Michael Garfield's Love Without End Tour Newsletter: Evolutionary Biology Symposium At Entheon 2009

12 October 2009

Evolutionary Biology Symposium At Entheon 2009

> Writing
Over the years, I've cultivated an identity as kind of a trickster-academic, lurking on the fringes of half a dozen disciplines and diligently synthesizing them in ways that wouldn't be options for me if I'd stayed in the tenure-track system. And it's starting to pay off. So I started a new page, evolution.bandcamp.com, for audio downloads of the various lectures, interviews, and discussions in which I've participated.

First item on the menu is an amazing discussion about evolutionary biology I had with three other, somewhat less rebellious biologists at Burning Man's Entheon Village this year – a freewheeling symposium that veered from one topic to the next (including the emergence of order from chaos, whether evolutionary theory can actually improve society, when going backward is actually going forward, and – somehow – the ethical demands that beauty makes on a person) with delightful caprice and strangely rigorous whimsy. One of the attendees came back the next day and told me that sitting in on it had been like "going to Awesome College." Here it is, folks – my first swing at being a professional public presenter of mind-blowing ideas, with help from fellow cool geeks Cory Bishop, Jason Hodin, and Ruben Valas:


If you like it, please share it with your friends! (Bandcamp has made it very easy to post worthy audio to Facebook, Twitter, and several others via a menu right next to the download button.) This talk really confirmed for me the value of conversations like this for the greater social good, as inspirational learning that reminds us of the incredibly awesome vastness in which we live and of which we are made...