In which Darwinistic Randomization is at once refuted and reaffirmed.

Once, when I was an inexperienced young first-year MA student at the U who did not yet realize that graduate academic conferences accept pretty much everyone with a pulse, I submitted abstracts to a couple of local ones and to my surprise was accepted at both. My bluff had been called; suddenly I had to actually write a pair of papers to present on the same weekend on opposite ends of the state. 

The first was this graduate student conference down the road at BYU.  My shoe-string rush-job of a paper contemplated aesthetics as a possible survival mechanism, i.e. we are perhaps capable of experiencing beauty so as to better identify and preserve healthy environments, and also perhaps to help us persevere in harsh ones, and I cited Aristotle’s Goods of First and Second Intent and Victor Frankl and Hugh Nibley and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and whatever else was on my mind at the time.  

Against all odds, it turned out to be a kinda fun presentation that generated some enjoyable discussion.  The surreal part came when the moderator–some BYU English Professor with a delightfully pretentious faux-European accent–asked me and another presenter, “Am I correct in assuming that you are both Darwinists?”

Confused, perplexed, we looked at each other, then at him, and said, “Huh??”

“Yes, you are both Darwinists,” he continued.  Not knowing how to respond, I just let it go, figuring it would at least make a funny anecdote back at the U.

Besides, there was no time to ponder: right after the conference, I had to immediately drive through the snow to Cedar City for my other conference.  There at SUU, I presented a more conventional paper on Writing Center Pedagogy that later became my very first academic publication^[1]here’s an alternate link, in case the first one is broken–cause like all academics, I am an incurable attention whore, even for my juvenalia..

The next morning at SUU, there was a lunch and raffle for the conference attendees.  I was mostly uninterested in the door prizes until they announced the free t-shirts, for which I have an incurable weakness.  To my delight, I won!  But then I examined the t-shirt itself.  The front read:

 While the back side read:

I just stared at it in confusion for a minute.  “Am I correct in assuming that you are a Darwinist?” echoed across my mind.  Here I had a nonsensical statement on Darwinism from a BYU Professor that weirdly coincided with this equally nonsensical t-shirt on Darwinism from SUU.  What did this strange confluence of Darwinism mean?  Surely they both meant nothing, yet the sheer proximity of the two events surely meant something!  Or did it?  Was this a sign proving strict Darwinistic Randomization?  But wouldn’t such serendipity undermine the very concept of Randomization?  But then, as many a statistician has assured me, random events tend to cluster?  But then, are events actually random if they do cluster?  Was this t-shirt a comment on something…about something…or something??

Sphinx-like and inscrutable, I later just threw the t-shirt into my drawer, occasionally pulling it out to tell a funny story with.  I wrapped up that whirl-wind weekend of minor conferences more experienced, but I’m not sure more wise.