Are ideas clearly expressed and supported by good sentence structure and paragraph structure? – Does the essay have a title that generates interest? – Is there at least one visual (Table or Figure) that is labelled?

Assignment Question

Natural History, the magazine of the American Museum of Natural History, has commissioned you to write an essay in the tradition of Stephen Jay Gould’s column, “This View of Life”, relating evolutionary theory to an aspect of art, literature, history, philosophy or contemporary culture. The column, published monthly up through January 2001, was based on musings of an evolutionary biologist who found analogies between evolutionary processes and diverse aspects of human culture. For example, in one essay, “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse”, Gould likened the evolution of Mickey in drawings, to a reverse developmental process – where the later, most highly-evolved drawings of Mickey had the most infantile proportions, and the earliest drawings had the most adult proportions. The essay addressed how evolutionary principles are unconsciously interwoven in art. Your task is to brainstorm a commonality between art, literature, history, or philosophy with biology, and write an interpretive essay, suited for a museum-going audience with limited scientific background. Reading one of Gould’s essays will provide a model for this assignment.

Learning Goals: Drawing parallels between biology and other disciplines; expression of ideas for an educated non-scientist audience; honing techniques for “readability” for a general audience. Some points to think about for Essay #3: – Is the analogy clearly defined and well-developed? – Does the writing generate interest and intrigue for the reader? (Think about techniques that could enhance reader comprehension and interest. The use of questions is one technique – that asks the reader to think independently about the ideas presented. Personal anecdotes are another technique. In The Panda’s Thumb – Gould references how he was an Andy Panda fan and by some fluke won a stuffed toy panda as a child. – Are ideas clearly expressed and supported by good sentence structure and paragraph structure? – Does the essay have a title that generates interest? – Is there at least one visual (Table or Figure) that is labelled? (Tables are labelled above and Figures are labelled below.) – Are references given at the end, using APA. CBE or MLA? (Refer to the Goldbort text, chapter 5).