Madness, I know. We've been thinking of evolution in so many other, more abstracted contexts, that I, at least, had kind of forgotten about biology. I've been watching nature documentaries this week, though, and aside from the narrator's worrying fascination with snakes, they've been pretty good. But the buzzwords that we spent many weeks debunking - progress, advancement, purpose - have been appearing in these documentaries every few minutes. It's interesting; the understanding of evolution that I now have (and take for granted) is completely absent from these movies.

As we have discussed over the course of the semester, the line between science and literature is now blurred.  Or at least is partially blurred.  As we spoke in our closing classes about our final reflections and what we had learned over the course of the semester I thought a lot about all of those lines separating the 2 disciplines.  I finally came to the conclusion that some of the lines are blurred, but there are still some very concrete borders.  I think in the broader arena, the purpose of this class isn't necessarily what I've learned specifically about evolution, but rather the importance of thinking in different ways.

 For our final presentation to share with the class what we learned from this class hope, elly, skindeep, hannahgisele and I had the class head outside and set up in a line, what would become a spectrum. We each formulated a statement from each of our 5 texts (beginning with Darwin and ending with Adaptation) and read them to our classmates one at a time, asking them for each question to orient themselves on our imaginary between "agree" and one end and "disagree" at the other. We then asked them to talk amongst themselves about why they chose the place on the spectrum that they did, and invited them to move if they changed their minds after the discussion.

 In preparing to finish up my portfolio for this class I was looking back through some of my most recent notes and noticed, amongst my  notes about "vacilando" a small bullet point. Paul told us that "uncertainty is neutral" and that it favors no one. I learned in this class that the answer to all of Paul's questions is "randomness," so applying that here it, an outcome as dictated by the laws of randomness is just as likely to turn out favorable as unfavorable. While we as humans have no say in which outcome it is, if you believe in either agency or fate, there is only one way out of the two that it can turn out. This reminded me of a strip from Calvin & Hobbes that I can remember reading as a child and totally agreeing with.

Avery Larson

Final Performance Write-Up

In our last small group meeting we talked a lot about the set format that exists in academic writing, and why that is.  We said that there are selection pressures on those papers and that they need to be in that set format to remain as objective as possible, so that they will be accepted and respected in their given academic field.  This made me think about memoirs, and in particular the memoirs that have in the recent past been outed as fiction.  A Million Little Pieces and 3 Cups of Tea were both highly respected, immensely popular memoirs that were later proved to be fiction.  The uproar surrounding both of these stories was not about the writing style, or the stories that were told, but rather that fictional stories were portrayed to be true.

 I don't know if our class is obsessed with the Library of Babel, or if I, personally, am obsessed with it, but once again I have Babel on the mind. A book I read a few days ago was in the habit of throwing the word "destiny"  around as though it meant something, and I'm wondering if destiny and Babel aren't inter-related. Would a finite number of possibilities in this universe imply destiny, or would it negate the idea? If a person can only choose from so many options, perhaps the option that she chooses in therefore "destiny" - or, if there are an infinite number of options, perhaps the option that she invents is possible only because it is her "destiny".