Epistrophe Apostrophe Apostasy Gawwd.... On weblogs, I turn the corner, and possibly flow this one out of existence. I am moving on to a bio-blog, something that is for self-education. And onto making a choice in the weblog world that assures me exportability and safety of content. (The blogger server has failed me a few times in the past days.) So, some more tedious software angst between Blogger and Moveable Type, and evaluating Radio Userland simple and complex packages. My morning routing moves away from weblogs, web reading, to books before anything else. On history of biology, particularly relevant give genetic engineering and bio-tech prominence, I had started way back with Gina Kolata (Flu & Dolly), Sunstein & Nussbaum (Clone,Clones & Clones), Steven Jay Gould (Panda's Thumb and numerous others), Dawkins (Hungry Gene), and an internet survey showing up socio-biology in modern garb. And I have returned to it via Evelyn Fox Keller (Century of the Gene, A Feeling for the Organism, and ???dev biology???), Jennifer Trusted (Beliefs & Biology -a survey from Aristotle to now of Western biology), and Stephen Jay Gould ( Urchins in the Storm). I and other seem to find similiarites (surface at least) in social sciences and biology which often degrades into unexamined socio-biology. But I also see parallels in the two professions and their internal prejudices and divisions. EFK / SJG are the two authors who write about the science sociologically; neither mentions sociology, or economics, ever. I see parallels in qualitative vs. quantitative methods, antipathy to new 'technologies', observation vs. measurment, holism vs. reductionism, specific vs. general. The other murky area is religion and science and how they have interplayed over the years; coming, as far as I am concerned, from the same roots, they diverged at a point (modern science) as each has vied for supremacy in having the one true explanation. I have never believed in fundamentalism, and have never seen the dichotomy, and consider them different facets of the same mystery, even more than just opposite sides of the same coin. Another facets of the same mystery? Arts. And facets we cant' imagine. Religion, philosophy, natural science, social sciences; identity. I had a funny image reading SJG, somewhere into the fourth story of a famous biologist, scientists as worms in the compost. I would be very happy to achieve the nobility of compost worms -- and cows --- and hens ;-).