October 27, 2010
Greg Graffin
Department of Life Sciences
UCLA
Le Conte Ave & Westwood Blvd
Westwood, CA 90024
gwg1@cornell.edu
Dear Greg Graffin:
I enjoyed reading your interview. (Darwin Was a Punk, David Biello SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN vol. 303 no. 5 November 2010 page 28) I like your style. This is just for fun. I mean the science is serious enough, but you can’t run around being grim all the time … at least I can’t. When you have done everything you can the best you can, then it’s time to play.
I was struck by the question, “Are there any good songs about science.” I agree that alas the answer is no. As chance would have it, I just finished giving a couple of hours of lecture at a science fiction convention here in St. Petersburg. The first hour was on exobiology, an update from last year. The second was about the steampunk telescope. I introduced the first hour with some women doing a dance in which they were rabbits passing around chromosomes. So far as I know it’s the first fertility dance actually to address questions of fertility.
The dance is described at the beginning of the attached file. In the event we had some props: rabbit ears, a sign for the sun, one for icicles, a white sheet for a glacier. But pretty much it ran as advertised.
The basis is hard science, the best I can put together. As a Harvard Medical School Graduate and former Johns Hopkins faculty member, I’m not so bad at that. My ideas are not popular. I have been discreetly ejected from a genetics meeting for my ideas and my own county medical society will not even discuss me putting something in their non-refereed journal even though they beg for contributions from members. They did an article on voodoo once, but evidently I am too much for them.
Challenging authority has become a knee jerk for me.
The difficulty with the dance was that we had no song. I ran a metronome to keep time and simply narrated the events. Then as the lecture began I qualified and contradicted the letter but not the spirit of the dance. Ah for a good song.
If you like, have at it. If you want to make a video, maybe the ladies would not mind doing it again. I have not asked. They enjoyed doing the performance. (And the audience loved it. In fact it was a great audience. If somebody had a question or a challenge during the lecture he would simply shout it out. Fabulous.)
The principle being demonstrated … no. I’ll not tell you. Pour yourself a nice tall glass of lemonade, open the file and read it. The dancing girls will explain.
Sincerely,
M. Linton Herbert MD
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