Deans Message

OK so I went a little overboard on my Dean’s newsletter message this semester so here it is in full

Welcome to the Honors College newsletter. Normally the Deans message section of Newsletters you would get a little piece that tells you how wonderful we are and what great things the students are doing, and while that is certainly true, I thought given we are coming up to the Holiday Season I might take a slightly different approach to the Dean’s message. This semester I have had the privilege of working with students in several classes based on set readings and I thought it might be of interest to you to know about some things that the students were reading in the Honors Book Club and in other programs. These maybe books that you would want to read yourself or perhaps give as gifts to people, this Holiday Season.

Recently my wife and I had a group of students over to our house for the final meeting of the Honors Book Club. Each semester one of the Senior Administrators at the University selects a book, and a group of students sign up for the book club, read the book under the guidance of Professor Cookie Schultz and then meets over dinner with the person that assigned the book to discuss the book with them. This semester it was my privilege to set the book and as I mentioned students (about 15 of them) came around to our house and ate a rather wonderful dinner that my wife prepared, and at the same time discussed the book.

The book that the Honors Book Club students were reading was a biography of Charles Darwin. This next year is the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the origin of the species. This seemed like an appropriate book. The biography of Darwin (Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist by Adrian Desmond and James Moore) is one of my favorite biographies of Darwin, and I would certainly recommend it to anybody who is interested in Darwin and the development of the ideas of Natural Selection. What I like about the book is not only is it very readable but also puts Darwin and his ideas into the social and political context of the 19th century, showing that in many ways Darwin was not a revolutionary, but someone that was responding to the times in which he lived.

One of the parts of the book I find most fascinating is in the later section when the authors talk about the X club, a group of scientists who had significant political power in the 19th century England. The notion of scientists with political power seems to be a rather strange one in the 21st century in America, yet for 19th century Britain it seemed perfectly appropriate that people that actually knew something about science and technology should be controlling the way in which the country developed during the height of the industrial revolution.

With another group of students we have read the book The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson. This is a description of the late 1850’s cholera epidemic in London and the way in which John Snow developed some very early ideas about epidemiology and the mapping of disease. Snow was able to understand the source of the cholera epidemic was the Broad Street pump, even though at that time we did not have an understanding of the way in which diseases were transmitted. In fact, the vast majority of scientists of the day thought that diseases were transmitted by asthma rather that is by gases in the air and had no concept of the notion of germs and in fact germ theory did not develop for another 20 years.

The final book I would like to recommend is Your Inner Fish by Neil Shuben. This is a fascinating book written by a paleontologist that also teaches human anatomy at the University of Chicago Medical School. He is perhaps best known for his discovery, of the quite remarkable intermediate fossil (Tiktaalik), which is a fish with legs. This particular fossil is very important, in that it filled in one of the important gaps in our understanding of the development of terrestrial organisms from fish. But what is goes on to show is how through the study of comparative anatomy, our understanding of the developmental biology and the relationships between genomes we can actually understand ourselves and our own bodies. Some of the more intriguing questions about why our bodies are the way they are, are a function of evolutionary history. This book does a wonderful job of presenting a clear and very accessible window into the modern sciences of paleontology, and evolution, particularly molecular evolution.

I have to say this has been a semester in which I have enjoyed meeting with students and talking about books, seemed to me to be the essence of what education is all about. Talking about books over a great dinner, now that is the way ideally that all education should be conducted. I hope these suggestions add to your holiday list. I wish you all good Holiday and we look forward to a successful New Year when we will begin our move from Stalnaker Hall into the new residence hall.