Book Review

I Am Not Myself

Listening to Prozac by Peter D. Kramer

 

The Mystery Surrounding Our Layers of Skin

Wider Than the Sky

        This semester I read the book Wider Than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness by Gerald M.

Edelman, a writer who is also a Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist. This book explores the ideas of

consciousness—what it is, how it works and even whether consciousness actually exists. In the words of the

author, consciousness contains, “Many disparate elements—sensations, perceptions, images, memories

thoughts, emotions, aches, pains, vague feelings and so on. Looked at from the inside, consciousness seems

continually to change, yet at each moment it is all of piece—what I have called ‘the remembered

I have always been interested in language. When I was small, I discovered my love of etymology through vocabulary tests. I realized that I remembered words much more easily if I knew how these words were “built”, so to speak. For instance, the word “decimate” was much easier to memorize when I knew that it basically meant “to kill one in ten” in Latin. Eventually, my love for language grew; so much, that I am probably going to major in one, if not two foreign languages here at Bryn Mawr. So it was very fortunate for me when Professor Grobstein recommended that I

In Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos, Vonnegut acts as a first-person narrator who tells a story

of the evolution of people from the 20th to the 21st century. Vonnegut’s evolutionary story

mocks the human race, and more specifically the human brain and its intellectual in creating

technological machinery that is almost as useless as the brain.

 

      Skin is the body’s largest organ and is very essential for our survival; it is what protects all our other organs from antigens that are detrimental to our health. The book Skin: A Natural History by Dr. Nina Jablonski is a very informative chronicle on how our skin protects us and at the same time allows the world to see one’s state of health, identity, and uniqueness.

Having the opportunity to take Biology 103 this semester has allowed me to take on a whole new perspective on Biology, and life, in general. I found that in my traditional biology class in high school, we were simply taught certain things about life but not taught to think about why these things have come to be. In the beginning of this course, we tackled with the question of evolution. We knew that evolution was a good story to explain the diversity of life on Earth but had to figure out if it explained the ‘clumpy’ organization of life. Evolution is, in fact, an

I think the element of Biology 103 that I enjoyed most was its ability to answer all my ‘big questions.’ Before the course, I did not understand molecular evolution, the purpose of the scientific method, or how chemistry was connected to biology, and I left feeling pretty confident in my comprehension of these things. Because science is a loopy storytelling process, though, I was continually reassessing my ideas of what these processes meant, in particular, evolution. While our society’s great debate on evolution often hinges on the idea that evolution denies the ‘miraculous’ associated with a divine being (like that of creationism or intelligent design), the play between genes and environment and particularly  improbable assembly certainly seemed miraculous to me.