Where do our ideas about evolution, human development, and human history come from? How do we collectively think about who and what we are? How are those ideas shaped by journalism, novels, and film? We are interested in this course in the stories that we tell across disciplines, media and genres that shape individual and collective ways of thinking about the nature and history of human being. We will draw on readings in both science and popular fiction and non-fiction to consider how (and why) we tell and have told the story of our biological selves. Our focus will be on narratives of evolution and genomics as they have found expression in science and culture from Darwin through contemporary genomics. We will consider how scientific ideas circulate through, and are influenced by, popular cultural forms. We will begin by reading Darwin in the context of his moment (science and culture), with an emphasis on the stories that he tells about what he observes as well as on the scientific theory and cultural preoccupations of his time. We will then trace changing ideas about evolution as they take shape first through the evolutionary synthesis of the mid-20th century and then through the rise of population genomics in science, in the mainstream media, and in popular fiction and film.
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