For a third, try listing some things that you absolutely wouldn’t expect a sane Theory to lead you to do (say, tell the poor guy to “stop whining and get a job”), and based on the general idea that theories should add up to normality, ask how Roy’s Adaptation Theory specifically prohibits you from doing them. (If it doesn’t, that’s where it’s broken.)
This is the second thing that jumped out at me when reading the components of Roy’s Adaptation Theory (the first being that the “definitions” completely fail to circumscribe the actual concepts they attempt to define.) Adaptation to an environment does not correspond to our naive notions of good patient treatment, in situations such as a prisoner in a maximum security detention facility, whose growth into a violent top dog who makes the other prisoners his bitches a good Adaptation Theory nurse would be obliged to assist.
It’s a common naive view of evolution that it consistently makes organisms better and more advanced according to human notions of advancement (and perhaps this misconception is at the root of Adaptation Theory, if it takes adaptation to one’s environment as its mandate.) But according to ordinary human values, environments can impose perverse pressures , so that the results of adapting to them can be quite horrible. If the most face-value interpretation of Adaptation Theory tells you that it’s better for a patient growing up in a violent slum to become a high-powered drug dealer who occasionally has people shot and has women all over the slum raising children who don’t know their father than for him to get some sort of job or education which gets him out of there, it’s probably not a very good theory.
If we can’t take Adaptation Theory at face value, but instead have to twist it around so as to interpret it as telling us to do what already seems like common sense, then it’s definitely not a very good theory.
This is the second thing that jumped out at me when reading the components of Roy’s Adaptation Theory (the first being that the “definitions” completely fail to circumscribe the actual concepts they attempt to define.) Adaptation to an environment does not correspond to our naive notions of good patient treatment, in situations such as a prisoner in a maximum security detention facility, whose growth into a violent top dog who makes the other prisoners his bitches a good Adaptation Theory nurse would be obliged to assist.
It’s a common naive view of evolution that it consistently makes organisms better and more advanced according to human notions of advancement (and perhaps this misconception is at the root of Adaptation Theory, if it takes adaptation to one’s environment as its mandate.) But according to ordinary human values, environments can impose perverse pressures , so that the results of adapting to them can be quite horrible. If the most face-value interpretation of Adaptation Theory tells you that it’s better for a patient growing up in a violent slum to become a high-powered drug dealer who occasionally has people shot and has women all over the slum raising children who don’t know their father than for him to get some sort of job or education which gets him out of there, it’s probably not a very good theory.
If we can’t take Adaptation Theory at face value, but instead have to twist it around so as to interpret it as telling us to do what already seems like common sense, then it’s definitely not a very good theory.
I am so tempted to print your comment out and show it to my teacher...