Travel Diary 9: An Australian in New York

I’m an alien, a legal alien, and I have been in New York for a week. This is what I did there…

First of all I must express my unbounded admiration and affection for my hosts, Matt and Cathy Silberstein. I mooch off them every time I come to New York, and I did so again, with great breakfasts, dinners and events organised for me…

Apart from the Howlerfest* I met with a number of local folk. I had dinner with Massimo Pigliucci, head of SUNY Philosophy and until recently a working evolutionary biologist. I also met with Joel Cracraft, who is a leading ornithologist (he basically did the taxonomy of birds) and figure in the species concept debate. Joel and I talked easily an hour and a half and only his prior commitments stopped us. In both cases I found that my personal opinions about various topics were not immediately rejected as laughable, which was a plus. I don’t think New Yorkers are that polite they would not have said something.

I also met my long time internet correspondent, Bill Benzon, who is a jazz musician, cognitive scientist, and, as I discovered, an early applier of evolution to literary theory, although he is rightly dismissive of what has come to be known as “literary Darwinism”. His ideas on narrative structure have got me thinking about the prallels between taxonomy in biology and taxonomies elsewhere.

I am presently on an Amtrak train to Washington DC, where I will mooch off Mitchell Coffey, another talk.origins netizen, and his family. I gather that to sing for my supper I must entertain adolescent males with rollicking Australian stories. This I can do, since the only reason I am not adolescent myself is an unfortunate accident of chronology. Inside I am definitely 16, trust me.

I am now at Mitch’s, also mooching off his wifi. More later.

* I spent years on a Usenet group, talk.origins. One of the anitevolutionists, Ted Holden, called evolutionists “a tree full of howler monkeys”, leading us to adopt the slogan semper Alouatta, and refer to our get-togethers when one of us was travelling as Howlerfests.