Field Museum Final Project

Our final project is a trip to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.   We chose the Field Museum because museums of natural history are interestingly suspect as representations of science.  Rather, they present interesting sciencefictions – representations that need to be analyzed for their political meaning.

My dream article would be one which would analyze various representations of evolution in natural history museusms across the United States.  However, that doesn’t seem to exist.  So I decided to identify a broader set of materials about the Field Museum more specifically. 

Kadanoff, Leo P. “Sue’s Several Heads: The Evolution of the Natural History Museum”

This article, written in an accessible style, describes the experience of a scientist trying to understand how the natural history museum has come, in the 21st century, to present an uncertain mix of art, entertainment and science.  More importantly, it represents very little up to date science.  He offers a reading of the “Life Through Time Exhibit” that I would like students to see.

His article suggests that, by the 1900-1920s, the museum ceases to function “scientifically” and becomes a mode of entertainment.  This is exactly the time of “science fiction” – literature about science, and what Marianne Sommer calls, “sciencefiction” – visual reconstructions of prehistory or natural history.

Sommer, Marianne. “The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth Century America”.

Marianne Sommer argues in this article that the president of the American Museum of Natural History is a “shaper of collective fantasies of human evolution”.  Already, she argues that the museum is less about science, and rather, about creating fantasies that draw on both science and fiction.   As we have been reading “science fiction” about evolution, the museum also occupies the space “between science and fiction” – so we can use the same tools to read it.  Of course, what makes this so suspect, politically, is that museums “seem to be” about education in a way that literature does not – although we often expect the science of science fiction to work – and are annoyed when it does not.

The task for our students will be to read the representation of evolution in the Field Museum.  There is one exhibit specifically about evolution, and a featured exhibit on mastadons and the ice age.  What is the story it is telling?  How good is the science, or, does it matter?  How objective are museums when describing the origin of life on earth?  We can use this project to refer back to the scene in Wells’ The Time Machine in which The Time Traveller runs through the museum looking for useful knowledge and finds none.   

Dr. Wentzell, how does this sit with you as a project?

Time Machine: Ronald Mallett

How fiction influences science.  Ronald Mallett read a comic book in his childhood based on H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine.  His childhood goal – to create a Time Machine – has been partly realised in his work as a theoretical physicist.

Ronald Mallett

 

This man’s story is so incredible.  You can listen to his story on This American Life or watch a webcast of him at the Walker Art Center from earlier this year.  I was heartbroken that I couldn’t go see him speak.

Chimp raised as human: Lucy

 

Listen to podcast about Lucy, the chimp raised as human.

Mammoths and Mastodons: Exhibit at Field Museum

As luck would have it, our field trip to the Field Museum will include this new exhibit:

Cool – Mammoths!

New Lungfish Fossil

Evolution in the news today:

“Lack of Oxygen Forced Fishes’ 1st Breath”

New Fossil Found!

Creation (Amiel, 2009)

A colleague suggested taking our students on a field trip to see “Creation”.  I haven’t found any local listings for it, although the distribution at the moment seems to be in larger cities, at least for the first month.

Review from Huffington Post

Review from The Hour (Canada)

Wikipedia entry

Official “Creation” website

Reflections on Week 3

This week’s reading, Chapter 3, focused on the evidence for evolution because of similarities and differences between organisms.

Here are the key ideas that will be significant for me.

1) The fundamental similarities between organisms are so similar, that humans cannot help but feel kinship between themselves and all other species.  However, this runs against many narratives, in which humans are essentially different, and made to dominate all other creatures.

2) Speciation.  I’m interested in how species become so separate from others that they become incapable of interbreeding with other species.  Is this always a gradual process?  Were there exceptions? 

In Darwin’s Radio, an endogenous retrovirus begins to rapidly evolve humans in the womb.  A generation gives birth to a completely different human species.

Here’s the science of how this is supposed to work.

In Quest for Fire, homo sapiens and homo neanderthalis are shown interbreeding.

In Robert J. Sawyer’s The Neanderthal Parallax, in a parallel Earth, homo neanderthalis has become the dominant species. 

3) Heredity

In Oryx and Crake, the bioterrorist, Crake, has decided that the human species has evolved with far too many imperfections, not the least has been the complicated sexual reproductive process and the cultural byproducts.  His solution is terrifying.

4) Mutations:  Because we are analog, not digital, errors in copying happen.   But this imperfect copying results in mutations, and some of these mutations could be advantageous. 

X-men - Mutated humans are born with abilities that make them frightening to the non-mutated population.   Two mutants, one who has decided mutants represent a superior evolutionary leap, wishes to leave humans behind, while the other wishes to continue to help and assist humans.  Meanwhile, the human population fears mutants, and wishes them to be placed in camps separate from the rest of the population.

the evolution of the virus through mutation is a big part of Darwin’s Radio.

Movie of the Week: Quest for Fire (1981)

This film is based on a 1911 novel, La Guerre de Feu  by J.-H. Rosney aine.  It does makes quite a lot of imaginative leaps in terms of evolutionary development and the co-existence of different human-ish species.

It is the Ice Age, and there are several groups, homo erectus and homo neanderthalis.  After an attack on the homo neanderthalis tribe, where they lose their fire, this group go on a quest to find fire (something that they do not know how to make.  They meet a woman from a homo sapiens sapiens group.  From this woman, one of the men in the group learns comedy and laughter, love and companionship, and, how to make fire. 

 This film then, imagines “what if” three early human groups could have existed at the same time, and shared culture and genetic material.   Given recent discoveries about the possibility of interbreeding between homo neanderthalis and homo sapiens sapiens, it may be worth a look.

Reflections on Week 2

Dr. Wentzell made some general comments that I agree with.  One of the dangers of thinking of the history of an object is that it begins to normalize; that is, the leaps of imagination that one needs to do to really see the relationship between environmental pressures and also the directional shifts away from the potential counterfactuals means that one has to see evolution as a process with far less predictability than we might be encouraged to see.   These relationships won’t always be the most obvious.  Like Dr. Wentzell, I found the stronger presentations the ones who really stretched to identify unusual environmental pressures, beyond the obvious narrative.

Dr. Wentzell’s example, of how Darwin’s theory of evolution became “dominant” as a result of the environmental pressure of classism is excellent.  How is it that we can only now see that there was a real relationship between these two thinkers, while the official historical narrative, reproduced in textbooks, etc., made Darwin’s theory dominant? 

Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, Chapters 1-2

Because my primary responsibility in this course is to teach the cultural representation of evolution in literature, philosphy, religion and art, I am going to begin by building on the idea presented in the first chapter of our textbook.

The relentless application of the scientific method of inference fromexperiment and observation, without reference to religious or governmental authority, has completely transformed our view of our origins and relation to the universe, in less than 500 years. In addition to the intrinsic fascination of the view of the world opened up by science, this has had an enormous impact on philosophy and religion. The findings of science imply that human beings are the product of impersonal forces, and that the habitable world forms a minute part of a universe of immense size and duration. Whatever the religious or philosophical beliefs of individual scientists, the whole programme of scientific research is founded on the assumption that the universe can be understood on such a basis. (1-2)

There has been an odd tendency to “blame” the rise of scientific rationality for “undermining of traditional belief systems” (2).  And yet, this seems such a strange idea, when in fact, it has not been the fault of scientific rationality that has been the problem.   Here, a book I have been reading by George Levine, Darwin Loves You has helped me.  I want to understand why the rise of scientific rationality resulted, rather than in a greater wisdom about the workings of the world, a “very real sense of spirituality vacuuity” (xii).   This paradigm shift, I think, demanded a major rethinking of the terms, and what happened, rather, was a more reactionary response.  “The wise application of scientific  understanding of the world in which we live is the only hope for the future of mankind.”  That our book begins with an epigraph by Thomas Hardy is apt.  Here is another quotation from Hardy:

Few people seem to perceive fully as yet that the most far-reaching consequene of the establishment of the common origin of all species is ethical; that it logically involved a re-adjustment of altruistic morals by enlarging as a necessity of rightness the application of what has been called “The Golden Rule” beyond the area of mere mankind to that of the whole animal kingdom. (Used as an epigraph to Darwin Loves You.)

What then, has the idea of evolution changed?  It has changed the place of the human.  It has reconnected the human to other forms of life on the planet.  It has redefined the notion of who is considered our “kin”.  It has offered the possibility of humility by decentering our perspective.  

I am going to start with the claim that the place for “hope” is in speculative fiction, that is “utopic” fiction.  It is here where the hope for the future is place.  Rather than clinging to old dogmas and traditions, utopic fiction allows us to spin out those possibilities and alternatives for a different future.  

Reflections on Week 1

So, I am now considering what we learned as of last week.  My purpose here is to think about the implications of such ideas, to help us to look ahead to the second half of the course and also, as I will be creating the review session, I am creating a review document as I follow Dr. Wentzell’s section of the course.

First, evolution, although most people immediately think of biological evolution when they think of evolution, is first and foremost a process to describe how a thing passes through different stages or sequences, by degree, from a less complicated to a more complicated thing.  [Question:  Does the concept of staging mean that it becomes more complicated over time?]

If we are trying to understand the evolution of a thing, then we need to know the following:

1. the progenitors of a thing: The idea of a genitor is a “natural parent”.  So clearly, this word means something to do with direct ancestry.  When you identify the progenitors, you are trying to look to the past to try to figure out “who” the ancestors were.  In the literature we read, I will call these fantasies of “kinship”.  That is, the stories we tell about our “ancestors” reveal anxieties about our connections to the animal world.  (Wait – my ancestor is an APE?  That is distressing to some who consider that humans represent the “highest” biologically evolved life form.)
2. environmental pressures: This refers to the pressures imposed on the thing from outside. (Hmm.  So this means that no spontaneous change can come from inside the thing.  No free will in biology.)  That is, the thing is always responding to influences from outside. 
3. counterfactuals:  Dr. Wentzell explained that these are harder to identify, but that this is basically a mode of imagining, what would have been the case, if a particular environmental pressure had not happened, or, if the thing’s history were different.   Now, here is where I come in again.  In literature, there is a parallel genre called “alternative/alternate history”.  In French/German, the genre is called “uchronie”, which means that they take place in “no-time”.  All of the “What if” novels we are reading are extended “counterfactual” discussions.
4. imperfections:  To identify imperfections means that one looks at the thing in the present state, and then tries to identify possibilities for changes that might be necessary.  Again, I worry about the idea of “perfection” but perhaps it isn’t so worrisome as all that.  Again, this becomes the realm of speculation and imagination.  Where are we going to go? What might happen?  What changes may happen, that may result in the modification of human biology, perhaps beyond what we recognise as the human?

What amazes me, of course, is how close a connection I can find between the idea of evolution – and I do think that when we focus attention on biological evolution – and the development of the literary genre called speculative fiction.   And I am fascinated with a scientific method that asks one to “imagine” alternative possibilities.  It makes me think about science and the idea of “wonder” – the scientists who saw before them endless shifting, changing biological forms, and began to imagine the origins of life on this planet.