February 19

Today we continued our discussion about Dostoyevsky’s view on Darwin’s theory of evolution. Darwin claimed that humans, like all other animals, function only with survival in mind. Dostoyevsky argues that we in fact act according to our will and that we will purposefully make illogical decisions. Dostoyevsky chortles in response to the Darwin’s claim and states that if Darwin’s theory were true then we should already know exactly how our lives are going to turn out. Obviously none of us (or so I believe) know exactly how our lives are going to turn out, but I think most of us have a good idea. Dostoyevsky spends some time talking about statistics, and I think he’s a little ignorant in this area. He completely disregards statistics, when there is a lot of truth that can be found in it. What I am trying to describe here is the statistical bell curve that describes that the middle 99.7% percent of the people are going to fall in the norm. It is only the .3% that are outliers and exceptions.