Sunday at noon. I’ve got a vagueish sort of plan.
Hey! I was going to do a punctuated equilibrium video, but I got hung up on spiders this week. I’ll still wrap one up on PE next week, but in the meantime, I thought I’d talk a bit about Stephen Jay Gould, and then segue into whatever you all want to chat about.
You can either leave comments in the live chat, or if you’ve got something you desperately want to share in person (or you just really like Gould, too), contact me and maybe I’ll send you the magic link to join me on the video.
Or just watch and send me hatemail. That’s a valid choice, as is not watching at all.
Sounds interesting. I’ll turn up he volume to hear you over the crunching of my lunch salad.
Should be good. Back in the stone age I subscribed to Natural History specifically to read Gould’s “This View Of Life” column. It was always fascinating, and challenging to this engineer (well, technician in those days) with limited knowledge of the goopy biosciences.
After SJG ended the column, the replacements included an astronomy-focused column by a then little-known fellow named Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I was quite disappointed — Tyson’s writing was nowhere near as good as Gould’s. But then, very few writers could have filled Gould’s shoes.
PZ, is your next hangout going to be with Tim O’Neill? I’ve been reading his site over the last week or so. Pretty interesting. He seems to have a feud going with your old pal Richard Carrier…
I’m gobsmacked that your high school didn’t teach evolution. I went to a Catholic H.S. where the biology course was taught by a Marianist brother who explained Darwinist evolution. Two key takeaways (after many years): 1) He was obviously proud that a fellow member of a Catholic religious order (Mendel) contributed to evolutionary theory. 2) He also explained how traits acquired after birth were not (generally) passed on genetically.