Otherwise Maladroit

27 March 2000 Finals for STS

27 March 2000

Finals for STS

What Barry Singer wrote about unaided intuition being likely to err is so true. A common trait that surpasses the boundaries of sex, age, and race is that people are notorious for wagging tongues and flapping ears. We take hearsay evidence and skin-deep assessments very seriously, and recklessly disseminate this information, often adding our own comments fired from the hip, without concrete evidence. Even though tattletales are disliked tabloids thrive, gossip columnists earn, and frauds fool much to their delight. For example, we denote clean and well dressed with decency. So much so that clever hold-uppers bathe or wear a tie before they hit.

My lola illustrated the unreliability of the senses once quite literally. I'm a big fan of Xena: The Warrior Princess and if you have watched that show (Sir?) you will know that they use a lot of special effects since the storyline is set in mythical Ancient Greece. With today's technology creating giants, sphinxes, and centaurs are a cinch. One such computer generated centaur in an episode of Xena fooled my grandmother. She said, and I quote from memory, "Nakakaaliw naman, meron ba talagang ganyan?" I think she wanted one for a pet.

On the topic of our elders, I wonder where they got the idea that a dot of lipstick on the forehead could ward away sickness. I could only imagine that maybe some lucky mother from circa 1920's Philippines kissed her baby on the forehead, while an epidemic was raging on. This lipstick on the forehead technique must have gone the same path as drilling holes on the skull to relive headaches, and changing sleeping positions to ward off the Black Death. After all, if something itches you scratch it. It works, and that is based on intuition. Of course today we know better. Or at least we know "we know better".

It's hard to admit that we were thrown into this world without a map, or an owner's manual as the High Commander, Dick Solomon of 3rd Rock From the Sun, despairs (I watch a lot of television). Admitting that we do not know anything absolutely is scary. This loss of control is a devastating blow to our ego. This is why to seemingly have an uncanny intuition is something that people boast of. It gives a feeling of being more in tune with the world than other people. It is an arrogant feeling that one is able to rationalize unaided. However, this equivocalness to facts is dangerous at its worst, and at its least could lead to some silly assumptions.

When the reproductive system was introduced to us in elementary level Biology, my friend and I, because of gaping holes in our accumulated information (we were still into the introduction of the parts), assumed that kissing was how one conceived a baby. I remember us seriously puzzling over the phenomena of pregnancy, and concluding that the gland in the brain that releases the sexual hormones (pituary? endocrine?) also released the egg cells in women and sperm cells in men. The egg, we surmised, was fertilized somewhere in the head, and then the zygote proceeds on to its long trek to the woman's uterus. The biggest hitch to our theory was how the fertilized egg bypasses the digestive system. All I can say is thank God for science, because if I was a caveman I don't think my progeny would last long.

posted by Otherwise Maladroit @ 5:19 PM