Response to presentation in class...

I think the idea of people, alone or in small groups, doing a creative presentation this final week was a great idea.  We've all had such different, interpretive responses to what we've gone over in class (it's a topic that people have very passionate and disparate responses to), so it's interesting to see how people have responded with their presentations. 

For mine, I've been thinking a great deal about how evolutionary theory is so applicable to things outside the realm of biology.  I think we've gone over that pretty thoroughly in class, reading philosophers like Dennett, who use natural selection and Darwinian thought to frame their perspective and then use that to generate new insights in different fields of study, or novels like Camus's "The Plague" that absorbs the biology and then puts it a creative spin on it.  I decided to talk about how cowboy hats evolve, but, honestly, I could have chosen anything.  Everything undergoes a kind of evolution, often eerily similar to a naturally selective process.  Memes, which the cowboy hat could be considered really, help people understand how this happens not just for living organisms, but for objects and ideas.