After reading silent spring sections for tuesdays class and I was curious about what peoples response was to her books. After doing a little research I found out that Rachel Carson was highly criticize. “The weekly Human Events gave Silent Spring an “honorable mention” in its list of the “Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” along with just this one quote I found many more things that she ended being criticized even though they did not have the technology yet to find out those things. The book did point to problems that had not been adequately addressed, such as the effects of DDT on some wildlife. However, she did not realize that DDT helped keep Malaria down by killing the mosquitos.

She was also supported, According to a TIME magazine article in 1999, a year or two after it was out,  ”all but the most self-serving of Carson’s attackers were backing rapidly toward safer ground. In their ugly campaign to reduce a brave scientist’s protest to a matter of public relations, the chemical interests had only increased public awareness.”

I feel that Silent Springs did what Carson wanted it to do. Although Carson may have not realized how important her book would become I think that by Silent Spring being so controversial has helped bring out the issue of pesticides, making it a prominent issue that is discussed from both sides. Although, Carson did not have the scientific methods that we now use, she still spent her last days finalizing her book to bring the issue to the public eye. She utilized every discourse that should could so that her book could be read from a scientific view to be read by the everyday citizen.

As a side-note: In class we looked at some images of Darwin’s hand drawn evolutionary trees, and professor Siperstein said he’d concluded that lemurs were the original relative of humans. That information sounded familiar to me, so I tried to research if that was true. From what I can find, lemurs were the first primate to evolve, which lead to apes, monkeys, and us. It boggles my mind that Darwin was able to deduce, without genetics, that lemurs gave rise to the rest of the primates correctly, since they look more like cats than monkeys. It’s an example of the trust he had in methodical observation and empirical data, and his unwillingness to settle for the easy explanation…

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Rachel Carson’s “A Silent Spring” is a critical novel about the ubiquitous environmental practices around the 1960’s. She begins the novel by using a hypothetical setting that calls forth nostalgia for a reader who can identify with the loss of life in nature. She suggests that many settings in America have lost critical natural elements that create the atmosphere of each season. Carson is able to identify when this switch from picturesque, vivid seasons to the “shadow of death” happens. I am not able to pin point when this switch happened. Carson has been able to see the slow change and progression that humanity’s conventions have imposed upon nature. However, this means that it is only a matter of a few years until my generation can see the change taking place within nature.

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To be quite honest, there were many portions of the biosemiotics lecture that I did not understand, however, from what I could take away, it seemed to be an interesting, yet controversial field.  Biosemiotics in general is the study of signs and communicating factors that interplay between life forms. Interactions between both animals and plants have been described as the result of some form of this communication. The evolution and development of the cell is thought to have occurred in a biosemiotic fashion. Personally, the formation of a single cell can and will be forever debated as it is a topic in which variability and uncertainty reign as dominating factors. Another point that was made was the signs and communication between plants and trees of a forest and how that influences growth of the forest as a whole. Biosemiotics claims that similar amounts of carbon is stored in trees of the same forest. This is due to the fact that some form of communication, via signs or other intangible signals, between the trees allows the to remain is similar biotic stages. This is an interesting idea, however, one might argue that trees of the same area have similar life stages because they have been growing under the same environmental conditions and similar time frames. Here is a link on biosemiotics if you’re interested.

http://home.comcast.net/~sharov/biosem/geninfo.html

I find creation myths or stories relating to the creation of mankind to be interesting. The origin of man and even more so, man’s purpose on earth, is the single most desired question to be answered. Due to my interest in creation, as well as having a background in evolution, I tend to read books such as Darwin’s Origin of Species, and other biologically based stories with a certain attention to creation themes.

Darwin’s encounters on the HMS Beagle helped lay the foundation for biology, particularly ideas about evolution and the diversification of species. Through reading Darwin’s work, I find two themes that contradict the stories of Genesis as well as most religions in general. Darwin’s ideas on evolution via natural selection gives a strong case for the plethora of species present in our world today. Darwin’s logic is that humans are the descent of a long evolutionary line that is continuous and infinite. Keeping along with this idea, humans are just another evolved animal, just as a whale is thought to be an evolved form of a wolf. This claims that humans are equal to animals, as they share similar ancestors and lineage. Genesis claims that humans were made in the image and likeness of God and as a result, gained dominion over the animals. These two views on mankind, both Genesis and Darwin, seem to contradict each other in there description of the hierarchy of man.

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Chapter 3 of the Origin of Species was extremely interesting, especially the part in which Darwin talks in depth about the Struggle for Existence. He stated, “…We do not always bear in mind, that though food may now be superabundant, it is not so at all seasons of each recurring year.” I found that to be very thought provoking because I truly figured out how this lends itself to Natural Selection and variation among species. Because there is always a different atmosphere among organisms each year, whether it is because of overpopulation or just a lack of resources and food, the need to adapt is also different each year. As Darwin was saying, when more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there is going to be greater competition and, therefore a “struggle for existence.” Only the most fit, the ones most able to adapt, of animals will then survive, and they will pass their genes to their offspring, in the hopes that one day there will be a superior and near perfect variation of that species in existence. Of course, the animals don’t actually think this way, but it is part of their genetic goal to survive to reproduce.

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