Interdisciplinary Applications of Evolutionary Theory

– I agree that there has been a bit too much administrative stuff, partly due to it being a first run of this kind of course, and partly as a result of overcompensation for my tendency to kind of dominate things too much. We were fed multitudes of scary stories during the training sessions about seminars rebelling against their coordinators and such (apparently true stories!), so we decided to take it easy with the rigidity of structure/planning. Of course, part of the price to pay for flexibility is time being spent on organising the course itself.

– The introductions/transitions could definitely have been better planned; was hard to see how to make them smooth during the first run.

– Coordinating becomes quite difficult towards the middle-to-end of term as other courses pile up, as does participating, of course. To soothe this, perhaps more assignments/parts of assignments and course planning done towards the beginning could help, as well as perhaps reducing the blog entries to once every two weeks, with or without topic questions. Unfortunately, one kind of has to get through the heavily-structured and condensed biology part of the course in the beginning, but prefacing it with a topical overview (as in the point above) could help. It seems like most discussion courses tend to get more flexible, and thus more effort-intensive, towards the end of term, simultaneously…

– As for the blog entries, it was difficult to think of stuff for me too, even though I blog science stuff publicly on a regular basis. Something about this being “informal-yet-formal” makes it still difficult to write stuff. Towards the end of term though, times get busy and probably would make sense to have the posts due less often than in the beginning.

Hm. The thing that pops into my mind first is that we spent a lot of time dealing with administrivia – I know with the fact that this is essentially a brand-new class, and student-directed at that means a lot of it is necessary, but I feel like it takes up more time than it needs to, and it eats into time for discussions and for presentations and guest speakers, all of which I’ve been really enjoying. I’m kind of on the fence about the blog posts – I do feel like they have potential to add a lot, but for some reason I have problems remembering to actually check and post and comment. I’ve been having this problem with the discussion boards for the online classes I’m taking, so…I don’t really know, here.

MURC went…better than anticipated, at least for me. A lot of that is my crippling fear of public speaking – the fact that everything went relatively smoothly was very nice. Plus, I can’t say no to free food. Still, I agree with what others have said – the timing problem really screwed us up. And I think the timing of MURC within the year was bad for the course, too – if this had been a fall course, presenting would be fine, but it’s so early in second term, that I feel like I at least was still trying to figure out where I wanted to go with things when oh, hey, time to throw together a presentation, which sort of detracted on working on the paper and bigger-picture stuff.

I feel like I could have done a better job, personally, at MURC, but overall as a group I feel we did well. Next time, I think the entire research project should be brought up right away – we barely had any time to work on it before MURC happened. More time would have been good, and also maybe some prepared discussion questions for the audience at the end (well, and a longer discussion time at the end. I think people were a little surprised about it – since all the rest of the panels were basically mini-lectures and we were trying to get a discussion started!)

A general restatement of thoughts: A more thorough introduction tying all the subjects together and briefly explaining them at the beginning would be good. With the short presentations, I agree that the ones we’ve had so far have been scattered. Maybe it would be good to link them broadly to the current topic (as we’re doing from now on). So, one presentation for topics in biology, one for linguistics, and one for culture.

I can’t say I’ve really liked the blog posts. I always forget about them until right before they’re due, and stare blankly at the screen for a while before coming up with something I feel no one reads. Some guiding question might be good (though maybe they should be more suggestions than requirements). It might also be good to group every week’s posts into one thread, I’m thinking that might facilitate discussion more.

Also agreeing with preparing questions to asks presenters before they come in – and maybe having a bit more of an introduction as to who they are and why they’re coming in before they do. I dunno, I feel like this Thurday went really well, and I’m trying to figure what contributed to that. 🙂

To reiterate what was said on Tuesday:

CONS (to be fixed in hypothetical future run course)

1. Cover evolutionary biology, linguistics and culture at the beginning of class rather than make a sudden switch of topics halfway through the term

2. Begin broad so everyone has the same outline in their head, having a sense of purpose, with specifics explained later so the gaps can be filled while we WANT to know why.

3. First point allow us to come up with research topics, then second point helps with the research.

4. More direction to blog posts. Have a question to answer or bullet points to meet, such as “Informal midterm course eval — what was good, what could have been better, suggests for a [hypothetical] future run of this course, etc.”

5. Come up with questions for our speakers as a class beforehand.

PROS (what works now)

1. Cover biology first, then linguistics, then culture.

2. Guest lectures are awesome.

3. MURC is awesome, especially for Arts students. (I’d much rather be presenting on this kind of material than go up and explain my webcomic, really, even though Sonja said that was okay when we talked to her first year)

4. Class size. I can’t see this working for a larger class, especially given our coordinators are not specialists in all three disciplines.

5. Blog posts. I think these are an asset to the course, especially for the links Greg and others post to potentially help with our research topics and areas of interest. It’s also handy to have a place to share comments, such as on our MURC proposals.

Some researchers have proposed that a culture is made up of smaller units called memes, akin to how an organism is composed of genes. Because researchers have not yet agreed on a working definition of what a meme is, the definition I will be using is: memes are patterns in neural networks, akin to how genes are patterns in DNA. Other definitions have included vague references to information and ideas stored in brains, which must replicate, but these definitions do not point to any observable physical matter that can be tested empirically and assume if a meme exists, it must replicate in a similar manner to genes.

Before genetics, researchers thought hereditary traits were blended in offspring through some vague, overarching mechanism—like culture is thought of at present. Researchers define a sequence of DNA as a gene when they knock it out and observe an effect in its absence. While it would be more difficult to knock out a meme from someone’s brain, I argue using literary review that we can postulate the process of memetic replication by explaining how memes blend (recombine) for imaginative and creative purposes within one person’s head, and mutate between heads during communication errors—which is the opposite of how genes recombine (between organisms) and mutate (within an organism).

The explanatory power of memes lies beyond reduction; memetics can inform cultural anthropology by the provision of a proximate causation in addition to the ultimate cultural explanation by which anthropologists are already familiar.

NOTE: I didn’t post my proposal earlier because I had already submitted it. I was under the impression the posts were to be edited, and then subsequently forgot to post this anyway until now.

I think all in all it went exceptionally well.

Thanks very much to Greg and Santokh (we enjoyed the chocolate, by the way) and to Sonja and everyone at MURC (for the free food, etc.)!

I’ve been to MURC twice before, courtesy of Yana, and while I thought the improv show was much more hilarious last year, here are my thoughts pertaining to our panel:

Our talks were all well timed in such a manner that we had discussion time left in the panel. Lsi, I think you could’ve used more practice to pinpoint timing, but I enjoyed your presentation nonetheless. It’s too bad MURC happened so soon right after the break, and of course, we procrastinated. *coughtimemanagementcough*

Unfortunately, there were some questions that I wish were asked, but were not, especially given the nature of the material. Topics like mine could have been elaborated so much more, and everyone else’s too. Not everyone got a chance to answer questions. I noticed that people I invited either came in early for the first part and left, or came in late and stayed, thus not seeing all of the talks. If we had more time, or broke up the presentations into two panels, that might have worked better. The people who left may have had questions for the earlier presenters.

But given we were pressed for 8 minute talks, we did the best we could. It was exactly what I signed up for, to actually get up and present, even if for a short time, to an audience (which looked full by the way!). I know that presentation skills are very important, to sell an idea whether it is a science project, a business model, a teaching method, a story, a product or whatever it may be.

I gained a sense of just how much information I can present in 8 minutes, and learned how to cut down a talk. I also learned how to speak without reading off slides, making sure to use visuals as a guide to make concrete abstrat concepts and direct the flow of the talk, especially since you need more words to describe what can just be shown. I also am reminded that Mircosoft Word is crap, because when I copied my proposal into the submission box, the apostrophes got screwed up. NOTE TO SELF: Copy to Notepad first.