Throw it and see what sticks.

When I was in high school, my english teacher illustrated the relationship between the brain and information using chicken wire and oatmeal. He threw the oatmeal at the chicken wire. Ta-daa! Knowledge. It's a surprisingly effective analogy.

In my preparation for teaching the summer course, I found myself motivated to learn more about sociobiology, the explanation of ethics from an evolutionary perspective. I think it is interesting stuff, and it provides an alternative explanation for the source of ethics - something I believe needs to be addressed in the ethics class. Anyway, it turns out that my initial reading (Michael Ruse's article, "Evolutionary Ethics" in The Blackwell Guide to Ethics) spurred more reading and research along these lines. I read David Quammen's The Reluctant Mr. Darwin - in the Norton Great Discoveries series - which presents the development of the concept of Natural Selection, both from an academic perspective and from the point of view of Darwin's personal life. I'm reading right now Bill Bryson's A Short History of Everything, which chronicles the development of major discoveries in the history and philosophy of science (this will also help me fill in some holes in my Jeopardy! preparation). Up next is E.O. Wilson's Concilience - the substantial tome on sociobiology.

The weird thing is that even when reading all of this, it still doesn't satisfy me as an adequate explanation for the things before me. Today I'm reading Bill Bryson on the porch, sitting with my husband, the Atlantic Ocean stretched out before me with hordes of people frolicking on it, and doggone it, it doesn't jive that this is all a happy accident. This piece of information actually made me just a little happy - recently I've been feeling a little (a lot?) unmoored. A little bit like I'm without convictions. This isn't true, of course, because I do have convictions ... it just happens that some of them have sunk to the lower layers in the last year.

This thinking and engaging reading incited a new ongoing project (I know, as if I need another) - I'd like uncover some of these sunken ideas from an opposite viewpoint and see what I can build. In short, throw it at the chicken wire and see what sticks. More to come.