The Life Academic
jlynch | April 27, 2009
My colleague and friend Kaye Reed has a nice remembrance of Charlie Lockwood in the current issue of Evolutionary Anthropology. I had reason to mention Charlie during my "Last Lecture" and will admit to getting a little choked-up. The article is unfortunately behind a paywall, but any good university library should have access.
jlynch | April 24, 2009
Last night I was honored to be the first of three faculty members to take part in the 14th annual Last Lecture series here at ASU. The other two talks are next week. In the interests of completeness, I'm posting the slides here, though they are even more cryptic than usual. See if you can figure out what I said :)
jlynch | April 20, 2009On Thursday I will give a "Last Lecture" at ASU. I'm one of three faculty chosen by students to deliver a talk as if it were our last ever. Here is a news story about the event and below is the portion referring to me:
Lynch tells his students that an undergraduate degree is only the beginning of a journey of possibilities, not the determinant of a person’s future path. He’ll talk about his own journey as a young Irish scientist who came to ASU to do research and discovered a love of teaching when he was asked to teach a combined science and humanities course.
“The key to success is to take…
jlynch | March 12, 2009Next week there is a big conference here at ASU - hosted in conjunction with University of Cambridge - examining the concept of "Unchallengeable Orthodoxy in Academia and Science." The general purpose of the conference is:
To critically examine the precept that American and British universities and the scientific communities in these countries are, and should be places, in which people are free to "think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable." (Quoting 1975 Statement of Yale Committee on Freedom of Expression).
Specifically, the conference will…
jlynch | February 20, 2009I gave two talks yesterday. The first was at a luncheon for ASUâs chapter of Sigma Xi. A small crowd of largely retired scientists and engineers heard me give the same talk I gave in Norman last week. Naturally, given the comparative size of the audience (400+ versus 16) the dynamic was different and Iâm not sure folks really got what I was saying.
I spent the early evening at Science Cafe over at the Arizona Science Center discussing "Evolution and Faith Revisited: Can the two be reconciled?" After presenting a brief set of talking points (which I had hoped the audience would pick up on),…
jlynch | February 14, 2009Saturday was the last full day of the OSLEP course and we had the students thinking about religious and other reactions to Darwinâs ideas; three hours on St George Jackson Mivart, Alfred Russel Wallace, Ernst Haeckel, and Charles Kingsley, followed by another three hours on American anti-evolutionism. The students really seemed to get into the material and Iâve been very impressed with what theyâve been able to accomplish since Wednesday. For those that may be interested, on Wednesday we discussed natural theology (Paley & Hume) and Darwinâs life. Thursday was devoted to discussions of…
jlynch | February 13, 2009Not a bad article in the Norman Transcript which is apparently a fairly conservative paper. It will be interesting to see what happens in the comment thread over the next few hours.
jlynch | February 12, 2009
Abbie (of ERV fame) and I after my talk at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Natural History Museum. It went well, I think. About 350 folks in the audience and the local NPR and PBS stations will apparently be offering audio and video at some stage. No questions from creationists (surprisingly) and, while the theme was the Darwinian Revolution, I got to get in a few comments regarding SB 320 and science education, and managed to plug Oklahomans for Excellence for Science Education.
Abbie tells me that she’ll blog something about the talk at some stage. We didn’t get to chat much, but will be getting…
jlynch | February 10, 2009Iâm in Oklahoma at the moment (more anon perhaps) but was dismayed, to put it mildly, to see the following announcement come from ASUâs Provost:
The funding lost in the recently revised FY09 state budget has forced Arizona State University to cap enrollment and to close applications to next yearâs freshman class on March 1, five months earlier than usual. â¦
ASU is also closing about four dozen academic programs, many on the Tempe campus, and scaling down administrative operations at its Polytechnic and West campuses, in response to state budget reductions, which have totaled $88 million or…
jlynch | February 4, 2009February is going to be a busy month for me. Sunday I leave for Oklahoma where I will be giving the lead-off public lecture for their Darwin 2009 Celebration. I will be speaking on the 12th at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the topic of “Was There A Darwinian Revolution?” Any Sooner readers should feel free to come along and introduce themselves.
While in Norman, I’ll also be teaching a four-day intensive course on Darwin for the Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program, the syllabus for which is here. While there will be some lectures, the meat and potatoes of the…
jlynch | January 28, 2009I’m quoted in a press release regarding a teacher training workshop (the “Evolution Challenges Workshop”) we’re giving at ASU to help middle and high school teachers teach evolution. Money quotes:
Studies have shown that “16 percent of high school biology teachers are essentially young earth creationists who deny human evolution, with only 28 percent accepting unguided naturalistic evolution of humans,” says John Lynch, a lecturer in ASU’s School of Life Sciences and an Honors Faculty Fellow in Barrett, the Honors College. “While this latter number is higher than the general public’s 13…
jlynch | January 28, 2009Apparently I have to take 12 9 days of unpaid furlough before May 15th. And it can’t be days I teach on, i.e. it has to be Monday or Friday. All because the Republicans in the state senate want to gut K-16 education in Arizona. Seriously, in a state that hasn’t raised state taxes in 20 years, we’re having to do this to keep education afloat. A read somewhere that a 1c sales tax on alcohol would keep the K-16 system afloat, but no that would be raising taxes.
What galls is simply this. Staff on furlough will go home and rest. Sure, they’re not being paid, but they will at least rest. Faculty…
jlynch | January 20, 2009A few days ago I highlighted the current state of the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Nigel Monaghan, the Keeper of the museum, contacted me and has kindly allowed me to repost a piece he wrote for Museum Ireland on the past and future of the museum. Enjoy!
The Natural History Museum
Dublin, past and future.
Nigel Monaghan
Keeper, Natural History Division,
National Museum of Ireland
Museum Ireland 17: 48-52
The Natural History Museum
celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2007. The building houses
collections that are even older and faces challenges on a number of
fronts. The Victorian ‘…
jlynch | January 16, 2009Arizona Republicans have proposed that education - from kindergarten through university - should be the first thing to get the chop in a proposed budget. They are looking to cut $1.5 billion from education over the next 18 months with the K-12 system being hit for nearly $1 billion of that. I agree with our Board of Regents that the proposed $500,000 cut to the universities would be “cataclysmic in the depth and breadth of devastation they will cause to our higher-education system in Arizona.” Even a short-term cut in funding will have serious implications for the competitiveness of Arizona.…
jlynch | January 14, 2009
As I’ve mentioned before, I spent a good part of my graduate years working on specimens in the collections of the Natural History Museum in Dublin. Some readers may have read of the museum through the essay “Cabinet Museums: Alive, Alive O!” in Stephen Jay Gould’s Dinosaur in a Haystack. Gould was a fan of the museum and he felt it represented the majesty of the old-style Victorian museum. This story would therefore have brought Gould much sadness. Following closure in 2007 due to the collapse of a staircase, plans to renovate the museum are now on hold and it appears the future of the…
jlynch | January 12, 2009It’s the week before teaching starts again and I’m staring at a “to do” list that somehow managed to increase in size over the winter break. That’s never good, especially when that list includes a few book reviews and a short article. I had hoped that the coming semester would be a relatively quiet one, but that looks unlikely. Teaching-wise, I have my usual seminar course and my lecture course on Origins, Evolution & Creation, so there shouldn’t be a huge amount of preparation involved there. It’s the other stuff - particularly talks and conferences - that are going to be time-consuming…
jlynch | January 1, 2009The coming year should be fairly productive. Here are what I hope to be the highlights for 2009:
Finish and submit three book reviews over the next few weeks
Finish some work for the History of Science Society's Committee on Education
Have a paper accepted by Pediatrics (more of that anon)
Teach my Origins, Evolution and Creation course for what must be the eleventh time (Spring)
Give a talk at the University of Oklahoma for their Darwin celebrations (February). This was the first of a number of invites I got to give a talk on February 12th and thus the one I accepted.
Give a four day…
jlynch | November 22, 2008
The Tyndall Correspondence Project (of which I am a participant) has now gone online. Our aim is to follow in the footsteps of the Darwin Correspondence Project and transcribe the letters of the Irish physicist, John Tyndall. The site is a little bare at the moment, but more information and resources will be forthcoming.
jlynch | November 8, 2008So I'm here in Pittsburgh for the History of Science Society annual meeting. Had a chance to catch up with Janet and Ben while meeting Michael Robinson (of Time to Eat the Dogs) for the first time. Congratulations to him for winning the HSS Forum for History of Science in America book prize for his book The Coldest Crucible. Also got to meet some readers (you know who you are!).
jlynch | November 1, 2008ASU has a number of exciting graduate programs in history, philosophy and social studies of science (with particular emphasis on the biological sciences). I am a faculty member for three of these programs (Biology & Society, Philosophy & Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology) and have worked with PhD and MA/MS students. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student who wants to study in these fields, please do not hesitate to use the contact information below or contact me with any questions you may have.
We announce new graduate programs to study science and society…