(Speaking of lame time-travel jokes: my otherwise tres cool fellow student and office mate Jenny has ring tone of "Out of Touch" by Hall & Oates. Jason starting making fun of her the other day - "you really are out of touch" - and I added that someone was calling her from the 80s. I then yelled towards Jenny's phone "Buy stock in Google!," something I thought was a fairly standard / obvious Back to the Future 2-esque joke, but Jason nearly had a heart attack from laughing. Good times in the Ethics Lab).
Monday, we heard a talk from Mary, a soon-to-be PhD with a fellowship at Cal Berkley (and by soon, I mean SOON; she's defending in approximately one month). I think the aim here was to give us a little "here's you in four years!" vantage point, to convince some of us that the abstract tomorrow is not so abstract. Mission accomplished - Mary is very sharp / cool / nice and a generally great role model. Her research is in model organisms and the history of the study of regeneration, and she gave a great overview of her time at ASU and a little Q & A afterwards. Good times.
That afternoon, we continued our S, T & L class talks on expert witnesses and advisory panels, specifically focusing on the silicone breast implant / auto-immune mediated disease cases prevalent in the 1980s. The general vibe is that expert witnesses are hopelessly biased, panels are hopelessly biased, and that juries don't listen anyways. We then watched a video of a landmark civil suit where a jury awarded a suffering old lady 5.4 million dollars, despite the fact that both JAMA and the New England JoM had published epidemiologic studies showing no association b/w the implants and the scleroderma that the lady had. The two jurors were interviewed afterwards and explicitly stated that the silicone didn't cause her problems, but "we thought she could use the money. She's just a poor old lady, and the big company has bucks to spare." Ugh. Quick cut to an episode of Oprah, where the CEO of Dow Chemicals is trying to defend his company, and the morons in the audience start chanting "we're the evidence." The overall effect of this lecture was a veil of disappointment: between the constant no-solutions offered polemic in the course and the absurdity that is our legal system picture that the prof is painting, the whole thing makes all efforts feel worthless. Whadya think of that, Mike NTPB?
Tuesday's big accomplishment was a meeting with John Lynch, a superstar prof who's half-time at the Barrett Honors College (for Undergrads) and halftime a SoLS. Here's his blog. He researches the history of anti-evolutionism in America, so I met with him to talk about a potential paper for my SL&T class regarding cultural values / narratives motivating the ID / Evo debate. Fantastic meeting; really got me going in the right direction and was just a schwank guy to talk to generally. Interdisciplinariness is a big strength at ye olde ASU, but his strength is really just cross-disc: he also teaches "The Human Event" for Barrett, which from what I can tell ranges over all kinds of great lit and history and you name it. Very cool guy.
Wednesday featured a meeting with Andrew Hamilton, an STS superstar at ASU and one of the professors from my core seminar HSD class. We got coffee, chatted about a variety of things, and centered in on popular conceptions of the Sociobiology debate of the 70s-80s (today?) as a research topic. Cool stuff.
Which reminds me - this week for that class, we read articles by Gould, Alcott, and Sergerstrale, all centered around E.O.Wilson's coffeetable classic Sociobiology (of which we read selected pertinent chapters). The basic story is that Wilson wrote a book with a very throwdown "Let's establish a new discipline as the root of all these other disciplines" opening chapter, a middle 25 chapters of fairly high quality cited research supporting a biological basis (read: genetic) of social behavior in everything from ants to apes, and a final chapter that essentially said humans are just another animal and our social behaviors are grounded in our biology / evolutionary history, too. Nowadays, it's actually a pretty commonplace and relatively accepted idea, but in the 1970s, coming out of the Civil Rights era and on the cusp of some controversial work regarding inherent IQ differences between the races (call it The Bell Curve, Version 0.0), this was big time controversial, at least amongst hot shot scientists in the US and Britain. I won't go into particulars here, but Wilson got pretty accused of being a ultra-con racist by some Marxist folks, people called one another bad scientists, and a whole wealth of debates erupted over what constitutes good science (some felt Wilson had way over-conjectured; some felt you have to have models in place before you can test hypotheses) and how moral behavior and scientific practices are interrelated. I'm currently reading Segerstrale's Defenders of the Truth, a thoroughly excellent account of the event, its aftermath, the subsequent history, etc., and it's a fascinating vignette of what happens in so-called scientific / academic discourse. BUT the thing I am finding interesting thus far is that there has been little to no articulation as to who exactly the lay public is or how this science is supposed to corrupt them. Hence the potential research paper topic. We'll see.
Wednesday afternoon featured another SL&T class, this time outlining how brutally inefficient and troubled Congressional Agencies are in times of uncertain scientific data. Smell a theme in this class thus far? This time it was re: BPA, that plastic in your Nalgene bottle that is going to kill you dead. Pretty thoroughly uninteresting.
Thursday I checked out a huge pile of books for research, and Friday we had our seminar class which went well. I also went to a burger joint with Andrew, Johnny and Kathy and ate a stupidly good cheeseburger. Good times.
I'm fading here, but I'll mention real quick that we were supposed to have dinner with Elaine on Friday, but Hurricane Ike derailed her plans. So we ate with D&C instead at a restaurant that strongly resembled Richardson's. We were lucky enough to sit next to a tableful of drunk-as-hell real estate types who quietly discussed the virtues of Helvetica vis a vis Arial font. SO ANNOYING. Geez, get a room, people.
And Saturday Dan & I played golf - woohoo - and I managed to shoot a 42 on the front nine (par 31) and then lost all ability to chip and went to 46 on the back nine. Sigh... very cheap course, and I didn't lose too many balls, so all was good. Don't think I'll be making a habit out of expensive courses, though hanging with MC "25 foot putt" Dan works pretty well. D&C came over for pool-sittin' later, and Beck and I capped the evening by having a good dinner at Zipp's.
Beck and I hit up the McDowell Mts. on Sunday, and I played a fun game of pickup later in the day. Spent the remainder of the weekend reading Politics in the Laboratory: The Constitution of the Human Genome and also hearing the aforementioned terrible news that I will write about at some point soon.
And that was the week. Okay, back to the Defenders...
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