TRYING TO REASON WITH HURRICANE SEASON

As I write, river flooding and cleanup from Hurricane Florence in North and  South Carolina are ongoing. The storm was not a major one in terms of maximum sustained winds--only a Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson scale when it made landfall at Wrightsville Beach, near Cape Fear, NC.  But the storm approached the coast very slowly, and moved only very slowly once it made landfall. That, and the areal extent of of the storm, resulted in quite a beating for the eastern Carolinas. 

Satellite image of Florence approaching the Carolina coast. 

SELECTION REDUX

A couple of years ago I blogged about generalized Darwinism in a post called Occam’s Selection. This is the idea that principles of variation, selection, and preservation or retention are applicable to development and evolution of many different phenomena. The GD label is most common in evolutionary economics, but the notion is constantly being reinvented in many different fields. 

A recent example is Selection for Gaia Across Multiple Scales, published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution. The issue is how biological natural selection, which operates at the level of individuals, could result in evolutionary trends at ecosystems and broader scales, including the self-regulating biotic/abiotic coupling of the global Earth system. 

4th Annual Bailey Alumni Lecture "The crisis of belonging in contemporary Europe"

The 'migration crisis' in contemporary Europe has received substantial attention from academics, policy makers and the general public. In this talk, I argue that the interest in numbers, flows and routes of people seeking sanctuary in Europe has diverted attention from another, substantial crisis: the crisis of belonging. By focusing on the practices and experiences of belonging, I show how formal belonging is being undermined in contemporary Europe and discuss the broader implications for this for people who seek to call Europe home.

Date:
Location:
WT Young Library, UKAA Auditorium
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