Follow up from class discussion 1/15

As usual, you raised many more ideas than could be covered in depth in class and threw out many references and sources. Here are links to a few of the topics we discussed today.
1) The turtle Who was Trained To Do Tricks:
Jasmine told us about this story. This title makes the story seem like an animal fable or Just-So Story, and, perhaps, it can be read as one. Watch this short new story about the human psychiatrist and the turtle trick-doer/helper and attend to the way this story is framed and narrated. Why does this man use a turtle to help children see, concretely, psychological conflicts? http://www.videosift.com/tag/turtle+does+tricks+like+a+dog

2) Fainting Goats and Breeding Humans
I can't recall who discussed fainting goats today, but you (plural) asked about why goats would be bred by humans who "fainted." The "why" of this is a wonderful Darwinian story as the genetic "defect" that causes the goats to have extreme muscle stiffness and contractions (and so fall down when excited or scared) is linked with the breed traits that make this goat desirable to humans (muscle tone, docility, size, etc). (Are fainting goats any more strange than snorting Boston Terriers?) This breed also comes with its own origin story. Here are some links:
a) this is the link to the You Tube video (a news story) about fainting goats:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9_CdNPuJg
b) This is a link to a personal faculty web page from the University of Michigan all about this person and his fainting goat friends:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jimknapp/goats.html
c) Here are 2 links to websites for breeders of fainting goats (Myotonic goats). These, and the first site in particular, are very interesting and, again, the origin story of this breed is great. (What is the difference between a breed and a species? What kind of rhetoric do breeding web sites use to provide information about a particular breed?)
http://www.myotonicgoatregistry.net/MGRbreeddescription/MGRBreeddescription.html

http://www.faintinggoat.com/

d) Evolution in the Public Schools
The first link is to a story on NPR about fairly current state School Board decisions about the teaching of evolution in public schools.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4630737
This second link is to a story in the Washington Post about the Gallop Polls that asked people in the U.S. about their beliefs in evolution.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/polls/wat/archive/wat060198.htm

e) The Origin of Species
This is the Wikipedia entry on the background, publication, and reception of Darwin's text. This may be of interest to those of you who were discussing Darwin's decisions to delay this manuscript's publication, etc. There are useful external links here too, and this will allow all of you to read all of Darwin's many works this weekend for fun!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Species

f) Finally, here is the Wikipedia entry on the 1933 Island of Lost Souls, the film from which the clips I showed today were taken. I said that this was a fairly "bad" film, and yet it's really not except for Charles Laughton's over the top acting as the crazy creepy Dr. Moreau. It's an interesting film in the way it sensationalizes certain versions of evolutionary theory, plays on racist associations between "animals" and the less than human (the "primitive"), represents scientific knowledge and experimentation, conceives of what it means to become human or to become animal (there are many scary "reversion" scenes), and shows the entangled intersections of "race," sexuality, gender, class (remember the "failed" experiments who provide manual labor to create the new experiments), colonialism in a bizarre popular fantasy. The history of the making of the film is pretty interesting (Adriana, check it out) and it's been remade numerous times. Plus, there is a make out scene between Richard Arlen, the hero and the horrified and handsome bystander to Moreau's insane practices, and a panther-human hybrid. Not to be missed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_Lost_Souls_

See you on Thursday!