The extraordinarily superb 2009 aaas annual meeting: first day

Video taping Al Gore from a front row seat. Engaging in riveting discussions about science and religion with a British university public information officer, an American Geophysical Union scientist, and a Pittsburg theology professor and minister who is a member of the esteemed, invite-only, 140-member International Society for Science and Religion. Capturing a sword swallower and dancing science writers on film. And finding the convergence of feminism and brain and mind studies, two of my great intrigues.

Those are only some of the highlights from my weekend at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2008 annual meeting in Chicago. In no way can I capture it all in one short post, so I will write about it one day at a time, in what will still be a very limited account of all the terrificness that is the AAAS annual meeting.

Here’s Thursday.

I step out of the subway at the Washington station in Chicago’s downtown to see a flock of pigeons gathered in reverent assembly around a small fire in the ground. They’re just standing, some with feathers puffed. Chicago feels colder than New York had been, but my friend will inform me later in the day that it had been quite warm the day before there too. But today it’s cold, and like humans, the pigeons gravitate towards the warmth. I wonder, what would the world be like if pigeons had discovered fire? Off from the pack, a male is seriously chasing and pecking at a female who clearly does not want to be chased and pecked at by him; both are walking very quickly, and occasionally she flies off and he follows. I consider trying to shoo, or kick, the male, but decide that wouldn’t be very nice.

At the Hyatt where the conference is, I attend an hour or two of the latter half of a communicating science workshop for scientists. They had formed groups of about eight, and each group had videotaped one person talking about their research. Now they are recapping. It amuses and strikes me how nervous most of them say they had been while being taped, and it is interesting to me how our different professions, science and journalism, influence our communication styles and, in a way, dispositions.

I randomly meet an NSF communications person for whom I had written two articles before as part of a collaboration between an NSF lab where I interned and Livescience.com. Then I meet the NSF communications director, who informs me that NSF is interested in getting video on NSF-funded research. I tell her I’m interested in doing video (which is true), and she seems excited. Wow, great prospects, eh? Not bad for networking in a short afternoon ;-P

At Brent House at the University of Chicago, where I will be staying tonight, I meet my good friend from college for the first time in two and half years. Their house is hosting a dinner with John Polkinghorne, a renowned science and religion figure who is both a physicist and theologian. Brent House is the house of the Episcopal Ministry on campus. My friend, her boyfriend, and I get into a heated debate about whether people are machines. I argue yes, but they don’t like the idea, and I counter that I believe many non-scientists misunderstand what science does and means: just because science says we are machines, does not mean we are not human beings as agents too. We come to something of an agreement on the real danger of science being misapplied by people to form false conclusions about human nature and about the way people should live, translating limited-scope assumption-based descriptions into overarching prescriptions. Social Darwinism, for example, or the assumption in economics that people always act in their own self-interest. (I can expand on this idea of the misuse of science in philosophies of life in a separate post.)

It’s Darwin’s 200th birthday, and Lincoln’s as well today. John Polkinghorne is giving a talk on “The Friendship of Science and Religion” on campus. He is in Chicago for the AAAS meeting and will be speaking at a similar event there. Since he’s famous, I decide to videotape it and I quickly learn (first video experience lesson) that it is hard to focus on what someone is saying when you are adjusting camera settings and getting super tired because you don’t have a tripod. But I gathered his main point: science and religion are and should be friends. I’ll post the talk (and watch it again) later. (I will write a separate post on science and religion too later.)

The questions following the Polkinghorne talk are brilliant, and at least 30 people line up after the talk to talk to the guy. I had heard that UChicago was a very intellectual university, and one essay I had read from there and one fellow jschooler I know from there both supported that generalization. But now I saw it in action, or rather, in their riveting discourse. That’s not even to mention that the campus is clean and pretty and exudes scholarliness, and the people are really, really nice. (I won’t say what I am contrasting this with! ) I marvel again at the wonderfulness that is Midwestern intellectualism, provide a mental nod to the University of Wisconsin, and think, I could come here in the future for my PhD.