Hmmm. I feel like I probably don’t have a great deal to contribute in the way of thinky things on the stuff we talked about this week, because as a Biology major, most of what was presented wasn’t new material for me. I found the Dawkins chapter interesting, though – I haven’t read The Selfish Gene (though I’ve heard good things and keep meaning to read it), but the process he goes through in generalizing evolution reminds me a great deal of mathmatics – you can work through a few examples of a given problem type (say, a linear regression), and in doing so generate a simplified formula that applies to all cases of the problem. Dawkins’ replicators are almost equivalent to the variable in a given formula – for evolution, the process holds true no matter what the variable is.

I also apologize for my somewhat flailing attempts at explaining population genetics/drift – I’m not much of a lecturer, although if anyone wants clarification some of that, I can do my best.

If there’s anything that’s been on my mind lately, it’s brainstorming ideas for the research proposal which will lead to a MURC talk and published paper; it would be really embarrassing to miss the deadline or bullshit through the presentation. It’s what this seminar/course centers around, after all, besides our wonderful guest lectures and learning about evolution before applying it anywhere.

I hope this qualifies for our agreed weekly blog posts, as I’m terribly bad with coming up with questions about what I don’t know or would like to expand on until I actually try to do something with the information I have and come across a dead end.

I can, however, come up with questions that can’t really be answered with any precision such as why are there Vampire bats, mockingbirds and finches? What other species shares this trait/niche? (Greg, that’s your fault.)

Anyway.

My primary area of interest concerns the evolution of imagination and fiction, from a biological-psychological perspective, I suppose. It’s a fairly broad topic, and I’m at a loss of how to go about it. I’ve been trying to get my hands on Brian Boyd’s “On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction,” but someone’s taken it out of the library, which has a new layout I can’t seem to navigate (Can someone tell me how to CWL login to that page? I can’t find the link!), and it isn’t available in any Chapters store (though I think it can be ordered online, which would take money and time). If anyone has articles to suggest, you can throw them at me.

Other interests concern the evolution of meditative practices, or the evolutionary biology-psychology of it, and the evolution of sex, but I’ll wait until Rosie Redfield’s talk to think about that. I’m also interested in the evolution of religious institutions as they “adapt” to new peoples and places. Or perhaps I’m not so much interested in religious institutions as I am in the universal cognitive mental modules that all relgious ideas share in common (are there some? I’m not talking about belief as much as how it is embodied in practice). What is the most stable type of practice among the most “successful” major relgions of today, and why? There seems to be a common need for relgious schooling for youth, prayer/chanting/singing that generates merit of some kind, confession of some kind, and being able to transfer merit to others, especially in service to the dead in afterlife/reinarnation, but also to the poor and needy.

What is everyone else interested in examining?