A Bizarre Semester

Damn...well I can be forgiven in my first week back at university. Hopefully these large gaps in my blog won't become the norm.

This semester is going to be very interesting class-wise; I'm actually rather excited about it, and expect that it will be a great way for me end my time at Penn. I am finally taking a class that explores modern literary criticism, a subject in which I have found myself increasingly frustrated by want of a theoretical basis. The catch: this class is a modern feminist class (not exactly the field in which I have the greatest interest - however I am told that it's a burgeoning forum of intellectual activity today). Oh, and it's in French. And it's entirely about Marie Antoinette (yes, that cult figure of history around whom so many myths pervade). In fact the professor wants to dispel the many falsifications history has attached to her personality (such injustices the result of, in her words, gender exploitation). As the only guy in there, it should be an interesting hour of debate.

The other course greatly piquing my interest because of its stark contrast with the business courses I am usually enrolled in is "Human Evolutionary Biology" - this is going to be awesome. I have always felt that to understand man, and therefore mankind, demands a mutlidisciplinary approach in which truth is corralled into narrower spaces of ambiguity by counter-directional vectors of intellectual probing and exploration. One of these undoubtedly has to be an understanding of man's animal origin, the source of our primal instincts and emotional quotient.

Interestingly, I have already started to question the validity of evolution. There is a lot of proof for different aspects to Darwin's theory (namely in six different areas: Comparative Anatomy, Embryology, Molecular Biology, Biogeography, Experimental Simulation and Paleontology) but never has the thepry of evolution been wholly provable, or at all demonstrable. I've been trying to find examples of "speciation" that exemplify the actual evolution of different species of animal as opposed to the typical text book examples of natural selection at work (yes, the air got dirty and there were more black moths than white moths, but never at any point did two different species evolve from what was known to be the same animal). No success, and the professor was also clueless.