Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Reply to comment

Valentina's picture

thoughts on this week

Sorry for the late-ish post!

I really liked this week's discussion. I loved talking about biological evolution because it felt like a biology class, which, as we know, I much prefer to "the philosophical crap" (to quote myself...). Though I know I need to be more open to the "crap", I was not completely closed off this week when we talked about the difference between a narrative and non-narrative story. Though I won't go so far as to say the non-narrative story with the "great chain of being" had any validity whatsoever in comparison to the narrative story presented by Darwin, Lyell, and Malthus- I will admit that I can appreciate the attempt to explain the unknown from a point of view that had some logic behind it. While I was totally turned off by the creation stories because I found them to be b.s., I thought the "Great Chain of Being" idea was interesting despite its lack of time and history.

By far the most interesting thing to think about was the idea that humans are still changing, and, as far as we can tell, will never stop evolving (until we all die in 2012, at least). What will we become??? I wish I would be alive to find out because I want to know!!! What is going to be the next mutation to propagate amongst humans? Perhaps a third eye or eleventh finger…? It’s actually pretty upsetting to think of the fact that we are “yesterday’s news”. Just like we investigate the way the homo genus use to be, we will be investigated. In a couple thousand years, our descendants may be saying “Wow! Can you believe people in the year 2010 had to waste 8 hours (or much, much less if you’re a Bryn Mawr student) of every day sleeping?! What a waste!” I feel so…un-evolved. To be honest, I’ve never been upset by the prospect of dying until now. I guess that’s part of being in the “information age”- with facebook and twitter and what not, we’ve become addicted to receiving and publishing information. Dying would really put a damper on receiving new information… including finding out what's in our future. Bleh. I guess as long as we didn’t just miss out on the “immortality” mutation, I guess I can live with this.  

Reply

To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
4 + 3 =
Solve this simple math problem and enter the result. E.g. for 1+3, enter 4.