Evolution provides an explanation for the extraordinary biological diversity on this planet, including vertebrates. In this program, we will focus on macro-evolutionary processes-specifically speciation and the evidence it leaves behind. In doing so, we will focus on several large philosophical questions, including: How, generally, do we make claims of knowledge in the study of history, including in a historical science such as evolution? Can we generalize from singular events, such as the evolution of flight in birds; if so, what is our justification for doing so?

We will use vertebrates as our model with which to study evolution. Innovations have marked the history of vertebrates and their immediate ancestors, including the origin of cartilage, bone, brains, endothermy, and the amniotic egg, which allowed for the invasion of terrestrial habitats. In addition, the transformation of existing structures to take on new functions has been a notable feature of vertebrate evolution: from swim bladder into lungs; hands into wings; and scales into both feathers and hair. Because we can not observe these transitions directly, evolutionary biologists are dependent on the study of extant species and fossils to determine how, when, and why these changes occurred.

Learning will take place in the classroom, anatomy (wet) lab, computer lab and the field. Classroom work will include workshops and interactive lectures in which active participation by all students will improve the learning community for all. In the wet lab, we will study the comparative anatomy of vertebrate skulls and skeletons, and dissect cats. In the computer lab, we will become familiar with software used for systematic character analysis (PAUP and MacClade), and students will either generate or collect datasets that they will then analyze and present to the class in the form of evolutionary trees. We will go on one multiple day field trip to Eastern Washington early in the quarter and spend a few additional days in the field. This program will provide background in macroevolution, vertebrate zoology, and epistemology (how we make and support claims of truth). We will investigate questions that may seem simple at first-What is a species?-but turn out to have myriad, conflicting answers. It is this complexity, and our attempts as scientists to discern the pattern in that complexity, that will be our focus.

Many critics of the current United States War in Iraq claim a strong parallel to the Vietnam war: that the United States population was lied to about the causes and nature of the war; that the war is illegal; that it is increasingly unpopular; that it is causing increasing repression and surveillance in the United States; and that the United States is getting more and more involved in a war that is not winnable. We will compare and contrast the Vietnam and Iraq war by examining the political economic and cultural context of both wars and their causes, the nature of the war and its immediate and longer run consequences for soldiers and for Vietnamese, Iraqi, and United States society. We will also study the strategy and goals of those fighting the United States and the nature of the anti-war movements in the United States in both wars. There will be readings, films and guest speakers from diverse perspectives including Iraqi and Vietnamese sources. Among the required readings will be Marilyn Young, Vietnam Wars:1945-1990 ; Susan Jeffords, Remasculinization of American Culture: Gender and Vietnam ; and Rashid Kalidi, Resurrecting Empire . There will be individual and group assignments; some of which will be aimed at sharing our learning with the broader Evergreen and Olympia community.

This program will involve a compositional, structural and historical immersion in the relationships between poetry and music and the political significance of each.

Some of the creative compositional questions to be addressed include: When does one medium supplant the other, and why does it do so? Does the meaning of the text always hold sway over its "music"? When does "music" render its text insignificant? What is the "music" of political speech, and what does its "music" do to its "meaning"? What are the similarities and differences between delivering a political speech to 20,000 people, and delivering a political song to 20,000 people? How can we protect our creative work from being given a political function that we oppose? What are the differences among "myth," "narrative," "formalism" and "lyric," and what is the contemporary political significance of each?

This program will involve workshops, lectures and presentations by the faculty and invited guests, seminars on shared reading material, group listening sessions, viewing films of 19th- and 20th-century operas and regular student performances of original poetry and music. Students will be strongly encouraged to pursue their own creative processes through writing, musical performance or both. We will also attend performances of opera, experimental music and symphonies in Seattle, Portland and Olympia.

Fall quarter (Myth, Melody and Early Modernism) will focus on the work of the early modernists of the 19th century: the operas and politics of Richard Wagner and the response of poets such as Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Other authors and composers to be studied include Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Arthur Rimbaud, Claude Debussy, Jacques Offenbach, Franz Schubert and Gustav Mahler.

Winter quarter will focus on a reading of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake and other works of modernism that draw language and music closer together. We will consider the works of Ezra Pound, H.D., Gertrude Stein, Antonin Artaud, John Cage, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Bertolt Brecht, with his musical collaborators Hanns Eisler and Kurt Weill, as well as contemporary poets and composers. (This latter group includes Kamau Brathwaite, Richard Foreman and Hélène Cixous).