The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: EvoLit

If I were still putting together lecture notes to share with y'all, I'd be sure to mention a New Yorker article called "The Possibilian," about a neuroscientist named David Eagleman who says that "Science had taught him to be skeptical of cosmic certainties.... From the ..'alien computational material' [that is brain tissue] to the mystery of dark matter, we know too little about our own minds and the universe around us to insist on strict atheism.... 'And we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.' Why not revel in the alternatives?....'Part of the scientific temperament is this tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time.....

 A few weekends ago University of Maryland Medical Center held their annual conference (started in 1995) during which doctors meet and attempt to identify  the mysterious illness(es) that killed Darwin.  I found it somewhat fitting that while during Darwin's time no diagnosis could be made, as medicine has continued to evolve the same questions and illnesses are recycled in order to aid in the development and evolution of the field itself.  I like the idea that even events of the past, that a are long gone, and pose no significant selective pressure to a species continue to be used as lessons for the future.  I find it most fitting that Darwin's death is used as the mystery case.

When thinking about what kind of a project I wanted to do for the end of the semester, I tried to think about the different ways our class had learned and been taught to learn over the course of the term. For me, the two most important things I came to understand where the way I presented myself in arguments, and the ways I learned to hear more openly, and allow my views to shift. Consequently, my group decided to create a human barometer in which our classmates would line up on a spectrum ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’ as they responded to prompts inspired by the works we studied in class. In keeping with the ‘evolution’ centric topic, we ordered our prompts in the same order as we read/watched them.

 About two weeks before we gave our final presentation our group sat down over lunch and we discussed ways that we could represent what we leaned this semester.  All of us agreed that this class helped each of us to see the thin or overlapping boundary between science and literature.  Our original intent was to go through our notebook and select a few key terms that we had repeatedly discussed throughout the semester.  Thinking back to our lower school days (maybe for some of us middle school...or college) we decided to organize these terms into a venn diagram with the two main circles being science and biology.  We expected that most of the terms would correspond to either biology or literature, but that some terms would find a home in the middle circle.

Throughout the course of the semester we discussed many things that questioned many themes that seemed to have been established.  What is foundational and what isn’t foundational?  This was a big picture issue that we dealt with throughout the semester.  The development of stories and how they keep on changing. 

It all seemed so much that we did not know where to begin with this project.  Therefore, we decided to look at everything we had touched upon and use the tools we had gathered from it to create our own story.  We did a personal exploration as to what we had learned and obtained from this course.  I, personally, obtained fresh eyes.  Now I try to look at everything from every possible angle in order to understand it. 

This is why we decided to create our own Story of Evolution.  We began with the primary organisms that are now extinct and sort of spread out from there.  Throughout the course of the evolutionary story there are parallels.  There are two sides of the story: what actually happened and an alternative story.

the photos of our final performances!

 Group Presentation

For our presentation my group created a barometer – we made a spectrum outside on the green, with one person standing on one end as ‘agree’ and another on the other end as ‘disagree’, with plenty of room in between. (If anyone has taken any education classes at Bryn Mawr they might be familiar with this exercise). Each of us then proceeded to read out a statement from one section of the class – with the five of us, we were each able to pick one topic. The questions were:

Devanshi: Randomness is an awful thing to teach high school kids. (Darwin)

Hannah: Memes set us aside from the rest of the animal kingdom. (Dennett)

Hope: There are some areas of life that science should not address. (Generosity)

For my Final "Performance" I opted instead to create rather than to perform. Darwin, the large paper mache pigeon that you all saw in class, is the final product. My presentation was very short, but that is because I really wanted to just present the fruit of my labor and make sure the bigger groups had enough time to perform their presentations. He took 5 days in all to make. First, I applied strips of newspaper dipped in a flour/water mixture to the exterior of two inflated balloons(one for the head and one for the body). I let that dry for 24 hours before attaching the two with newspaper, tape, and superglue. Then I started painting his head and neck. After letting the paint dry, I painted his eyes and made a beak out of newspaper and superglued it to his face.

For our final performance, we wanted to interactively demonstrate evolution in a nutshell (or coffee bean, as the case may be) and incorporate its principles into the evolution of literature and memes.  

We put the names of books, movies, songs and popular quotes onto a variety of utensils: forks, spoons and knives. We then gave each person a cup, one of the utensils and 30-seconds to compete with each other to get the most coffee beans into their cup.