Today the rain ceased- for the most part. I’m spending the weekend in Stony Brook on Long Island attending the annual joint meetings of the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society for Systematic Biology- or something like that.
It’s actually a lot of fun. Part of it is that I’ve gotten to meet a ton of new exciting people- some of whose names I’m familiar and some that just introduced themselves to me or vice-versa. I even got invited to a BBQ by someone I just met this afternoon where I got to converse with a bunch biologists about (mostly) how art and biology intersect and some of the amazing introgressions artists are making into culture and life science.
Plus, I have a bunch of friends here that I knew and got along with extremely well in my former life at Indiana. It’s been a challenge and a pleasure to relate the work that I’m doing now to them, and they are generally very open and encouraging. Even new folks that don’t have any knowledge of me have been great and willing to talk at length. I’ve made it my goal to pay close attention to the visual images and language that is in play here. It’s truly been facinating. Some examples of flagrant metaphors and other areas to be addressed:
- Personification of genes and their activities;
- The adaptive landscape (do populations really ‘climb’ towards higher fitness; think protestant work ethic)
- Population genetics is to Adaptive dynamics as Muhammed Ali is to Bruce Lee?
- BAD, BAD, BAD graphics and design.
On the plus side I learned about the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis <www.nescent.org>. I think there might be some great possibilities for collaboration, interdisciplinary work, and synthesis with this organization, and I’ve had promising conversations to that effect.
