While discussing gaming, I was interested in the difference between virtual reality and “meatspace.” Meatspace refers to the publicly shared physical reality of our society—it’s where most people carry out their daily lives. A lot of avid gamers seem to give up this reality, at least to some extent. But no matter how invested a person becomes in a virtual life, they can never fully escape the fact that they are still a part of the collective meatspace, and exist in this reality, too.

 Madness, I know. We've been thinking of evolution in so many other, more abstracted contexts, that I, at least, had kind of forgotten about biology. I've been watching nature documentaries this week, though, and aside from the narrator's worrying fascination with snakes, they've been pretty good. But the buzzwords that we spent many weeks debunking - progress, advancement, purpose - have been appearing in these documentaries every few minutes. It's interesting; the understanding of evolution that I now have (and take for granted) is completely absent from these movies.

As we have discussed over the course of the semester, the line between science and literature is now blurred.  Or at least is partially blurred.  As we spoke in our closing classes about our final reflections and what we had learned over the course of the semester I thought a lot about all of those lines separating the 2 disciplines.  I finally came to the conclusion that some of the lines are blurred, but there are still some very concrete borders.  I think in the broader arena, the purpose of this class isn't necessarily what I've learned specifically about evolution, but rather the importance of thinking in different ways.

 For our final presentation to share with the class what we learned from this class hope, elly, skindeep, hannahgisele and I had the class head outside and set up in a line, what would become a spectrum. We each formulated a statement from each of our 5 texts (beginning with Darwin and ending with Adaptation) and read them to our classmates one at a time, asking them for each question to orient themselves on our imaginary between "agree" and one end and "disagree" at the other. We then asked them to talk amongst themselves about why they chose the place on the spectrum that they did, and invited them to move if they changed their minds after the discussion.

 In preparing to finish up my portfolio for this class I was looking back through some of my most recent notes and noticed, amongst my  notes about "vacilando" a small bullet point. Paul told us that "uncertainty is neutral" and that it favors no one. I learned in this class that the answer to all of Paul's questions is "randomness," so applying that here it, an outcome as dictated by the laws of randomness is just as likely to turn out favorable as unfavorable. While we as humans have no say in which outcome it is, if you believe in either agency or fate, there is only one way out of the two that it can turn out. This reminded me of a strip from Calvin & Hobbes that I can remember reading as a child and totally agreeing with.

Avery Larson

Final Performance Write-Up