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Evolit and beyond: more grist

Submitted by Paul Grobstein on Thu, 05/05/2011 - 3:13pm

From American West as Classroom, Art, and Metaphor (NY Times 4 May 2011)

For me art is about making metaphors, and to do that you feed on new sources of information, said Mr. Fox, who as served as a field lecturer for the Lubbock program. "In a sense that's all artists are doing, the same as scientists: What areas can we poke our noses into theat give new information and show us how to make work in a way we've never thought of?" .... These kinds of wildly interdisciplinary art-making and academic activities might be flourishing in the west because artists see it as a place where boundaries are less rigid, and they can go looking for insights from many fields of knowledge, the way hard sciences have long done.

From Findings on Dialects Casts New Light on the Origins of the Japanese people (NY Times 4 May 2011)

"The result provides support for a wider picture, controversial among linguists, that the distribution of many language families today reflects the spread of agriculture in the distant past when farming populations, carrying their languages with them, grew in numbers and expanded at the expense of hunter-gatherers. Under this theory, the Indo-European family of languages, which includes English, was spread by the first farmers who expanded into Europe from the Middle East some 8,000 years ago, largely replacing the existing population of hunter-gatherers."

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