Woodworth Lecture in the Sciences: Science and the world of ideas: All I really need to know I learned at Bennington

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC | Woodworth Lecture in the Sciences

Many people see the acquisition of data as the primary driver of scientific progress. Instead, I will make the case that the working concepts we apply to that data are the primary driver of scientific advances. I have made my career in evolutionary biology by searching for ways to connect ideas and the data we are capable of gathering right now.

Doing this is something most scientists are not very good at. Instead, they let others, the leaders of their field, define what is interesting to work on. However, in some fields, like evolutionary biology, the leaders that do the defining are sometimes not very good at it either. This has many symptoms, such as failure to consider alternative hypotheses, confusing correlates and causes, and pursuing questions long after theoretical work has shown the futility of doing so. I argue that everyone would be better at doing this if they had learned the things that Bennington teaches: talk to your leaders, but don’t always believe them. You are in charge of your own path. Your viewpoint empowers you. No, I really did not learn all I need to know at Bennington, but I learned things that are critical to science, and that you don’t readily learn elsewhere.  

About David Houle
David Houle is an evolutionary geneticist who investigates the connections between genomic, developmental and phenotypic variation.    

Houle grew up in California, then received his B.A. at Bennington College in Vermont in 1977, majoring in Science and Photography.  After working for four years as an art photographer, he went back to school to study evolutionary biology at SUNY Stony Brook.   After all the marine mussels in his first experiment died prematurely, he turned to working on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. These mostly did not die, allowing him to receive his Ph.D. under the supervision of population geneticist Walter Eanes in 1988.    

He then did post-doctoral research with Clark Cockerham, Brian Charlesworth and Michael Lynch before taking a faculty position at the University of Toronto.  He is now a professor at Florida State University.  Houle is best known for introducing the concept of evolvability into quantitative genetics, for work on sexual selection and life-histories, and for his large-scale experiments characterizing the genetics of complex phenotypes, such as the fly wing.