POLITICAL SCIENCE 320/BIOS 320X: BIOPOLITICS AND HUMAN NATURE
Fall, 2010
Instructor: Larry Arnhart
Tuesday & Thursday, 12:30 pm-1:45 pm, DuSable Hall 246
Office: Zulauf 404
Office hours: Tuesday & Thursday, 2:00-4:00, other times by appointment
Email: larnhart@niu.edu
REQUIRED TEXTS
Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, ed. Kenneth Blanchard (Imprint Academic, 2009)
Larry Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (SUNY Press, 1998)
Louann Brizendine, The Female Brain (Morgan Road Books, 2006)
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 2nd ed. (Penguin Classics, 2004)
Kevin Laland and Bennett Galef, eds., The Question of Animal Culture (Harvard University Press, 2009)
Malcolm Potts and Thomas Hayden, Sex and War (Benbella Books, 2008)
Frans de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex among Apes (John Hopkins University Press, 1998)
GRADING
The final grade for this course will be based on the grades for journal writing (30% for journal entries #1-6 and journal responses #1-6, 30% for journal entries #7-13 and journal responses #7-13), for class participation (15% for the first half of the course, 15% for the second half), and for an argumentative essay (10%). Grades for the first half of the course will be given out on October 14.
Journal Writing
A journal entry will be due every Tuesday
at the beginning of class. Each journal
entry should be at least 600 words long (or roughly 2 double-spaced typed
pages). Each entry must have your
name, the date, and the number of the entry on the top of the first page. They must be typed. They must be stapled. All journal writing must be submitted in
class. Submissions outside of class will
not be accepted. No submissions by
e-mail will be accepted. No late submissions
will be accepted. No submissions at the
end of class will be accepted.
You will be assigned to a journal group with two
other students. You must bring three
copies of your entry or response to class--one copy for the instructor and
two copies for the members of your group.
Of course, you should keep the original for yourself.
The journal entry should be a statement of your
thoughts about the reading assignment for that week. The purpose is to show your intellectual
struggle with the material. Do you
understand what the author is saying? If
so, do you agree or disagree? Why? If you do not understand what the author is
saying, what is it that you find confusing?
Intellectual struggle requires a logical
analysis of the arguments. What is the
issue? What position is the author
taking on that issue? What arguments
does the author develop to support that position? What are the strengths and
weaknesses in those arguments? Are the arguments ultimately persuasive or not?
Those are the kind of questions you must consider in analyzing the
arguments.
You
should not fill up your journal entry by merely summarizing, paraphrasing, or
quoting from the reading. Hey, you’ve
got a brain. Use it!
You are free to introduce whatever you find
pertinent--including ideas from your personal experience and ideas from other
classes you have taken--whatever helps you to make sense of the issues raised
in the readings. Integrating ideas from
our class discussions into your writing is important. Again, the purpose is to write an informal
statement of your thoughts about the reading assignments that show your intellectual
struggle with the material and with the questions raised by that material.
The reading for each week will suggest many
issues that might deserve comment. But generally it is best for your journal
entry to concentrate on just one issue that you can develop in two pages.
You will receive two grades for your journal
writing. On October 14 you will
receive your grades for the first half of the semester. Your grades for the second half of the
semester will come at the end of the semester.
To deal with emergencies (illness and so on), you
will be permitted to miss one journal entry and one set of journal responses
without any penalty. But missing more than that will lower your
grade.
Journal responses will be due every Thursday
at the beginning of class. Each
response should have your name, the number of the response, the date, and the
name of the person to whom you are responding.
Each should be typed. Every
Thursday, you will turn in two responses, and each response must
be at least 300 words long (or roughly 1 double-spaced typed page). Like the journal entries, you must bring
three copies--one for the instructor and two for the members of your journal
group. If a member of your journal group
does not give you an entry, you should turn in a note indicating that you
cannot write a response because you have not received an entry.
The journal responses will be your written
responses to the journal entries of the two other people in your group. So each Thursday you will come to class with
two responses of at least one page each for the two members of your journal
group. The purpose of the journal
response is to intellectually engage your fellow students. How does their handling of the reading
assignment compare with yours? What did
they see that you did not see? Sometimes
you will disagree. But don't be too
negative. Even if you disagree with a
journal entry, try to find some way to help that fellow student think through
the issues. You want to sustain a lively
intellectual exchange with your fellow students in which everyone learns
something from the exchange. You want to
struggle together in thinking through the issues.
If you do not receive a journal entry from a
member of your journal group, you must turn in a note indicating that you
cannot write a response because you did not receive an entry from that person.
The grading for the journal writing will
be determined by how well you obey Arnhart's
Ten Commandments:
1. You
must turn in all your journal writing (of the required length) at the beginning
of each class.
2. Your
must show some logical analysis of the texts that goes beyond merely summarizing
or quoting from the texts.
3. You
must avoid errors in spelling, diction, punctuation, and grammar.
4. You
must write journal responses that seriously engage the journal entries from the
other group members.
5. You must write on one or two major topics in
each journal entry rather than writing superficially about many topics.
6. You
must organize your writing into coherent paragraphs.
7. You must occasionally show how the readings
for one week relate to the readings for previous weeks.
8. You must develop your own line of reasoning
about politics over the course of the semester in response to the readings and
the class discussions.
9. You must take clear positions on the
controversies in this class and support those positions with evidence and
argumentation.
10. You
must regularly probe the deeper implications of the issues raised in the
reading and class discussions beyond what is clear on the surface.
To earn a "C," students must obey
commandments 1-4. To earn a "B,"
students must obey commandments 1-8. To
earn an "A," students must obey all 10 commandments. Those students failing to obey commandments
1-4 will receive a "D" or "F."
Class Participation
You are expected to attend class and contribute
to class discussions. High grades for
class participation will go to those who regularly attend class and who
regularly contribute to class discussions in an instructive way. You may miss two classes without
penalty. Missing more will be penalized. You are expected to be in class on time.
Those
who arrive late to class more than two times will be severely penalized. Anyone whose cell phone rings in class will
be whacked!
A grade of "C" for class participation
requires regular class attendance (missing no more than two classes). A grade of "B" for class participation
requires regular class attendance and contributing to class discussions at
least once a week. A grade of "A"
for class participation requires regular class attendance and contributing to
class discussions at almost every class meeting.
Argumentative Essay
The argumentative essay should be 1,500-2,000
words long (roughly 6-8 double-spaced pages).
The topics in this course are controversial. For this essay, you should take up one of
these controversial topics and defend your position on that controversy. To do that, there are four requirements. (1) State the question at issue. (2) State your answer to the question. (3) Support your answer with at least three
arguments—three good reasons for believing that your answer is correct. (4) Respond to at least two of the major
objections to your answer. This final
essay is due no later than 12 noon on May
8 at the professor's office (Zulauf 404).
Plagiarism
Anyone who commits plagiarism—using someone
else’s words without putting them within quotation marks—will automatically
receive a final grade of “F” for the entire course. This can also be sufficient cause for
expulsion from the NIU.
ASSIGNMENTS
Aug 24: Introduction
Aug 26: Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism, pages 1-84
Aug 31: Arnhart, Darwinian Conservatism, pages 85-129, 165-220
Journal entry #1
Sept 2: Journal response #1
Sept 7: Arnhart, “Darwinian Liberalism,” and reaction essays by P. Z. Myers, Lionel Tiger, & Herbert Gintis, at “Cato Unbound,” July, 2010, online at http://www.cato-unbound.org/archives/july-2010-darwin-and-politics/
Journal entry #2
Sept 9: Journal response #2
Sept 14: Darwin, Descent of Man, pages 21-22, 85-151
Journal entry #3
Sept 16: Journal response #3
Sept 21: Darwin, Descent of Man, pages 152-174, 207-212, 653-689
Journal entry #4
Sept 23: Journal response #4
Sept 28: de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, pages 1-75
Journal entry #5
Sept 30: Journal response #5
Oct 5: de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics, pages 77-215
Journal entry #6
Oct 7: Journal response #6
Oct 12: Laland & Galef, Animal Culture, pages 1-40, 99-124, 247-287
Journal entry #7
Oct 14: Journal response #7
Oct 19: No class
Oct 21: No class
Oct 26: Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, pages 6-15, 89-170, 189-210
Journal entry #8
Oct 28: Journal response #8
Nov 2: Arnhart, Darwinian Natural Right, pages 211-230
Journal entry #9
Nov 4: No class
Nov 9: Brizendine, Female Brain, pages 1-116
Journal response #9
Journal entry #10
Nov 11: Journal response #10
Nov 16: Brizendine, Female Brain, pages 117-187; Anne Fausto-Sterling, “The Five Sexes,” online at http://bms.brown.edu/faculty/f/afs/fivesexesprnt.pdf
Journal entry #11
Nov 18: Journal response #11
Nov 23: Potts & Hayden, Sex and War, pages 1-61
Journal entry #12
Nov 25: No class (Thanksgiving)
Nov 30: Potts & Hayden, Sex and War, pages 63-211
Journal response #12
Journal entry #13
Dec 2: Journal response #13
Dec 7, 12:00 pm-1:50 pm: Potts & Hayden, Sex and War, pages 213-281, 303-383
Journal entry #14
Dec 8, 2:00 pm: deadline for the argumentative essay to be delivered to Professor Arnhart’s office, Zulauf 404