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Thus far into the semester, the class has been interesting and has challenged me to reevaluate my understanding of evolution and its utility. In some ways, I feel that the class is exactly as I expected it would be. That being said, while I had expectations about how I was going to learn in this course, I didn’t come in with expectations of what I was going to learn. While I used to question our capacity to “know,” somewhere in the course of my college career, I stopped doubting our ability to know. However, this class has reminded me of the need to be a little bit more hesitant when claiming to know things. I guess that means that the edges of my learning can’t really be defined as I’ve become more open to the endless possibilities that may or may not exist. Before this class, I tended to compartmentalize evolution into this one subset of biology. That’s not to say that I wasn’t aware of evolution’s influence on other subjects but, I never viewed it as the foundation for anything, let alone everything. Of course, after reading Dennett, that tendency has changed. At the end of the semester, I am eager to have a class dedicated to what we as former students of this course, are supposed to do with our new knowledge. We are learning some pretty radical things about various aspects of life and I feel like we have an obligation to share it and let it evolve as it passes from person to person.

Concerning the way the class works, I appreciate the slight contrast in format between Tuesday and Thursday classes. Tuesday’s whole class discussion is refreshing in that we get to come together and communicate in person with everyone participating in this semester long mental journey. Additionally, on Tuesdays we have a tour guide who is not dominating the conversation but, is providing some structure around the ideas we offer up which we can build upon if we so desire in the smaller Thursday discussions. Thursday discussions allow us to generate a dialogue with our classmates about specific issues that bother us from Tuesday’s material or the reading. There are a few minor suggestions I would have for the remaining portion of the class. Even though we go over the blog posts on Tuesdays, I still feel like I missed something vital by not being part of the other discussion group’s conversation. I know the online postings provide a great opportunity for conversation between the two discussion sections but I was wondering if on Tuesday’s section we could always have a brief summary about what each section talked about the week prior. I also think it would be beneficial if on the Thursday a week before the next webpaper is due, we could get a chance to share our potential topics with the rest of the group.