Dutifully I worked through them, and finally, one rainy afternoon, surveying an empty pool and an abandoned parking lot, I decided that I was finished with Charles Darwin. Everything in The Origin of Species had seemed just too ordinary. Nothing in my adolescent reading of The Origin could match the sensual poetry of Milton, the brooding darkness of Eliot, or the chilling spell of Dante's admonition above the gates of hell: "Abandon all hope, 0 ye who enter here!
The man's arguments—and he called his book "one long argument," went something like this: Domesticated plants and animals show a tremendous range of variation. This was obviously true. After all, variation is the raw material upon which the breeders of animals and plants are able to work.
By selecting, consciously or unconsciously, the individuals who will give rise to the next generation, they gradually form new and distinct varieties, which can differ so greatly from one another that they are barely recognizable as members of the same species. Take, for example, two common breeds of dog: the Great Dane and the Chihuahua. There isn't the slightest doubt that they are both dogs Canis familiaris or that they are both descended from common ancestors.
Yet think how a naturalist who had never seen a dog would respond to these two creatures! Without a doubt, he would quickly conclude that they were different species.
That's variation! A similar range of variation exists in nature among wild species. I wondered about this, and was ready to "challenge" Darwin, but he summed it up in a convincing way—by pointing out that the variation was so great that naturalists argued endlessly among themselves as to whether the individuals of a widely dispersed type were one species or two.
At that point in my life, I had had only the slightest glimpse of academic science, but even this was enough to support Darwin's view. Arguments over exactly how different two populations had to be to constitute separate species were common. As it turned out, these natural variations were more than just a little important to Darwin.
To make sure that we would not mistake what he was driving at, in Chapter 2, titled "Variation in Nature," he wrote: These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage.
How about that? But let's not get ahead of ourselves. All living things are engaged in a struggle for existence. Like anyone who has ever tended a small garden, I immediately knew that Darwin was right about this.
I might have been only eighteen, but I had already watched tomatoes die under an onslaught of cutworms, red ants dismember a hapless beetle under my magnifying lens, and scores of weeds and grass seedlings sprout only to wither and vanish under the sharp August sunlight.
Despite all this carnage, our small yard teemed with life. Darwin explained it all succinctly. First, living things can produce more of themselves. There is no exception to the rule that every organic being naturally increases at so high a rate, that, if not destroyed, the earth would soon be covered by the progeny of a single pair.
And finally, a key insight: The struggle is most severe among individuals of the same species. Because the members of your own species are the very ones who need exactly the same resources you do to survive.
In short, to know what your number one competitor is like, take a look in the mirror—he's going to look a lot like you. Darwin began the fourth chapter of The Origin, "Natural Selection," with a rhetorical question: "How will the struggle for existence, briefly discussed in the last chapter, act in regard to variation? Those individuals that lose in the struggle for existence generally do not get to produce the next generation, but those individuals that do succeed get the greatest of all possible rewards—they get to pass their winning traits along to their offspring.
This means that the conditions of nature, whether acting in my backyard, on the Galapagos Islands, or atop Mount Fuji, are constantly acting on natural variation, selecting out unsuccessful variations and rewarding successful ones.
When forces divide a single species into two populations, natural selection will act on each separately, until they have accumulated enough differences that each becomes a separate and new species. Incredibly, that's all there was to it. In those principles you have all of Darwin's theory. Being a long-winded Englishman, Darwin wasn't going to end with just four chapters and a hundred pages.
He went on for eleven more chapters, explaining in numbing detail the implications of his theory for biogeography, paleontology, classification, instinctive behavior, and embryology. He even considered objections to his theory, and, just in case you had missed something important, fashioned a concluding chapter to recapitulate his arguments.
I did have to admit that each of the four building blocks of this theory was obviously true. Breeders did draw upon the range of variation in domestic animals and plants to make new varieties.
A similar range of variation did exist in nature. The conditions of life did place each individual in competition with others. And this competition clearly affected the range of variation that survived. Thomas Henry Huxley, soon to be called "Darwin's Bulldog" for his determined advocacy of Darwinism, is said to have read The Origin and then to have remarked, "How foolish of me not to have thought of it! Darwin's observations seemed tediously obvious. They also led to an obvious conclusion—that all life was interrelated, which hardly seemed earth-shattering to me at the time.
There may have been some truth to that, but like most kids my age, I still had a pretty good understanding of earth history. That understanding had been reinforced by a handful of visits to fossil collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The bones and shells and especially the great dinosaur reconstructions left very little doubt that life on earth had once been very different from today. Before long we all were convinced that evolution was the process that had produced the dramatic changes the museum documented in such spectacular fashion.
My encounter with Darwin's detailed, careful, exhausting nineteenth century prose was less than memorable the first time around. At best, it gave me a sense of where these rich and wonderful ideas of our past had come from.
But like most of my contemporaries at the time, I placed little value on historical context. I found nothing in The Origin worth reading to my love, which, for me, made it the single most boring book of an otherwise memorable summer. This motivating force was something I had not encountered in all the rest of my reading.
People were afraid of the book. My dad, whose chance at college came only when the end of World War II allowed him to lay down a rifle and pick up the GI bill, had ignored most of my attempts to act like an intellectual that summer.
When he saw me reading Darwin, he thoughtfully told me that I was reading a dangerous book, and I should be careful. I wondered about that. A few people at the swim club made the same comment. I never found the good parts that would have justified such concerns.
The scandal, no matter how carefully I read, escaped my notice. I had taken two public high school courses in biology. My first biology teacher, Paul Zong, was in love with life, and wanted to draw us into his kind of biology—a fellowship of systematic exploration, classification, and nomenclature. I am positive, even after I have earned two university degrees and accumulated years of specialized training, that my knowledge of classification and scientific names reached its high-water mark on the morning of my final exam in ninth grade biology.
And I never changed my mind. I took my second course in biology, an advanced course, as a senior from an uninspiring instructor whose name is best not mentioned. This awful class would pass unmentioned except for one striking similarity it shared with my wonderful year under Mr. Neither teacher mentioned evolution. Many years later, wondering if that recollection had been correct, I retrieved the exact edition of the biology textbook we used for the first of these courses.
The word "evolution" did not appear in the index. Charles Darwin was mentioned, but only in a chapter strangely titled "Organic Variation through Time. This was essentially the strategy followed by both of my teachers. I did indeed learn about natural selection, the human fossil record, and the age of the dinosaurs.
I simply had not learned evolution as a specific subject. This was hardly a unique experience. Historians of American scientific education would later document the great retreat from evolution that swept over public education at midcentury. I suspect that at one time or another in their careers, my teachers had discovered that teaching evolution and calling it such brought concern and discomfort to an otherwise quiet and respectable profession.
Like most of us, they found an easier way through the woods, and then trod that path year after year. The dearth of apparent scandal in The Origin made all of this a little puzzling, and it took me a few years to understand what all the fuss was about. During my second year of graduate school at the University of Colorado, trying to make ends meet, I was teaching a regular tutorial session of freshman biology students in the dorm lounge several nights a week. I have long since forgotten the specifics it contained, but the cover illustration is plain as day in my recollection.
Not only was evolution linked with the Father of Lies himself, it was "exposed" as a massive conspiracy foisted on an unsuspecting public.
In case I had been thick enough to wonder how a specialized biological theory might play such a crucial role in society, the back cover of the pamphlet spelled it all out for me. Evolution, it seemed, was responsible for such evils as theft, murder, drug abuse, prostitution, war, and even adultery. I dismissed the pamphlet with a sneer, cleverly pointing out to my younger friends that the Old Testament documented nearly all of these sins long before The Origin, and it seemed a bit much to blame Darwin for all of them.
The pamphlet jarred a nerve within me, however, put there no doubt by years of careful study of the catechism. The dangers sensed by the pamphleteers, by my Dad, and by my teachers all had the same source. The danger in evolution was that it struck directly at the fundamental assumptions of religion about the relationship between God and man. Evolution threatened the soul itself. Although Darwin was careful to note the contributions of those who preceded him, the publication of The Origin was a public event unprecedented in the history of science.
He may have hoped to write a book to be read and appreciated by specialists, but it immediately became a widely discussed best-seller. Evolution turned out to be hot stuff. Its influence has been felt in fields as disparate as immunology and sociology, and it has revolutionized the way in which we view the world, natural and manmade.
Detmett accurately described the impact of Darwin's theories: Let me lay my cards on the table. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.
But it is not just a wonderful scientific idea. It is a dangerous idea. One of the great beauties of evolution is that it is automatic. The combination of random variation and natural selection automatically selects the organisms that do best in a particular environment, and then rewards them by forming the next generation from the winners in the game of natural selection. The power of this simple idea extends well beyond biology.
When I first began university teaching, I was unexpectedly impressed by the skill of my students at taking tests. Test-taking is an ability distinct from actual knowledge, which is not to say that knowledge is unimportant to success on a well-constructed exam. There is a strategic component to doing well, and all of my students seemed to excel at this.
They asked the right questions: "Is there a correction [on the multiple choice questions] for guessing? Or just the most obvious one? Did we have a course where they are taught how to take tests, I wondered.
I asked this out loud to a colleague, who laughed. It's natural selection," he said with a grin. Why natural selection? Student admissions at the university where I teach are extremely competitive. Our students are products of an educational system in which those who are proficient at test-taking are moved towards the honors tracks in middle school and high school. Once there, they can earn the best grades only by excellent exam work—test-taking again. Students who are not proficient at test-taking are gradually weeded out.
By the time they reach my classroom, only the adept testtakers are left. It works automatically, just like natural selection. Biologist and author Richard Dawkins once allowed his readers to consider how powerful natural selection was by asking them how many of their direct ancestors had died in childhood. Within a few seconds, most of them are grinning or laughing out loud as they realize how ridiculous such a question is.
None of anyone's immediate ancestors died in childhood. If they had, they wouldn't be your ancestors! Putting it another way, each of us is descended from a long line of winners. The near-perfection our bodies display as they grow, processing food, regulating temperature, and resisting disease, has been honed at a price.
Unsuccessful experiments in metabolism or design, like poor test-takers, are weeded out by natural selection. Darwin's powerful idea, a biological explanation for the origins of living species, has exerted a transfixing hold on human thinking in the century and a half since it first kicked in the doors of Western intellectual life.
Once Darwin's apple had fallen from the tree, there was no stopping the ways in which eager scholars would apply it to one problem after another. Like a tide sweeping away old explanations of natural philosophy, Darwinian thought made scientists everywhere demand naturalistic, materialist explanations for the way things are. The intellectual dominance of these ideas led to a new set of cultural assumptions about science, about the world, and even about the nature of reality.
Was this because Darwin provided the first workable explanation for the remarkable adaptations of living things? I suspect not. I also do not believe that Darwin's wide influence comes from his patient and groundbreaking observations on orchids or barnacles. Rather, it comes from one simple fact. Evolution displaced the Creator from His central position as the primary explanation for every aspect of the living world.
In so doing, Darwin lent intellectual aid and comfort to anti-religionists everywhere. As Dawkins accurately observed: Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
In a Copernican universe where Newtonian laws, not the chariots of gods, moved the heavens around, evolution disposed of the last remaining mystery—the source of life itself. With that taken care of, surely there was no longer any room left for religion in the life of the mind. The world had at last been made safe for "intellectually fulfilled" atheists.
That is what was dangerous about The Origin. This view is not always articulated openly, perhaps for fear of offending the faithful, but the literature of science is not a good place to keep secrets.
Scientific writing, especially on evolution, shows this displacement clearly. In , Edward 0. Wilson's widely admired pioneering work on social behavior in insects led directly to his founding contributions to a new field which he called "sociobiology"—the study of the biological basis of social behavior. Right up front, on the very first page of the book, Wilson put his finger on the crux of the matter: If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species.
After Darwin, they were the children of "genetic chance and environmental necessity. Richard Dawkins leaves no doubt about his own view of a Darwinian universe.
It is not a place of real values, of genuine good and evil. As Dawkins admits: This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous—indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose. A few years ago, an opinion column in The Scientist, a trade weekly for scientific professionals, had maintained that any scientist who entered a house of worship had better "check his brain on the way in.
The readers of The Scientist are no fools—they knew exactly what had happened in recent scientific history. First Galileo and Copernicus displaced man as the center of the universe.
Then Darwinism set aside God as the author of creation. And finally the rise of biochemistry and molecular biology removed any doubt as to whether or not the properties of living things, humanity included, could be explained in terms of the physics and chemistry of ordinary matter. The word is out—we are mere molecules. So complete is the absence of the spiritual from modern science that a few writers even take withering potshots at God Himself.
George C. Williams, a scientist who has made important contributions towards understanding the complexities of natural selection, did so in his book The Pony Fish's Glow: She [anthropologist Sarah Hrdy] studied a population of monkeys, Hanuman langurs, in Northern India. Their mating system is what biologists call harem polygyny: Dominant males have exclusive sexual access to a group of adult females, as long as they can keep other males away. Sooner or later, a stronger male usurps the harem and the defeated one must join the ranks of celibate outcasts.
The new male shows his love for his new wives by trying to kill their unweaned infants. For each successful killing, a mother stops lactating and goes into estrous Deprived of her nursing baby, a female soon starts ovulating. She accepts the advances of her baby's murderer, and he becomes the father of her next child. Do you still think God is good? According to Williams, science certainly has ruled out the existence of a benign one.
Is this indeed the case? Is it time to replace existing religions with a scientifically responsible, attractively sentimental, ethically driven Darwinism—a First Church of Charles the Naturalist? Does evolution really nullify all world views that depend upon the spiritual? Does it demand logical agnosticism as the price of scientific consistency? And does it rigorously exclude belief in God?
These are the questions that I will explore in the pages that follow. My answer, in each and every case, is a resounding no. I do not say this, as you will see, because evolution is wrong. Far from it. The reason, as I hope to show, is because evolution is right.
In its opening chapter he worried openly, "When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. Things haven't changed. I teach a large biology course at one of our country's great colleges, and every time I step to the podium I realize that those bright young faces in the audience are making assumptions about me. Sometimes, I hope, those assumptions are grounded in reality. I hope, for example, that they accept my enthusiasm for science as genuine, and that they detect the optimism in my voice when I talk about the future.
The teaching of evolution brings forward a new set of assumptions in my students. They very quickly come to believe that a professor who speaks with excitement and passion on evolutionary theory, who documents the rich fossil record of our prehuman ancestors, and who describes the role of chance and contingency in the origin of species probably is or must be an atheist.
A few of them get the courage to stay after class and ask that personal question point-blank. And they get back an answer few of them seem to anticipate. Their intellectual instincts embrace the modern virtues of tolerance and diversity almost without question. Despite the conviction in some quarters that these graces extend only to one side of the spectrum of value and belief, I believe that most students are sincere in their attempts to be intellectually tolerant. When I answer their questions about evolution and religion by telling them that I happen to believe in God, I am treated respectfully and courteously.
Nobody seems to get upset, no organizations picket my classes, my name does not appear on protest leaflets. Nonetheless, after explaining my personal beliefs at the request of a student, almost every time I get the response, "You believe that despite evolution?
Despite evolution. Over years of teaching and research in science, I have come to realize that a presumption of atheism or agnosticism is universal in academic life. From time to time I have to struggle to explain to my students, and even my colleagues, not only why Darwinian evolution does not preclude the existence of God, but how remarkably consistent evolution is with religion, even with the most traditional of Western religions.
It is simply taken for granted that smart, modern, well-informed people have risen above the level of petty superstition, which is exactly how any serious faith is regarded.
Religion as culture, in the sense of Jewish culture, Islamic custom, and even Christian tradition, may be grudgingly accorded obligatory respect—just enough, I am sure, to evade the nasty charge of cultural imperialism. But religion itself, genuine belief, just doesn't belong. It would be difficult to overstate how common this presumption of godlessness is, and the degree to which it affects any serious attempt to investigate the religious implications of ideas. Ironically, if asked to justify such attitudes, my friends and colleagues in nonscientific disciplines will often claim science as their authority.
Clearly they believe that scientific inquiry has ruled out the divine. Unfortunately for them, as I will argue, nothing of the sort is true. Their attitudes towards religion and religious people are rooted not so much in science itself as in the humanist fabric of modern intellectual life.
This is a point we will explore in detail a little bit later, and as we will see, it is the source of a powerful backlash that science ignores only at its peril. Do I have some reason to doubt evolution? Is there some flaw, large or subtle, in Darwin's great theory, some new evidence that an embarrassed scientific community has hushed up? Many critics of evolution certainly seem to think so. In , when writer David Berlinski attacked evolution across the board in Commentary magazine, 2 letters of praise from delighted readers poured in.
They lauded his "courage," his willingness to confront a "stifling scientific establishment," and his achievement in breaking out of the "intellectual straitjacket" that Darwinism has imposed on modern life.
Berlinski is not alone. Such critics as Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson have charged that the weakness of evolution's scientific standing is a trade secret known only in the inner circles of the establishment. An honest appraisal of the evidence, they maintain, would sweep evolution convincingly into the dustbin of history. Are these critics right? If there is indeed a major flaw in Darwin's edifice, why haven't scores of young, iconoclastic scientists, eager to establish their own careers, smashed it to pieces?
These are questions worth answering. For more than twenty years, I have been fortunate to make my home in New England. The town in which my family lives was founded only a couple of decades after the Pilgims landed, and it has remained just distant enough from nearby urban centers to retain its rural character. Although growth has begun to change the town, not always for the better, Rehoboth has recently suffered a slow plague of urban workers putting up homes on what used to be fields and woods worked for farming and lumber.
Nonetheless, Rehoboth retains its essential New England character, much to the delight of its residents. Although some of our region's educational institutions, my own included, have well-deserved reputations for political liberalism, New Englanders on a personal level are exceptionally conservative.
New England leads the United States in church attendance and ice cream consumption, and in those seemingly unlinked characteristics I find a great deal to admire. The New England character has been formed by difficult weather and rough landscape. My friends and neighbors accept all of this without question, and also take it as their right to control every aspect of our local government.
If fact, they are the local government. The second Monday in April, a time when snowdrifts are unlikely to prevent travel but it's still too early to work the fields, is Town Meeting Day.
In numbers that rise and fall with the level of local controversy, citizens gather in a school gymnasium to vote, line by line, on every item in the town budget.
The police chief who needs a new radio, the tax collector who has her eye on a faster computer, and the building inspector whose truck has broken down must stand and plead their cases in front of the skeptical townfolk.
I've never had to go in front of the town meeting to talk about evolution, but if I did, I suspect that the questioning would be very practical. My plain-speaking neighbors would not much care about the philosophical implications of the idea.
They wouldn't worry about the personal religious beliefs of Charles Darwin, and they wouldn't give a damn if other people had used evolution to support or justify their own views on religion, on economic systems, on linguistics, or anything else. Very much like my firstyear students, the fundamental questions for my neighbors would be, sensibly, the big ones. The bottom-line issues. Did evolution actually take place? And if it did, did evolution produce us, too?
In plain language, I would answer those questions the only way that fact and science allow. Yes, it did. And yes, we are the children of evolution, too. In the strictest sense, no. Scientific knowledge, in the absolute sense, is always tentative. Science is founded on the proposition that everything we think we know about the natural world can, in principle, be rejected if it does not meet the test of observation and experiment. The very practice of science, at its core, is a constant exercise of extending what we do know about the world, and then correcting what we thought we knew for sure.
In this respect, evolution occupies no special place in the scientific hierarchy of ideas. There is nothing extraordinary in what I have just said. It simply means that evolution is a scientific idea, and scientific ideas rise or fall on the weight of the evidence. Unfortunately, there is a school of thought that rejects the very idea that any theory about the past can be scientific.
Science, the argument goes, is based on experiment and direct, testable observation. Therefore, science can address only phenomena that are brought into the laboratory and examined under controlled conditions. It is true that the very best experimental conditions are those in which we can control all variables, then manipulate just one or two, and make detailed observations of the results; but this argument would deny scientific inquiry to any situation that does not lend itself to laboratory science.
The natural history of the earth is just such a situation. Since there were no human witnesses to the earth's past, the argument goes, all statements about that past, including evolution, are pure speculation. Your speculation, some say, just like your taste in music, has no more claim to be scientific than my taste does. This line of reasoning, by denying scientific legitimacy to evolution, would take away from Darwinism its scientific cachet and place it in the same category as any story of origins.
All answers to our "Where are you from" question would then have equal scientific standing—which is to say, no scientific standing at all. As a practicing scientist, I might not like the implications of that argument, and I could oppose it just for that reason. I'd rather argue from a higher standard, however, which is whether or not the argument is correct. Is scientific inquiry restricted to what we can actually bring into the laboratory and see happening right in front of us?
Is there really any scientific way that we can know anything about the past at all? There is indeed a way to do this, and the process is so ordinary that most of us take it for granted. When a common burglar pries open a window and climbs into a home to steal, he does so in the hope that he will leave as he entered—silently and without detection. But despite his best efforts, every one of his actions leaves something behind.
The marks of his entry will bear the imprint of his tools. His footsteps will leave impressions in carpeting, residue on wood, and telltale debris on both.
And sooner or later, the goods he took will reappear in a marketplace where they may be traced and identified as stolen. A police detective would scoff at the notion that crimes can be solved only when they are witnessed directly.
Nonetheless, when McVeigh was apprehended on an unrelated charge, investigators quickly assembled a web of evidence that left little doubt that he had been deeply involved in the planning and execution of the bombing. The simple fact is that we can learn about the past by applying good, old-fashioned detective work to the clues that have been left behind. The same rules apply to science. We may not be able to witness the past directly, but we can reach out and analyze it for the simple reason that the past left something behind.
That something is the material of the earth itself. With a few notable exceptions,' every atom of the earth's substance that is here in this instant will still be here a minute from now. It may change form or shape, it may move, it may even undergo a chemical reaction, but matter persists, and that means that the present always contains clues to the past. Aside from the earth itself, no object in our tiny corner of the universe commands human attention and awe more than the sun.
For many peoples, the sun was a God itself to be feared and worshiped. To the Egyptians he was Amon-Ra. To the Greeks he was drawn across the sky by Apollo in a chariot of gold. The list could go on, of course, punctuated by tales of mass panic as his rays were apparently lost at the height of a total solar eclipse.
It is easy to see why our nearest star gained such status. The perceived movements of the sun define our days and nights, its warmth creates our seasons, and its energy grows the food that nourishes us and all of nature. To attribute all this to a power supernatural is understandable, maybe even logical. To be sure, Anaxagoras's analysis, which placed the sun a mere 4, miles above the surface of the earth, left a little to be desired. It seems that Anaxagoras had learned that on the day of the summer solstice the noonday sun in the city of Syene the present-day location of the Aswan High Dam cast no shadow—it was directly overhead.
At exactly the same time, the sun in Alexandria, miles to the north, cast a shadow of 7 degrees. Anaxagoras, no doubt a quick study in trigonometry, had taken these angular differences as a quick and easy way to calculate the height of the sun.
It would have worked, too, if the earth had been flat. Only a Theory Kenneth R. Miller — in Religion. Shadow of Oz Wayne D. Rossiter — in Religion. Author : Wayne D. Rossiter File Size : Darwin and Catholicism Louis Caruana — in Religion. Author : Louis Caruana File Size : Author : Michael Austin File Size : Species of Origins Karl Giberson — in Religion.
Author : Karl Giberson File Size : Author : Philipp Winterberg File Size : Darwin s Philosophical Legacy Gerard M.
Verschuuren — in Philosophy. Author : Gerard M. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project. It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos.
Perhaps, he speculates, the Novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos.
At the age of , James Lovelock has produced the most important and compelling work of his life. Achetez neuf ou d'occasion. A runaway bestseller in Sweden that has sold more than a million copies worldwide, Surrounded by Idiots shares a simple, revolutionary method of understanding the people around you that will change how you interact with everyone from your coworkers to your spouse.
Author Thomas Erikson explains that there are four key behavior types that define how we interact with and perceive the people around us. Erikson breaks down the four kinds of behavior types—Reds who are dominant and commanding, Yellows who are social and optimistic, Greens who are laid back and friendly, and Blues who are analytical and precise—and explains how to identify and interact with each type of person. Instead of being bogged down with overly technical categorizations, the simple four-color system allows you to speedily identify a friend or coworker and adjust how you speak and share with them.
Surrounded by Idiots is full of practical information for interacting with people based on their color, including the strengths and weaknesses of all the profiles, how to give positive and negative feedback to each, and the best way to word an email when writing to someone with a different profile.
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