science | ZETEO

Distancing / Awareness

November 4, 2014 by William Eaton

How scholarly work could be more informative and integrated, and what a challenge this is! By William Eaton {Note: The following text was prepared to be delivered at the 2014 annual conference of the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, the theme of which was “Revolutions: Past, Present, and Future.” It has been revised for print publication. It is also one in Zeteo‘s Fall 2014 series of pieces related to borders.} The Personal, The Political, and The Intellectual Zeteo takes a […]

Categories: Essay, Fall 2014 Issue • Tags: Alfred Kinsey, homosexuality, Jean-Luc Godard, male gaze, movies, revolution, science, sexuality

The Professor of Ignorance

October 14, 2014 by William Eaton

Excerpt from The Professor of Ignorance Condemns the Airplane By William Eaton On 25 October 2014 Dixon Place presented a staged reading of this dialogue. [print_link] [email_link] CYNTHIA: You know, thanks to the Internet — information technology — since I started working at the magazine, almost half of my colleagues have been laid off. And as far as I can tell most people have stopped reading anything but twits and chats. I’m sitting here involved in some kind of intellectual […]

Categories: Uncategorized • Tags: animal rights, loneliness, love, science, technology

Human Social Genomics

September 5, 2014 by William Eaton

Evolutionary theory has accustomed us to thinking of our genes as stable and essentially unchanging. Genetic change takes place over generations through mutations that give the bearer a competitive advantage in a specific environment. Genes are what we inherit from our parents and pass on to our children. But the emerging field of human social genomics looks at how environmental factors — low socio-economic status, stress, or pollution, for example — can influence our genes over the course of our lives. […]

Categories: Catherine Vigier, ZiR • Tags: genetics, health, inequality, science, stress

“There is no rigorous definition of rigor”

April 27, 2014 by William Eaton

The quotation of this post’s title is from Morris Kline, one of the great writers about mathematics. Kline, who died in 1992 and taught at New York University from 1938 to 1975, published a number of books — e.g. Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty (from which the quote comes); Mathematics: A Cultural Approach, and Mathematics in Western Culture — that continue to be worth reading. Recently I returned to Kline’s Mathematics for the Nonmathematician with an idea that it would help me brush up my rude understanding of […]

Categories: William Eaton, ZiR • Tags: intellectual history, mathematics, psychology, science, Western civilization

Interspecies communication

January 1, 2014 by William Eaton

Writing Science B (an essay published in Zeteo‘s Fall 2013 issue), was a thought experiment: imagining a possible though not actual science. In publication’s aftermath, however, I keep hearing news of scientists hard at work on projects that speak to one or another of the essay’s concerns. For example, in the final New Yorker of 2013, Michael Pollan writes about scientists who are investigating intelligence in plants. In what Pollan calls “a striking example of interspecies communication,” Suzanne Simard, a forest […]

Categories: ZiR • Tags: animals, intelligence, inter-species communication, plants, science

Science B

November 19, 2013 by William Eaton

Click for PDF. Science B By William Eaton William Eaton is the Executive Editor of Zeteo; his explorations appear almost weekly at Montaigbakhtinian.com. Let us begin gently, with, before theory, anecdote. After playing his violin for a range of non-human creatures, Michel-Paul-Guy de Chabanon, an eighteenth-century musician and philosopher, concluded that spiders are pleased by slow, harmonious melodies and will slide down from their webs in order to listen. Small fish, he believed, will surface with the same intent.[1] Like […]

Categories: Essay, Fall 2013 Issue • Tags: bees, love, Pascal, poetry, science

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Zeteo (ζητέω): to challenge, question, dispute, explore the forgotten and ignored

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