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Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
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"Why should these exacting sciences exact anything from me?"
As a little (not-so-fictional?) evidence for Paul's musings that we're still in a mode in which some scientists and some humanists seriously mistrust one another, here's a judgment that comes straight from the mouth of Jonas Elijah Klapper, Extreme Distinguished Professor of Faith, Literature and Values. A wacky character in Rebecca Goldstein's new novel, 365 Arguments for the Existence of God, Klapper is here explaining why he has no interest in the child math prodigy he's just encountered:
"I'm not impressed by the slide-rule mentality. I remain unimpressed with the mathematical arts in general. What are the so-called exact sciences but the failure of metaphor and metonymy?...
mathematics...is a form of torture for the imaginatively gifted, the very totalitarianism of thought, one line being made to march strictly in step behind the other, all leading inexorably to a single undeviating conclusion. A proof out of Euclid recalls to my mind nothing so much as the troops goose-stepping before the supreme Dictator. I have always delighted in my mind's refusal to follow a single line of any mathematical explantation offered to me. Why should these exacting sciences exact anything from me?....'what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if...I don't like these laws....?' Dostoevsky spurned the hegemanical logic, and I can do no less."