Profs and Pints - Richmond

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “The Course of the Appalachian Trail,” on the fascinating past and uncertain future of a beloved wilderness trail and national park, with Mills Kelly, emeritus professor of history at George Mason University and author of A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/rva-appalachian-trail .]

Spring brings people flocking back to the Appalachian Trail, which for more than 100 years has provided opportunities to spend anywhere from a few hours to six months traversing the Appalachian Mountains. Stretching more than 2,000 miles across 14 states, from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in Maine, it ranks among the most iconic long-distance hiking trails in the world. It and its associated national park are annually visited by nearly 17 million.

Gear up to perhaps spend some time on the trail yourself by spending an evening with Mills Kelly, an expert on all things Appalachian Trail and the author of two books and numerous articles on the trail’s history.

We’ll start our scholarly journey by looking at the trail’s origins. First proposed by Benton MacKaye, a forester, in 1921 as a place for urban workers to get some fresh air and sunshine, the trail took 16 years to scout, map, and carve out of the mountains. The first version was woven together mostly from abandoned mountain roads, Indigenous people's paths, and highways.

Drawing on research in archives up and down the length of the trail, Professor Mills will show us archival photographs and video clips spread across the decades of the trail’s history, and he'll let the voices of hikers themselves describe how the experience of hiking has changed over the decades. You’ll learn what hikers ate before the advent of freeze-dried backpacker meals and when and why thru-hiking became a thing. More profoundly, we’ll examine how innovations in gear changed the experiences of women on the trail, and how changing attitudes about race transformed the hiking community.

Professor Mills will describe how the trail is maintained entirely by 33 volunteer clubs. Looking ahead, he’ll discuss how the trail’s long-term health as a recreational resources is being affected by declining federal support, overuse in some sections, and climate change. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A 1928 photo of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club taking a break from its work (National Park Service / Public Domain).

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: “Life Hacks for Distracted Brains,” a look at how we all could benefit from research-based strategies for managing Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, with Laura E. Knouse, professor of psychology at the University of Richmond, licensed clinical psychologist, and author of Living Well with Adult ADHD: Practical Strategies for Improving Your Daily Life.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/rva-hacks-for-distracted-brains .]

Technology has altered our environments in ways that challenge our capacity to stay focused and complete tasks. Netflix beckons us away from doing the dishes. We doom scroll instead of undertaking planned projects. In bumping up against deadlines for completing important tasks we realize that we’ve been doing just about anything else.

Fortunately, the science of psychology offers insights into what we can do to take back our attention and bridge the gap between our intentions and our actions.

Learn new strategies for staying focused with Dr. Laura Knouse, a clinical psychologist who studies ADHD in adults and is an expert in using cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to treat it.

In a talk geared toward a general audience but sure to also benefit those with ADHD diagnoses, she’ll discuss evidence-based approaches to helping people gain new self-regulation strategies and manage thoughts and feelings that reduce motivation.

To help you become better at starting and completing meaningful tasks, she’ll teach you how to recognize and change emotional states that reduce motivation, and also how to notice and respond to sneaky thoughts that can derail task-completion efforts.

You’ll learn hacks for staying focused and the basic psychological principles that explain why they work. These include the principle of negative reinforcement and also the Premack Principle, which holds that we’ll perform a less-preferred activity for the sake of being able to perform a more-preferred one.

Audience members will have the opportunity to develop personal action plans for using these hacks to progress toward one of their important (but avoided) goals. To offer more in-depth guidance after the talk, Professor Knouse will have copies of Living Well with Adult ADHD available for sale. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image from Pixabay.

Profs and Pints Richmond presents: "Eugenics Then and Now,” on a dangerous movement in science and its lessons for current research, with Carlo Quintanilla, molecular biologist and health science policy analyst at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/richmond-eugenics .]

Global concerns about the return of eugenic thinking were reignited by Chinese scientist He Jiankui’s 2018 announcement of the first gene-edited babies, Lulu and Nana. He was quickly condemned by the scientific community and jailed for illegal medical practice, but he and others around the world continue experiments with goals echoing eugenic ambitions.

As genetic technologies advance at extraordinary speed, society faces a new set of ethical questions about shaping the traits of future generations. Are we entering a new era of eugenics? If so, how should we respond?

Hear such questions tackled by Carlo Quintanilla, who studied rare genetic mutations in human disease as a graduate research scientist and instructor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center and now works at the intersection of genomic medicine, science, and society.

Dr. Quintanilla will begin by discussing the origins and history of eugenics, tracing its development in the 19th and 20th centuries as an idea, a scientific movement, and a set of policies. He’ll examine the rise of Social Darwinism in the United Kingdom, forced sterilization programs in the United States, and the atrocities committed by the Third Reich in the name of “racial hygiene.”

From there, he’ll explore how our ability to shape human health and heredity have been transformed by modern reproductive and genetic technologies such as in vitro fertilization, prenatal and embryo screening, and genome editing. You’ll learn how these tools hold enormous promise when it comes to the prevention and cure of rare and debilitating genetic conditions, yet also raise profound questions related to their potential enablement of a new, technologically driven form of eugenics.

Dr. Quintanilla will then delve into the ongoing debate among scientists, bioethicists, and policymakers over what should be classified as eugenics today. He’ll highlight recent controversial uses of genetic and reproductive technologies that are pushing ethical boundaries faster than society can define them, from embryo selection for traits like IQ and height to speculative military interest in genetically enhanced soldiers. These examples raise urgent questions: Where should society draw ethical boundaries? Who gets to decide? And is the term “eugenics” still useful for guiding policy and public debate?

We’ll close by examining the social, political, and regulatory forces that will determine the future, considering whether they will restrain the push toward further genetic control or accelerate it. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: The frontispiece of the 1883 book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, by pioneering eugenicist Francis Galton (Wikimedia Commons / Metropolitan Museum of Art).