Tuesday, July 3, 2012

BioSci symposium notes


Found while cleaning my home office, a sheet of paper with the following:

BioSci Student Symposium notes:

(1) Does the reference to authority authenticate your work in a way that a good and conceptually strong idea doesn’t? (I think maybe so. ??Suggest a first slide with the idea/ref to authority and your test of authority’s assertion?) (What does this observation tell us about the structure of our science? Whatever the answer, it is unflattering, but ultimately perhaps something we need to take into account.)

(2) Is parasitism too complex for the average biologist to understand? For the average scientist? I think we should always be aware of this possibility and account for it in our presentations.

(3) In this same vein, are simple problems expressed within paradigmatic frameworks most easily understood by scientists?