Seething jealousy

John Wilkins has been off visiting the ghosts of Owen, Darwin, Buffon, and Saint Hilaire, while I'm sitting in Morris. Ah, if only I had an excuse (and the means!) to escape…

More like this

In which our hero discovers the joys of walking... Next on my trip, I visited David Williams, a paleobiologist at the Museum of Natural History in London. We talked at length about the nature of systematics (which is something I am increasingly less certain about) and of the history of species…
I just passed the 325-page mark in Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, which puts me in the middle of chapter 4. Chapter 1 was perhaps the most difficult, the abstracts at the end of the opening section being a bit cumbersome. Once I got into chapter 2, however, the sailing was a little…
The power of the evolution idea is that it directly affects every creature that has ever lived on this planet and ever will, for that matter. It does not apply only to mussels and marmosets, dinosaurs and date palms, or penguins and porgies; Homo sapiens is as much a product of evolution as the…
The African lungfish Protopterus, from A Text-Book of Zoology. Standing before the Linnean Society in 1839, the celebrated British anatomist Richard Owen delivered a detailed description of a strange new creature. Owen called it Lepidosiren annectans, an African relative of an eel-like animal…

PZ, in all seriousness, has UMM ever considered how much positive press and notoriety you bring to Morris? I know that it's already one of the premier state liberal arts institutions in the US, but I'd wager that folks may start traveling to Morris for the expressed reason of meeting you personally. I know that it's not as glamorous as Paris, but I think that you have personally put Morris on the map for many of us outside the Minnesota system.

Evereyone who would have never heard of UMM if it was not for Pharyngula, raise your hand. [rasies hand]

Now I know that when my kids start looking at colleges UMM is on our map. PZ teaches there, after all, so other faculty can't be that bad either.

Well right now I'm not all that far from you. If you can get to Bloomington Indiana before Saturday night, I can show you my slides...

By John Wilkins (not verified) on 26 Jul 2006 #permalink

Oh, the other faculty are much better -- they don't sink time into maintaining a blog.

A sabbatical is not on the radar for a while. As of this fall, I will have 3 kids simultaneously in college, and I'm not going to be able to afford the cut in pay for a while.

Indiana? Or Illinois? Illinois is closer.

Go to Illinois if you like (after all, I did), but I'm in Indiana. If you go to Illinois, then I will conclude that our affair is over...

By John Wilkins (not verified) on 26 Jul 2006 #permalink