From Beast Books to Resurrecting Dinosaurs

Catalog description

In this honors course, we'll explore changing perspectives on life and approaches to studying life. More specifically, we'll examine, through an historical lens, humankind's quest to describe and explain and, ultimately, to expand the diversity of the living world. We begin with early attempts to classify living things for example, Aristotle and Pliny. We then see how medieval bestiaries appropriated classical ideas about nature while adding to them in the context of Christian historia. In the Enlightenment, Linnaeus's taxonomic work provided a new way of naming and systematizing organisms. On the other hand, the nascent scientific methods of Sir Francis Bacon anticipate the shift from the descriptive to the theoretical and mechanistic that accompanied Darwin's first sketch of a phylogenetic tree and the theory of evolution. We consider new theories, methods, and language in our examination of Watson and Crick and the double helix, molecular biology, and genomics. The course concludes with a glimpse at future possibilities enabled by what was studied previously in the course: genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and de-extinction. The course's original structure offers the experiential engagement of the sciences through laboratory experiments and fieldwork along with the workshop and directed discussions characteristic of the humanities seminar. The content and type of "readings" also reflect both areas and include primary and secondary sources in a variety of media. A visit to a natural history museum and/or zoo provides important physical contexts where students learn about type specimens, live specimens, and how scientists today use collections. They will assemble and curate their own zoological collection, juxtaposing various approaches to describing and classifying animals. The integration of the humanities and the sciences into a single course, along with the incorporation of significant experiential work, helps students gain a broad and deep understanding of and appreciation for each of these intellectual disciplines and for life itself.