Original Blurb from 2011
Finals week is brutal. Not only are my students turning in exams and papers to be graded, this week the Biology dept. was interviewing job candidates and doing our annual performance reviews. So this is a short one, just the first section of my interview with Corbin Jones, Ph.D., an actual card-carrying evolutionary biologist. I know, a shocking departure from our first six episodes. But, although I recorded it weeks and weeks ago (so long ago that the recordings have decomposed a bit--probably due to those orange bacteria) it's actually a nice tie-in to the past two episodes on inclusive fitness.
2021 Updates
Evolutionary Economics
To this day, although game theory pervades diplomacy and economics at an abstract theoretical level, policy based on how animals actually behave is still not really a thing that happens. A new book by Armin Schulz, a philosopher at the University of Kansas, hopes to change that.
https://phys.org/news/2020-06-evolutionary-biology-solution-economic-recovery.html
I especially empathize with a quote from Schulz in the article:
The professor joked that he specializes in generalizing.
"I am not a biologist, not an economist and not a cognitive scientist. I am the one who sits in between all of these and makes connections between them," he said.
He is a person I might want to interview for this newsletter, or for a new podcast I’m contemplating. What do you all think?
Reunion Tour?
It occurs to me that I could do a ten-year reunion tour this fall. I could check in, at least in print, with my VSI interviewees to see how and what they are doing. Many of them I’m still connected with, like the estimable Dr. Jones (now a tenured professor), and others I can probably track down without too much trouble, due to our current state of surveillance capitalism.
That might be fun.
My larger goal for the fall is to turn the original blog for this series into an e-book, which will require updating or replacing all the broken links, before I dig into the possibility of re-writing it for a more traditional paperback kind of release.
REFERENCES from the show
That orange shower biofilm is supposedly an opportunistic bacterium called Serratia Marcescens, which has some interesting history and is medically relevant. They describe it as red, not orange, but in this picture it sure looks orange.
VSI Episode 7