discovery. It might help you to write them down. Good luck to all of you. you will be learning something on your own that nobody else's opinions could possibly give you.
Please let us all know whenever you make your discovery. Your success will help others to make their own discoveries.

Charles Darwin was a more interesting and dedicated writer than he is commonly credited for being. This essay will attempt to reassess the importance of his writing. The surface characteristics of Darwin's prose (conventionally referred to as his "style") seem at first glance so plain and ordinary that Darwin's writing rarely interests students of style. Exceptions such as Theodore Baird in an essay entitled "Darwin and the Tangled Bank"1 and Stanley Edgar Hyman in a longer study of Darwin's writing, The Tangled Bank,2 both make a point of the current general disregard of Darwin as a writer. But Darwin took considerable pains with the writing, particularly with his organization, sentence structure and metaphors. In his autobiography he says: "I have as much difficulty as ever in expressing myself clearly and concisely; and this difficulty has caused me a very great loss of time; but it has had the compensating advantage of forcing me to think long and intently about every sentence.... I will add that with my large books I spend a good deal of time over the general arrangement of the matter."3 And Francis Darwin in describing his father's characteristic writing behavior tells us: "On the whole, I think the pains which my father took over the literary part of the work was very remarkable" (I, 131). My analysis of Darwin’s writing will redefine style as a kind of literary ethogram of an individual’s writing behavior rigorous enough to allow a professional writer to duplicate from the analysis, using different subject matter, that same style without necessarily having seen the original text.

Abstract
In his book, The Swerve, on the re-discovery of Lucretius at the very end of the Middle Ages, Stephen Greenblatt wants us to believe that Lucretius’s epic poem De Rerum Natura initiated the Renaissance and ultimately made the world modern. To win our assent, he creates a fable of a dark medieval world being enlightened by the genius of a Roman poet far ahead of his own time. Greenblatt wants to re-circulate Lucretius’s Epicurean philosophy to a wide modern audience hoping it will enable a widespread epicurean happiness i. e. lessen anxiety and encourage tranquility of mind. But is this ancient philosophy likely to make modern Americans happy?

This essay offers a historical context for the influence of epicurean philosophy in mid-seventeenth century so that the ideological nature of poetry during the Interregnum becomes more clear. I begin by discussing the epicurean tradition in France from Michel Montaigne to Pierre Gassendi that had been maturing for half a century. This late Renaissance secular tradition, sometimes referred to as a new humanism, has too often been misinterpreted as the consequence of neo-stoicism rather than neo-epicureanism. Prominent French libertins (epicurean free-thinkers) greeted the defeated cavalier=s after their decisive defeat at the battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644. Rather than continuing to live in their enemy's England, many cavaliers gathered around Queen Henrietta Maria=s court-in-exile in Paris for a decade and a half. The libertins befriending the English included many French aristocrats and intellectuals including Gassendi himself whose neo-epicurean philosophy had Christiaized ancient epicureanism. English royalists began thinking and writing as new humanists, and some began translating epicurean, lucretian and Gassendian texts. A number of these royalist writers published epicurean influenced poetry and other texts in the London press from mid 1640s through the 1650s. The puritans, in charge of the English government during the Interregnum generally saw these texts as an ungodly literary invasion. Andrew Marvell, a kind of Poet Laureate to the Cromwell Protectorate, wrote a likely satire in response to royalist epicurean verse, which was not published until after his death. Yet To His Coy Mistress is generally regarded as having been written in the early 1650s. Today the poem is being read in the cavalier carpe diem tradition, indeed almost defines the genre. Our naive reading of what is most likely Marvell’s finest satire would surprise Marvell, if he knew how we have wrenched it out of its cultural context as a puritan response to royalist epicurean ideology.

A coming ‘Age of Interdependent Forms’ seems destined to mark the success of what could be called ‘despecialized/interspecific fitness’ among neotenic strains (perpetuating juvenile traits) of species such as humans and domestic animals. Humans as well as the first domesticants underwent a neotenic evolution in the wild during the repeated interglacial periods which, acting on a number of mammalian forms, selected against adult species-specific ancestral adaptations to a stable environment. Neotenic species continue to look and behave more like ancestral youths than adults—even after sexual maturity and throughout their life-history. As they retain lifelong youthful dependency motivations, they can easily, under suitable conditions, become interdependent forms. By the time of melting of the last Pleistocene glacier, all the domestic partners had already become more dependency-prone than formerly, and were behaviourally despecialized enough to form the alliance that is now changing the order of Nature.

Unlike reptiles, who are born with species-specific morphology and behavior that hardly changes as they grow into adults, mammals are born with a class-specific neonatal phase that renders the morphology and behavior of each species different from the physiology and behavior of their species-specific adulthood. Mammals must undergo a transformation phase, called youth, between the neonate and the adult. This youthful metamorphic and meta-behavioral phase is necessary while the mammal is remodeling from sucking milk to munching grass or hunting meat. During its youthful phase a mammal is not simply growing linearly into its adult form and behavior but is a hybrid trying out different patterns of  neonatal and adult micro-motor pieces of behavior that change almost daily in frequency as pieces of neonatal behavior inactivate and adult behavioral motor pieces begin to activate. The offsets of neonatal behavior and the onsets of species-specific adult behavior drive the youthful mammals into varied combinations of behavior sequences, that, since they are hybrids of two very different systems, don't look functional and are often unusual enough to amuse an observer. Such random hybrid combinations of micromotor pieces of behavior are commonly called play. But, then, play is not a unitary drive as many researchers have assumed but the consequence of youths hybridizing between neonatal and adult behaviors that are waning and waxing in intensity and frequency at each successive stage of youthful ontogeny. During the youthful period, any random combination of motor sequences that are useful for any reason can be remembered, repeated, and learned, so the youthful phase of mammalian ontogeny has potential for learning. A fixed neonatal system of physiological adaptations and complex behaviors is  built into the neonate and might be modified for the worse by learning at this stage of its ontogeny. At a mammal's species-specific adult stage it is presumably well adapted to a stable niche. So, again, at this phase of ontogeny learning might be unnecessary. However, during its youthful transition phase a mammal is shifting between two systems of physiology and behavior designed to fit two very different stable environments. Thus its abilities and motives are in constant flux and trial and error learning is perhaps its best means of adjusting to almost daily changes in its own physiology and behavior. The environment of many adult mammals has been changing fast, during the past two and a half million years of successive glaciations and melting with new niches opening and old niches disappearing or degrading. Learning provides a way of coping with swiftly changing environments, and the fastest and most efficient  means of providing adult mammals some more learning ability, and a somewhat less fixed and invariable species-specific behavior system would have been a selection for extending the youthful learning phase of mammalian ontogeny into adulthood. An extension of the youthful phase into the adult phase would likely have also loosened the typical species-specific sequences that would have been, in ancestral adults, a fixed system of invariable sequences that fit them to a formerly stable environment. A number of mammalian species and even some orders, such as Primates, probably Cetaceans, and including many Carnivores have, by an evolutionary process of neoteny, retained into adulthood some of their youthful phase of ontogeny. Such an adaptation provided these more neotenic adults a more open system of learning that could modify remnants of ancestral species-specific behavior to better fit adults of that species to a swiftly changing environment. We hypothesize an interesting phenomenon in mammalian phylogeny: that a number of mammalian species have been modified over the past several million years by selection for the metamorphic phase of ontogeny extended into the adult phase. Mammalian phylogeny appears to be recapitulating a reversal in the usual direction of ontogeny.

Some of Swift's more conventional classical figures of speech have already been noted, though more or less in isolation to one another as well as to larger designs and aesthetic aims. Swift's genius in A Modest Proposal is to create a speaker whose monologue keeps two distinct styles operational at all times. The style of which the speaker is aware is constantly opposed by covert and innovative verbal and grammatical techniques which the proposer sets in motion but of which he remains unaware, which slowly but surely turns a reader's sympathies against him and against those who share his point of view. By playing his proposer's classical rhetoric against Swift's own invention of a covert, more powerful kind of rhetoric, two antithetical points of view are embodied in one monologue. The proposer never seems to understand that the monologue Swift has given him is actually a dialogue that subverts him at every turn. Once our model of Swift's unique form of dual style satire has been built, we can see how similar it is to Michelangelo Antonioni's film, Blow-up. Both embody two antithetical styles that allow the more imaginative and positive point of view to persuade the reader or viewer more powerfully. In both art forms the message is positive rather than negative. Next, I wish to recommend the possible advantages of assigning new writers the practical task of using our model as a writing program. Swift's kind of satire could be used with modern subject matter and addressed to a modern audience. In discussing the real problems writers or directors must face, and considering solutions, new writers might be working with us to solve rhetorical issues rather than passively listening to us. Perhaps it is time for us to grant learning writers their democratic right to a participatory rhetoric.

Contrary to what I was taught in high school in the mid-1940s, science is no longer defined as an inductive methodology for immaculately conceiving culture-free truth after sifting through a huge data base of objective facts. For without some prior hypothesis to guide her, a scientist would not be able to decide which facts were relevant. Nowadays hypotheses can come from anywhere in the imagination or culture within which the scientist is working. The importance of a scientific hypothesis is that it be framed in such a way that it can be falsified when tested. Science now has a history and is part of human cultural evolution. The major premise of both these recent books is that scientific innovation needs to be understood as intricately bound to the particular time and cultural milieu in which it occurred.

As with juvenile wolves or coyotes, adult livestock conducting dogs displayed the first-half segment of a functional predatory system of motor patterns and did not express play or social bonding toward sheep; whereas, like wolf or coyote pups, adult livestock protecting dogs displayed sequences of mixed social, submissive, play and investigatory motor patterns and rarely expressed during ontogeny (even when fully adult) predatory behaviors. The most parsimonious explanation of our findings is that behavioral differences in the two types of livestock dogs are a case of selected differential retardation (neoteny) of ancestral motor pattern development.

In Canid ontogeny from puppies to adults there is a very young phase before any species-specific predatory behavior has been expressed. This phase has been ontogenetically selected as a breed of neotenic adults which are ideal for protecting sheep. At a more advanced phase of canid ontogeny older puppies have begun to express separate pieces of species-specific predatory behavior, such as eye, stalk and chase but not the complete adult sequence so that crush bite kill and consume is as yet unexpressed. This intermediate phase was also ontogenetically selected as a breed such as border collies used in Britain to herd or conduct sheep. These two different neotenic breeds behave very differently toward sheep and will be unsuited to the same task. But producing hybrids or mongrels is another way to disrupt adult species-specific behavior systems including predatory behavior. The disrupted predatory behavior of mongrels can result in a near facsimile of the very neotenic protecting breed, because the hybrid predatory sequence can be so disrupted it will remain unexpressed. Thus, hybridization may quickly create a dog potentially useful for protecting sheep.

We argue that the evolutionary process of neoteny -- the natural selection of regulatory gene mutations that retain a youthful ontogenetic system of physiological and behavioral characteristics, and thus never activates the species-specific features of the ancestors’ adulthood. The resulting new behavio-morph retains infant/young features throughout ontogeny and never displays the adult behavior or physiology of the adult ancestor. This kind of neotenic adulthood defines the human character. We not only inherit our ancestors’ youthful anatomy and physiology but the ancestors’ youthful motivations and proclivities such as docility and social dependency, curiosity and learning as well. We retain our ancestors’ youthful small teeth, and we continue to play throughout adulthood. Like young, but unlike most adult mammals, humans continue throughout life to crave attention, play, learn and remain curious whether just for social gossip or for scientific research.

A current project is writing a book of poetry. The different kind of poetry I’m trying to write melds science, humanities, and aesthetic aims of clarity and a polished plain style with social consciousness. I’m uploading one of the poems in the collection as an example of the kind of poetry I’m trying to compose.

In this poem, Dante is revealed as a scholar of Islamic literature who was influenced by two islamic texts about Muhammad's visits to Purgatory and Hell narrated in the The Isra, and whose visit to Paradise was recorded in The Mirage. The concept of Limbo introduced by Dante in his Divine Comedy was an Islamic/Christian hybrid new to his first readers.

Frederick avoided fighting the 6th Crusade by negotiating a peaceful sharing of Jerusalem by people of all faiths. No doubt it helped that he spoke Arabic and personally.engaged in five months of negotiations. His achievement was not appreciated by his allies at the time.

Science has made possible an increased productivity that creates an economic surplus--science continually teaches us how to do more with less resources. Why should the financial profits of science and technology be enjoyed only by the rich, since most of the innovations of science and technology have been funded or subsidized by citizen taxes? If the added productivity of science were shared among all citizens instead of only the 1%, poverty and homelessness could be ended.