getting out of the house and more school thoughts

Today the Smithsonian was showing some of the winners from the 2006 Wildscreen Festival, so Kira and I went to check it out. We watched 3 of the films, including the one on my primate obsession, the bonobo.

As I try to get myself geared up to apply to go to grad school, I think I'm narrowing my interests down into two main areas. I'm interested in the kind of psychology research Robert Altemeyer does, particularly into authoritarianism, and I'm interested in something around the anthropology/primatology area, where I'm especially fascinated by the potential for insights into human evolution from study of the bonobos. Both seem to combine my natural attraction to the topics and an element of urgency to the research.

To elaborate a bit more, my interest in Altemeyer's research is well expressed by this description of him that I've seen on some of his papers:

Bob Altemeyer is associate professor of psychology at the University of Manitoba. He does research on authoritarianism, prejudice, dogmatism, love, and the impolite topics of religion, politics, and sex.

I have to be honest, I would love to be able to put "he does research on impolite topics" every single place my name is written. So that's my personal attraction to the area, and the urgency of the research should be obvious to anyone who's been paying much attention to my blog over the last few months. Basically, authoritarianism has become a devastating political force in this country, causing tremendous damage here and around the world. The more we understand it, the better we can fight it. And the sooner the better.

And my interest in bonobos is about my longstanding fascination with evolution in general, human evolution in particular, and probably evolutionary psychology as well. Reading Robert Wright's books about evolutionary psychology and then Steven Pinker's books really opened my mind back up after years of intellectual dormancy. I'm having trouble deciding exactly what to think about evolutionary psychology (I get the impression that lots of biologists scoff at it pretty hard), but I know that I'm totally sold on the human mind as a biological adaptation and I know that whatever I do I want to have some scientific rigor. Anyway, I imagine there's enough there to be studied to satisfy a lifetime of curiosity, and I think I could be quite happy trying to learn more in this niche for a long, long time. The element of urgency to this is that bonobos are dangerously close to extinction and their habitat is threatened by a raging genocidal civil war in the Congo. Our opportunity to learn about them could be almost gone.

Speaking of getting out of my house and trying to learn something, last weekend I went to see James Randi as the featured speaker at a National Capital Area Skeptics 20th anniversary celebration. That was an entertaining and enjoyable event. His James Randi Educational Foundation does good work and deserves more than this brief mention.