Submission

I finally submitted an article I've been meaning to all year. It's just that I kept realizing I didn't know enough. It was originally an article proving something was possible that most people don't think is (evolving altruism) but in fact that is already known -- at least by a few mathematicians. So I've finally rewritten it with a brief review of the fact it's well known and now concentrating on what that can tell those of us interested in the evolution of human behavior.

I was trying to submit it before flying on Wednesday, but I wound up spending three hours listening to and talking with a really cool philosopher who is interested in the role of modelling in science and of mechanism in scientific explanation. Bill Bechtel. It still wasn't really enough time because I wanted to find out whether it was fair to call things like genetic drift "mechanisms" (a point of dispute at the KLI) but we had a previous dinner engagement and then the next morning both they and us were flying from Vienna.

Now we're in Cambridge and I was too jetlagged to be very useful for a couple days, at least on hard stuff like writing articles, but I got it finished Sunday. But submitting is a total struggle, it's not just the content, it's the formatting and jumping through the right hoops, filling in web forms etc. All this and I sent it to a journal where 90% of papers get rejected. But I figured out last week where to submit the paper next & have commented into my text the stuff I'll change for that. But I stupidly forgot to bring the file where I wrote down the journals I've decided on at the KLI so if it does get rejected in less than a week I still won't resubmit it 'til I get back to Vienna.

I have so many cool ideas to do next but first I have to review a bunch of papers and a grant which I've been putting off and also some PhD dissertations. Hagen has finally submitted a draft to me, and I am the internal for another student at Bath. But I'm optimistic I will get through this quickly. We are getting up very early and getting tons of work done now. So hopefully I'll get some more of my own work done before I go home too.

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