Evolution 2010 Wrap-Up
Yeah, I skipped the last few days of blogging, but I ended up being really busy. Okay, so I found a really cute girl and just spent as much time as possible with her, but I digress. I'm just going to jot down some final thoughts I have. I may post more as the conference evoked quite a bit of thinking in me.
1. I was asked several times why I was at Evolution 2010 if Mormons didn't believe in evolution. I know I've touched on this already, but I feel that members of the Church and people that aren't part of our church need to realize that the Church neither confirms nor denies, as far as I can tell, the existence of evolution. The official stance of the Church [PDF] all talks about how man is the offspring of Deity and has says nothing more. Some people want to extend this to mean that the species is immutable, meaning that God created animal as it is now and that they do not change. For me, that's as preposterous as still claiming a geocentric universe. If you look at morphological or molecular data, it's impossible to say otherwise. Might I add that the fact that species evolve is of little religious interest either.
2. Having met with a few students and one of their professors, I'd recommend going to the University of La Verne to anyone seeking an undergraduate in the life sciences. Yes, the tuition is ridiculous (something like $15,000 a year) but the individual attention they give to their students is unreal. The associate professor I met really impressed at me and especially the emphasis that she put on undergraduate research. Amazing really.
3. Evolutionary psychology is another fascinating subject of study. That one has a lot more moral and religious implications and I'm not entirely sure to what I subscribe and to what I don't, but it's interesting to entertain nevertheless. I'm reading that book, Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters, and it's extremely interesting.
4. Voodoo Doughnuts in Portland is ridiculous and delicious simultaneously. Look at the menu at your own peril. I personally ate an "Old Dirty Bastard" and it was incredible.
5. Multnomah Falls outside of Portland is beautiful and certainly worth the short trip to go there. It's also worth the hike to get to the top. I'd recommend it to anyone with time to kill in Portland.
6. Despite how much I enjoy it, bioinformatics lectures are comparatively boring, especially you could be learning about selective sexual adaptations and pressures. Who would have thought cricket sex was so interesting?
7. I'd love to research the social dynamics of a conference like this. The way people interacted with me was most curious. I feel it's worth mentioning probably 40% of the conference was professors, 45% were masters, PhD, and post-doc students and 5% were undergrads. My initial fear was of all the interaction with the higher educated people like the post-docs and professors, but in the end they were the most friendly people. They were giving golden advice left and right. They loved to explain their research to me and come down to my level to help me understand. A few even offered me positions. I initially thought I'd congregate with other undergrads but they ended up being the ones with the chip on their shoulders. The girl I presented next to at the poster session seriously cold-shouldered me. I felt like I was in third-grade getting the silent-treatment. It blew me away. I guess it just shows that people tend to discard their insecurities as they become more educated/experienced.
Evolution 2010: Day 2
Continued thoughts from an undergrad about a really big biology conference.
1. People from Oregon are really nice. A lot of them are extremely strange, but in general, the Oregonians seem to be a friendly breed.
2. My professor, Dr. Keith A. Crandall, is a really important guy. I mean, being a professor makes you important and everything, but he's also the biology department head at BYU, has written a ridiculous amount of articles, and is the acting president of the Society of Systematic Biologists which is one of three organizations that runs this conference. And he's also nicest professor I've met at BYU.
3. Phylogenetics is cool. I listened to a whole lecture on a phlyogenetic research conducted on Panthera, also known as big cats. The guy talked about how and where the big cats evolved and how we're still determining exactly how and where they diverged in their respective evolutions. This guy's research actually shows that snow leopards and leopards aren't really that closely related. If I remember correctly, the lion is closer to the leopard than the snow leopard is. The clouded leopard isn't even in Panthera at all!
4. I went to a lecture entitled, "How to Succeed at Being Male." Needless to say, a man can learn a lot of life lessons from a nematode. Morale of the story: you got to get your sperm in there before the hermaphrodites can can fertilize it themselves. Else the males are gonna go extinct, and God help us all if all there is left on the Earth is a bunch of asexual hermaphrodites running around.
5. Watching sports in a bar is fun. Watching sports with drunks in a bar is more fun. Even if it's sad if your team loses, watching sad drunks in a bar is yet more fun.
6. Powell's Bookstore is ridiculously huge. I mean, you could make Zaire a first world democracy with all the knowledge in that place. It's something definitely worth seeing if you go to Portland.
7. Statistics is boring. The end. I can't take another lecture on some new way to measure data in some meaningless fashion. It could prove fatal.
8. Evolution is still awesome.
Evolution 2010: Day 1
To give everyone a bit of background information that may not know, I work in an evolutionary biology lab that specializes in crustacean research, or more specifically: molecular phylogenetics and the greater Tree of Life project. I work on a subset within that on the infraorder Brachyura, or more commonly referred to as crabs (the animal, not the STD.) After a year or so of research, I've compiled a bunch of data together (with some other data the lab already had) and made a presentation that I'm presenting on Monday at this conference. It's a five day conference in Portland, OR and I'm just going to jot down some thoughts I've had throughout the day. They may or may not be related to biology.