- Week 7 was a no-go for Law Class. The ASU Law School gets a winter break, so a nice reprieve from the lawheads. Really, the professor for this class is great and passes the material on well enough, but the level of discourse is somewhere in the CNN ballpark. Meaning that we seem to have a generation of lawyerheads with a soundbyte-level depth to them. That's just super.
- We read a paper by Chip Burkhardt on the issue of "space" and naturalism - essentially, what is the appropriate way to study animal behavior - in a lab, in the field, in a zoo, with a shoe? More on this in a sec
- Somewhere in here I read a book by Levins and Lewontin called Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture and Health. They are hard-core Marxists and it shows, though their basic premise is entirely correct - you have to consider the complexity and shifting dynamics of all things biological in order to accurately comprehend them. This book is a collection of essays, and for better or worse they did not edit a thing - you end up reading the same examples OVER and OVER. So a problematic book - the rhetoric in particular gets tiresome - though an interesting one. J and I are supposed to write a short review at some point.
- We hit up the Botanical Garden this week for our HSD seminar class. Hot damn, can Andrew tear apart a docent. It was a nice break from the classroom routine, and cool to see a taxonomist's perspective on such places. We also drove there, which means I got to show Johnny and Melissa the glory of GPGDS in the car. It also showed me the glory of this:
- After class that Friday, I went to my first "grad students have lunch with a visiting professor"... lunch. Dr. Burkhardt was exceptionally kind, but man - it was "let's go around the table, and each student will describe their research." So, so worthless, largely because there were about 30 people there so everyone had about a minute to talk. Just a waste. Not to mention the sandwiches were soggy. We went to his talk afterwards on Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology, and that was good.
- Week 8 - Law class, back in session, covered Antitrust Law (Microsoft) and Technological Mandates (e.g., Digital TV). Very interesting content-wise, and to be honest this class since the break (when I wrote the above soundbyte comments) has improved, though this is all Dr. Marchant and not the students themselves (see week 9).
- Johnny defended his prospectus in week 8, so one of his committee members (a muppet-less Pam Henson) was there on Monday to give a talk on bio-policy work in Panama. Very nice, very good scholar, but she hails from the Smithsonian and WOW am I not interested in that particular archival style of history. Good to know.
- Somewhere in here I finished Ed Larson's Trial and Error and Kary Smout's The Creation/Evolution Controversy: A Battle for Cultural Power, two books for my law paper.
- For seminar this week we read M. Rudwick's The Meaning of Fossils and some other works on neuro-imaging and continental drift. Melissa and Monamie presented; good stuff.
- Week 9 - Law Class. I skipped a lecture on Tech Policy (which I SWEAR we already covered) to attend a borderline sociobiology lecture by Robert Boyd. Seems like an interesting, smart guy, but he really gave us the reader's digest version of his work. I was seriously disappointed as this guy is supposedly THE MAN when it comes to cultural evolution. I mean, he is THE MAN and was a great speaker, but this was such a general audience speech that I didn't even feel like asking a question afterwards. I have no more refined critique than that; it was basically a talk on the persistence of artifacts through culture and how they evolve over time. This version of the talk seemed to suffer from all the usual Evo Psych type complaints of positing plausible arguments sans mechanistic explanation. I digress. It was better than law class.
- Oh, and to push it over the top, the law class later that week was on Bioethics, and this law-dork tried to claim that ethical and moral laws always match up, especially in the case of murder. When I challenged him on this, he was a PRIMO DICK and ended by calling me "crazy." After which he got summarily shot down by the prof. This put me in a bad mood for quite a while. I'm over it now; can't you tell?
- We had a "Ballot Issues Breakfast" on Wednesday of this week, where I met Jenny, her special man friend Ilya, Genevieve, Jamie, Ryan, and Nat at La Grade Orange for coffee and political talk. This was awesome and informative. I would never like to be an activist - that would require way too much concern for the empty, fleeting material world - but I enjoy knowing them.
- For Monday Seminar we read an article by Hannah Landecker, a sociologist / anthropologist / HPS type who used to work in the anthropology department at Rice. She irks some bioethicists (not us!) because she insists that philosophy is only comprehensible when the philosophers understand and consider the context of the science that they are studying. So she is a sort of a "friend of the program," what with our shared ideals, and a cool lady taboot - we read and discussed an article on Monday and had lunch / listened to a talk on Friday. It was a SMALL lunch on Friday, so we really had ample time to have an actual conversation and not just a roll call. That was very cool - and we got to eat Oregano's, too, so YEAH.
- Somewhere in here I helped Dr. Armendt prepare for a "Ethics Debate" for ASU parents weekend. The debate topic: "Genetic Engineering is Necessary for a Better Society." Dr. Armendt had to argue for the con. We came up with some good examples - leukemia in XSCID patients, genetic biomarkers showing up in wild corn - but the main thing I took away from this was how stupidly low the level of discourse was for a public event. It was fun to help out a prof and discuss some of the topics, but for a straight up philosophy professor to have to deign to such an empty mode of arguing... ugh. Let me be absolutely clear here - it was the format, not Brad, that was lacking. He had 3 minutes to talk! They wouldn't let him define "better' or "genetic engineering!" Woah. I just shudder at what passes for intellectual discourse in front of the masses.
- Week 10 - Law this week was research ethics (YAWN) and privacy technology (wahoo). Good classes, and I didn't even get called insane by anyone! The privacy class had its share of surreal moments - Dr. Marchant had just talked about nano-cameras and their illegal applications, including voyeuristic endeavors which amount to 21st century shoe mirrors. I want to avoid having my site come up for these types of searches, so I'll try to be vague here - he said there was a certain site called up-ay-irts-skay-ot-day-om-cay that had been sued and "probably shut down." Dr. Marchant moved on to the next topic, but a certain WEIRD lady in our class raised her hand, apparently after looking said site up on her computer - via the ASU NETWORK - in CLASS - and said, "Oh, [that site] is still up." Ladies and Gents, your awkward silence of the year award winner is... THAT LADY.
- In Monday Seminar, we listened to a talk on the basics of stem cell biology and history of research. This was... meh?
- On MONDAY, I learned that when Jenny was in Cleveland the previous weekend, she got to HANG OUT WITH DAVID BYRNE. I am so angry/jealous I could spew fluid out my tear ducts. Tears of violence, I will call them.
- As mentioned, I had to present on a long (450 page) Challnger themed book this week, and that ate up a lot of my time. See here.
- Lots of stuff lined up for the coming weeks, including writing two papers, finishing a couple of articles with jason, meeting with a neurophilosopher, and starting a bio-ethics paper witha real life bio student. GOOD TIMES.
Follow-up: I should mention that the last four weeks have seen a blossoming of community within ye olde SoLS Bio & Society program. Mark, Melissa, Jenny, Johnny, Katherine - just a lot of quality people, and the occasional lunches have been absolute laugh riots. I like good peoples.
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