The Story of Evolution and the Evolution of Stories: EvoLit

 As a recap, for our final presentation my group created a Darwinian game in which players were given a utensil and timed for thirty seconds while they tried to get as many coffee beans from a communal pile into their cups. We meant to eliminate the lowest coffee bean-grossing players over more rounds, but found ourselves strapped for time and did two rounds instead. 

Here is the link to our video:
www.youtube.com/watch

 While I found all the presentations to be interesting, I was most piqued by the creative story writing and its connections to the tree of evolution. I like the idea of how I can start a story and see its development as each person contributes a piece to make the story whole. It makes me reflect on my contributions to evolution. Am I creating a story during my lifetime that gets passed on and continued by my children and their children and so on... The story created by my ancestors, are my current actions contributing to it? How am I shaping this story? Where is the origin? The end? I find myself thinking a lot the elements of a story - the various characters, plot, climax and anticlimax. How does these elements come into play when the story is infinite?

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned this before, but I was reading The New York Times online this morning and saw an ad for this movie.  The title immediately sparked my interest and after reading a few plot descriptions online, I think it relates well to our course and some of the themes we have discussed.  It stars Brad Pitt and Sean Penn and comes out on May 27th.  Here is the link to the trailer.  

In terms of evolution and all that we have learned this year. Where would one place the following concepts within the categories of science, English, or both?

My final project was a collaborative one with cr88, in which we created word clouds of the full texts of The Plague and The Origin of Species to look at 1) the differences and commonalities between scientific and literary texts, as embodied by this bizarre representational form, and 2) different forms of literary analysis outside of the ones we are used to and how they can be useful. These were the images we produced:

The Origin of Species

 One of the things this class has really made me think about is what it means to be human. That is to say, what it means to have agency as a human, and how our actions affect the world around us. We've discussed how we as human beings are slowly but surely destroying the world we live in, how we're becoming our own evolutionary forces by developing technologies, how we have agency, how we don't have agency, how it doesn't matter whether we do, how we shape the world around us and how we force our interpretations onto the world. Through these discussions, I've come to realize that I am very much a humanist. I believe strongly in our own agency, and I recognize our enormous capacity both for good and for ill.

On Thursday, we discussed how many people used to feel that they all had a role to play in the scheme of the universe, but how in more modern times, people started to feel that the individual does not play that important of a role. While I think that some of us might not have the biggest role to play, I think that we all somehow influence the lives of others. Even the smallest, and most seemingly unimportant person can affect the lives of those around them. And because much of the time the effect of that person on the life of another is indirect, as in the person being influenced does not realize it, many are therefore left to think that they have reached their current place in life completely without help or influence.