EvoLit

If I were still putting together lecture notes to share with y'all, I'd be sure to mention a New Yorker article called "The Possibilian," about a neuroscientist named David Eagleman who says that "Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties.... From the ..'alien computational material' [that is brain tissue] to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism.... 'And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.' Why not revel in the alternatives?....'Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.....

 A few weekends ago University of Maryland Medical Center held their annual conference (started in 1995) during which doctors meet and attempt to identify  the mysterious illness(es) that killed Darwin.  I found it somewhat fitting that while during Darwin's time no diagnosis could be made, as medicine has continued to evolve the same questions and illnesses are recycled in order to aid in the development and evolution of the field itself.  I like the idea that even events of the past, that a are long gone, and pose no significant selective pressure to a species continue to be used as lessons for the future.  I find it most fitting that Darwin's death is used as the mystery case.

When thinking about what kind of a project I wanted to do for the end of the semester, I tried to think about the different ways our class had learned and been taught to learn over the course of the term. For me, the two most important things I came to understand where the way I presented myself in arguments, and the ways I learned to hear more openly, and allow my views to shift. Consequently, my group decided to create a human barometer in which our classmates would line up on a spectrum ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ as they responded to prompts inspired by the works we studied in class. In keeping with the ‘evolution’ centric topic, we ordered our prompts in the same order as we read/watched them.

 About two weeks before we gave our final presentation our group sat down over lunch and we discussed ways that we could represent what we leaned this semester.  All of us agreed that this class helped each of us to see the thin or overlapping boundary between science and literature.  Our original intent was to go through our notebook and select a few key terms that we had repeatedly discussed throughout the semester.  Thinking back to our lower school days (maybe for some of us middle school...or college) we decided to organize these terms into a venn diagram with the two main circles being science and biology.  We expected that most of the terms would correspond to either biology or literature, but that some terms would find a home in the middle circle.