Thursday, August 13, 2015

A World From Dust talk highlighted on Emerging Scholars Blog

My recent talk in Grand Rapids got highlighted in IV's Emerging Scholars blog! I like the author's summary and the first adjective made my day:
"Ben McFarland of Seattle Pacific University gave a cool talk about how chemistry makes life possible, and perhaps even inevitable. In a sense, biology and life are contained in the period table in the way that a whole range of geometry theorems are contained in Euclid’s postulates, or the way that American society is encoded in the Constitution."


Hadn't even thought about the political analogy. I'll have to keep that metaphor.

The blog, including linked audio, can be found here.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I'm sorry I wasn't able to attend your talk in person, but I'm glad I was able to catch up with it via the audio recordings. I really enjoyed the topic.

Are your slides available anywhere? I'd be curious to see them myself, and I'd be happy to link to them if you'd like.

I have a strong interest in both the metaphors we use to talk about science, and the metaphors we get from science, so I'm glad to hear you liked my political analogy.