Identifying Methods of Development

For each of the following paragraphs, write a sentence stating the main idea in your own words in the first space. In the second space, write the predominant method of development. Here again are the methods of development taken up in Chapter 4:

• cause-effect
• analysis and classification
• analogy
• definition (specify stipulative, personal, historical, or etymological)

Dogs, as a species, were created by man. In the standard Darwinian model, natural forces in the wild would have selected for the perpetuation of those genes that favored survival and procreation. But dogs came into being through a process of artificial selection, when human beings, probably around a hundred thousand years ago, began to domesticate gray wolves into Canis familiaris. Man bred those animals to suit his work purposes and to be compatible with his social structures and his social behavior. Canines were trained to serve as hunters, trackers, herders, and sentinels, as well as playmates for children and companions for adults. The lives of man and dog became so closely integrated that we began to breed them for behaviors that were functional surrogates of our own. In the ancient Middle East, where grain was cultivated and livestock was husbanded, people bred dogs that had protective instincts. During the Middle Ages in Europe, many dogs were bred in monasteries, with preference given to traits seen as Christian, such as loyalty, cooperation, and affection. And over the past century man has shaped canine evolution even more systematically, by establishing breeds that meet kennel-club standards.

--Jerome Groopman, "Pet Scan," The New Yorker

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2			Method of development:

America is also the inventor of that most mythic individual hero, the cowboy, who again and again saves a society he can never completely fit into. The cowboy has a special talent--he can shoot straighter and faster than other men--and a special sense of justice. But these characteristics make him so unique that he can never fully belong to society. His destiny is to defend society without ever really joining it. He rides off alone into the sunset like Shane, or like the Lone Ranger moves on accompanied only by his Indian companion. But the cowboy's importance is not that he is isolated or antisocial. Rather, his significance lies in his unique, individual virtue and special skill and it is because of those qualities that society needs and welcomes him. Shane, after all, starts as a real outsider, but ends up with the gratitude of the community and the love of a woman and a boy. And while the Lone Ranger never settles down and marries the local schoolteacher, he always leaves with the affection and gratitude of the people he has helped. It is as if the myth says you can be a truly good person, worthy of admiration and love, only if you resist fully joining the group. But sometimes the tension leads to an irreparable break. Will Kane, the hero of High Noon, abandoned by the cowardly townspeople, saves them from an unrestrained killer, but then throws his sheriff's badge in the dust and goes off into the desert with his bride. One is left wondering where they will go, for there is no longer any link with the town.

--Robert N. Bellah, et. al., Habits of the Heart

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The rise of spectator sports to their present importance coincides historically with the rise of mass production, which intensifies the needs sport satisfies while creating the technical and promotional capacity to market athletic contests to a vast audience. But according to a common criticism of modern sport, these same developments have destroyed the value of athletics. Commercialization has turned play into work, subordinated the athlete's pleasure to the spectator's, and reduced the spectator himself to a state of vegetative passivity--the very antithesis of the health and vigor sport ideally promotes. The mania for winning has encouraged an exaggerated emphasis on the competitive side of sport, to the exclusion of the more modest but more satisfying experiences of cooperation and competence. The cult of victory, proclaimed by such football coaches as Vince Lombardi and George Allen, has made savages of the players and rabid chauvinists of their followers. The violence and partnership of modern sports lead some critics to insist that athletics impart militaristic values to the young, irrationally inculcate local and national pride in the spectator, and serve as one of the strongest bastions of male chauvinism.

--Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism

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In ancient Rome, libretinus denoted a slave who had been liberated, a freedman, and this was the meaning of libertine in early English use. But, just as a schoolboy released from irksome confinement of school is likely to break all bonds in his exuberance, so it was found that those released from slavery were likely to show no restraint in the observance of moral laws. Thus it came to be expected that a libertine would lead a life of unbridled license, and it was in this manner that the term came to refer to anyone, whether ex-slave or not, who lived such a life.

--Charles Earle Funk, Thereby Hangs a Tale

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Like a never dormant, ever erupting volcano, New York is an endless spectacle, full of irrationalities that flow in smooth, well-worn channels and splutter wildly through the air, and--depending on where you happen to be standing, figuratively and literally--the spectacle can be a source of threat or of beauty. New York has the power both to demand your attention (and you had better answer the call, unless you want to get hit by a speeding taxi) and to reward it: contemplation--and use--of some of its improbably well-functioning features can bring you daily in touch with the miraculous.

--Nancy Franklin, "The Thing About This City," The New Yorker

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In the book business, as in the movie business, there are two kinds of hits: sleepers and blockbusters. John Grisham and Tom Clancy and Danielle Steel write blockbusters. Their books are announced with huge publicity campaigns. Within days of publication, they leap onto the best-seller lists. Sales start high-hundreds of thousands of copies in the first few weeks-and then taper off. People who buy or watch blockbusters have a clear sense of what they are going to get: "a Danielle Steel novel is always-well, a Danielle Steel novel. Sleepers, on the other hand, are often unknown quantities. Sales start slowly and gradually build; publicity, at least early on, is often nonexistent. Sleepers come to your attention by a low, serendipitous path: a friend who runs into a friend who sets up the interview that just happens to be heard by a guy married to a bookseller. Sleepers tend to emerge from the world of independent bookstores, because independent bookstores are the kinds of places where readers go to ask the question that launches all sleeper hits: Can you recommend a book to me?

--Malcolm Gladwell, "The Science of the Sleeper," The New Yorker

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The decline of fatherhood is one of the most basic, unexpected, and extraordinary social trends of our time. Its dimensions can be captured in a single statistic: In just three decades, between 1960 and 1990, the percentage of U.S. children living apart from their biological fathers more than doubled, from 17 percent to 36 percent. By the turn of the century, nearly 50 percent of American children may be going to sleep each evening without being able to say good night to their dads.
No one predicted this trend, few researchers or government agencies have monitored it, and it is not widely discussed even today. But the decline of fatherhood is a major force behind many of the most disturbing problems that plague American society: crime and delinquency; teenage pregnancy; deteriorating educational achievement; depression, substance, abuse, and alienation among adolescents; and the growing number of women and children living in poverty. The current generation of children may be the first in our nation's history to be less well off-psychologically, socially, economically, and morally-than their parents were at the same age. The United States, observes [former] Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "may be the first society in history in which children are distinctly worse off than adults."

--David Popenoe, "Where's Poppa?" The Wilson Quarterly

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Friendship has been called "love without wings." On the other hand, the Stoic definition of love ("Love is the attempt to form a friendship inspired by beauty") seems to suggest that friendship came first. Certainly a case can be made that the buildup of affection and the yearning for more intimacy, without the release of sexual activity, keeps friends in a state of sweet-sorrowful itchiness that has the romantic quality of a love affair. We know that a falling-out between two old friends can leave a deeper and more perplexing hurt than the ending of a love affair, perhaps because we are more pessimistic about the affair's endurance from the start.

--Philip Lopate, "What Friends Are For," The Utne Reader

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