I play the harp, yo.

So it all seems to come down to the Pinker side out there and the Lewontin followers. While I may have oversimplified that to some extent, I am rather pressed for time…it seems that every prof I have this semester is shoveling out the 11:59 Sunday night deadlines. Oh well.

My mother did the same things in college. She wrote papers at the absolute last second that was humanly possible. My father, however, did not. He was a planner. Who am I supposed to be? It seems that Pinker would want me to believe that I should be like one of my parents…probably like the one who had the dominant trait, right? (I know absolutely nothing about genetics past the little squares that I drew to find out why I had green eyes in high school biology. I am sure that someone will explain it to me) Lewontin, on the other hand, would want to explain to me that the reason I am writing this at 10 rather than 11 is because I’ve found some sort of happy medium between my parents.

I really don’t know what to believe in this situation. Almost everyone in my family is somehow tied up in some heavy-duty science. My grandparents were both physicists that worked on the Manhattan Project and both my parents were both trained scientists. My bother also followed suit and works for NASA (go Pinker team, yes?).

BUT WAIT.

I play the harp. I am a musician. Tell me how that fits into all of this! This whole class was attractive to me because I got to do the two things that were so much at war in my life until now. I guess even now. I wanted to be an astronomer but I also wanted to play the harp. The one place with a halfway decent harp teacher AND a good physics/astronomy department was here. However, once I got here they decided that music trumps all and science needs to be placed on the back burner. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard that one before.

So. Lewontin seems to have a point. I took this class. I seemed to have found the happy medium. The environment that I was in when it came time for me to decide what to do with my life was void of my family’s direct influence. I was living in the middle of Long Island by myself. I decided that I was going to play the harp.

So. That is what my life story boils down to. I play harp, man. I play jazz harp. I am most definitely not the physicist that my relatives were and that my brother is. I went differently and chose things from both disciplines; I am just not sure why I did. I play jazz, but here I play classical music. I wanted astronomy; instead, I chose philosophy of science? Hmm. I guess there may be some sort of Lewontin force at work here. The environment I grew up in until I was 10 seems to have set some heavy influence on my life. I just feel like I didn’t get a say in any of it. Maybe that’s some Pinker?

If it wasn’t clear before, I am a tad bit conflicted. I think I find some truth in both sides of this. Or maybe I am full of shit; I guess you guys can decide.