Three professors below preview Core courses they will offer this year in-Literature and Arts, Science and Social Analysis, discussing how they will implement the Core.

Edward O. Wilson, Baird Professor of Science, readily acknowledges that his scientific colleagues at Harvard will seldom leap at the chance of teaching an elementary science course. Even the bait of a high status Core course is not enough to lure them to face the ignorant masses. But Wilson doesn't feel that way. He presents himself as "one of a minority" among the professors in his department who has supported the Core from the beginning.

Wilson says most of his associates in the Biology and Biochemistry Departments "tend to be deeply engrossed in research" and have difficulty translating their activity into a language they think undergraduates can understand. But Wilson's Science Core course, Science B-15, "Evolutionary Biology," proposes to do just that by integrating current research on social behavior in organisms into an introductory biology course.

Wilson offered his course under Gen Ed as Natural Sciences 6. But Wilson this year has adjusted the course to fit more precisely the Core guidelines.

According to Wilson, "Evolutionary Biology" departs most radically from Gen Ed because it teaches students how to assemble knowledge, not memorize the facts and principles accrued in an academic discipline. His course will develop this feature of the Core by "attempting to present one branch of science as a creative activity," he explains.

Wilson will "describe how science is done," using examples from his current research--such as his studies of chemical communications among social insects--and relating them to human social organization. In this way, Wilson says he intends "to orient evolutionary biology against the background of social sciences." Before the Core, Wilson points out, a Natural Science Gen Ed course would "present a segment of knowledge and leave it up to the students to figure out how it might apply to broader social issues, if it indeed applied at all." But the Core proposes--and Wilson agrees--that Core professors are responsible for establishing that connection.

The Core committee on Sciences last spring ruled that Science Core courses must include a laboratory section. "Evolutionary Biology" includes four lab sessions, each devoted to an area of specialized current research. One session will cover behavior hormones and reproduction in lizards, based on present research by David P. Crews, assistant professor of Biology.

Another session will look at Wilson's pet research topic, division of labor in ant colonies. He plans to bring in his experimental colonies of South American leaf-cutting ants. In Nat Sci 6, Wilson was famous for a unique lecture-demonstration style--one that should adapt nicely to the new labs. He waves his arms above his head and zigzags about the floor to simulate the way the bugs use their antennae to sniff out trails left by fellow ants. Though this may strike some as collegiate show-and-tell, Wilson asserts that by introducing actual research to his students, they can gain exposure to the imaginative and active process of scientific experimentation, yet still "talk in terms of general principles."

Wilson concedes he eventually would have come to these conclusions on his own, Core or no Core, but certainly not as rapidly as this year. The Core also prompted him to give sociobiology special prominence in the course, as a way of associating biological studies with social science.

The course will include some history of science by tracing the development of ecological and environmental theories. This satisfies the Core report's recommendation that scientists tie in the historical context whenever possible.

Wilson's enthusiasm in the biology labs on Oxford St. so far has not proved infectious. "It hasn't exactly caught fire with the biologists or biochemists," Wilson notes with regret. "Frankly, they haven't given it much thought."

Without the Core, Maria M. Tatar, professor of German, believes she would never have developed her Core offering, "Weimar Culture," Literature and Arts C-13, although she has wanted to teach such a course for some time. "The Core provided the impetus to go ahead. It somehow legitimized it, gave my idea institutional backing," she says.

The Contexts of Culture courses must place literature and the arts of a particular culture in its social and historical context. Some have suggested this requires a tortured effort to combine an era's history, social life, literature and fine arts.

Tatar managed to pack expressionistic poetry, architecture and the Bauhaus, Weimar opera and cinema, and an analysis of the economy's inflation and stabilization into her "Weimar Culture" course.

Her reading list likewise runs from Thomas Mann's short stories to Remarque's familiar All Quiet on the Western Front. But this won't be a frolic through translated works: The texts are all read in German, although Tatar will conduct class discussions in English.