Species
Reading the Origin of Species but cannot catch up. The first week (just passed) has the first 4 chapters, 135 pages. Took one night to read 20 pages. All the rest time were reading Moby Dick (about 70 pages per week), and also spent time reading Stephen King's Fairy Tale (the latter may have explained some but not all slowness.)
The discussion was also bad - not able to participate at all. Since the mid-weeks it was like that, the participation became less and less, for I had to spend time commute and cooking, for many hours not spend on reading at all. But biggest reason might be not appreciating other people's ideas. I am too comfortable with my own thoughts.
And I am not satisfied with my own thoughts, as they are not worth sharing. My language is too poor to share anything. Had to repeat the same thing over and over. In the beginning it was fine to ask some simple questions, but during mid-weeks and later, it becomes hard. People are becoming comfortable discussing things, I become less comfortable. It was bullshit and I have no idea how to make it better. Same problem as LZ's teaching career. Who can go on to the end without any achievement or ideas? To speak publicly, even without judgement, is hard.
I read the Origin of Species in Chinese before, did not finish. It is very confusing, to refute many ideas at once. And the majority idea is wrong with today's standard. The reasoning is probabilistic, not deterministic, but was presented as "exclude these, exclude that" so that there seems to have one option left, which cannot be wrong. That is not good scientific reasoning.
It would take me forever to understand his definition of "Species". Then to every reader, there is a definition of "Species", all based on reading of the same text. Any knowledge to other definitions of "Species" only makes reading the text harder. Species got "more than 20 other different species concepts" and the idea of interbreeding may not be in the book, who knows.
If two kinds of human intercourse and their child can also be fertile, they are the same species. That's the Wikipedia definition.
The idea of natural selection vs. artificial selection makes me sad. For one thing, human never had enough resource to grow any animal or species in the rate it could have been in natural state. To get enough variations, human need to allow one species to grow exponentially, which human does not have the resource to do. So sad!
And the other sad part, is "artificial selection" focuses on one set of inheritable characteristics. That is to reduce the variance even to one particular set - that is highly correlated, allows easier inheritance. Why there is no new species? Why monkey is not evolve to human nowadays? The elementary school explanation was that human has changed the environment. But as long as human is looking for one set of characteristics, the variety suffers. Sad!
The last one point would be for the already domesticated animals. They are fed so well and human will never introduce planet scale events, to change the living conditions forever for them, so that new species can be discovered and take the resource. Human is incapable to do that! Except for global warming. And if that happened, human is likely going to select based on the same criteria, suppress even more variety. It is the road to hell, everything is uniform and fragile. How sad is that.