Reply to comment

Hi, I'm Jesse.  I am a sophomore at Haverford, and am going to be a Political Science major.  I loved biology in high school, especially evolution, which I tend to frame all explanations of human behavior in (even using Jared Diamond's "The Third Chimpanzee" as a basis for part of my philosophy final last year.)  Some questions/topics I'm interested in are:

1.  The idea of nature as a pure or self-correcting force.  I have doubts to whether even a world without any humans continuously supports life.

2.  What are the long-term effects of sleep deprivation, and what is it that drives sleep cycles?  This is of personal interest to me, because I tend to find that no matter what I do during the day, I simply don't get tired before 3 or 4 AM, with the result that I've been sleeping a lot less than I'm theoretically supposed to have been since middle school.  At this point though, I feel fully refreshed after sleeping for 5 or 6 hours.

3.  What drives people to create art, and why do other people enjoy it?  Even beyond how the brain specifically reacts to art, why would we have evolved to create pleasure from an activity that would take time away from other more practical pursuits?