Post by David Lahti on Mar 4, 2014 21:21:18 GMT -5
In Narrow Roads of Gene Land (vol. 1, p.485-487), W. D. Hamilton proposes a hypothesis that simultaneously explains (1) the rise to stardom of the University of Michigan in the 70s-90s, and (2) the peculiar kind of argumentativeness of graduate students from the period:
"At the University of Michigan, Richard Alexander, long a prime mover in the study of social evolution... had persuaded his colleague Donald TInkle, likewise an exceptional evolutionist and currently the Director of the University Museum, to consider that I might be a useful colleague in the museum and in the graduate teaching programme of the university...
"The degree of interest in evolution may have been a special Michigan feature. As a result of, I think, the influence of Richard Alexander and later other faculty members he had encouraged to be there, the university had acquired a reputation throughout the whole USA as one of the very best campus destinations to which you might 'U-haul' your possessions, including your bachelor's or master's degree, but, most important of all, your research-oriented curiosity about fish, ferns, birds, lakes, lizards, insects-- or simply about evolution per se.
"...Certainly the biology graduate students gained a nationwide reputation, if for nothing else, as being the most argumentative in the land.
"Was this all, perhaps, a meme complex emanating from one source-- my patron Alexander?"
"At the University of Michigan, Richard Alexander, long a prime mover in the study of social evolution... had persuaded his colleague Donald TInkle, likewise an exceptional evolutionist and currently the Director of the University Museum, to consider that I might be a useful colleague in the museum and in the graduate teaching programme of the university...
"The degree of interest in evolution may have been a special Michigan feature. As a result of, I think, the influence of Richard Alexander and later other faculty members he had encouraged to be there, the university had acquired a reputation throughout the whole USA as one of the very best campus destinations to which you might 'U-haul' your possessions, including your bachelor's or master's degree, but, most important of all, your research-oriented curiosity about fish, ferns, birds, lakes, lizards, insects-- or simply about evolution per se.
"...Certainly the biology graduate students gained a nationwide reputation, if for nothing else, as being the most argumentative in the land.
"Was this all, perhaps, a meme complex emanating from one source-- my patron Alexander?"
