Let’s get this straight once and for all: Evolution by natural selection is not a theory. It is a fact!
Evolution
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A taste of madeleine
I wanted to write on the volatility of memory at age 71 — a subject of considerable interest to myself and my spouse — and searched my computer’s hard drive for previous musings on the subject.
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Skyhooks and cranes
Some one-word titles in the psychology section of the library: Solitude, Compassion, Self-hate, Laughter, Jealousy, Regret, Shame, Prejudice, Violence, Anger, Embarrassment. And that’s just for starters.
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Wasting away
Many communities in the United States are talking about banning plastic bags. Here in Ireland we’ve been required to bring our own shopping bags to the market for years. But Lord knows there’s still plenty of trash.
One of several subspecies of Ensatina salamanders • Photo by Marshal Hedin (CC BY 2.0)
The tyranny of the discontinuous mind
A telling tale from Richard Dawkins’ “The Ancestor’s Tale” is the tale of the tailed salamanders that live in the mountains around California’s Central Valley (but not on the valley floor).
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Village water white wild woods
Here is a sentence from a scientific report on the evolution of language: “A challenge for evolutionary biology, therefore, is to provide a detailed mathematical account of how natural selection can enable the emergence of human language from animal communication.”
The tendril of a cucumber plant • Photo by Robert Reisman (CC BY 3.0)
The importance of hooks and tendrils
Take the train from London’s Victoria Station to the town of Orpington, fifteen miles south of the city. Here you might catch a bus or a taxi for the last leg of your journey.
Photo by Aleksandra Dementeva on Unsplash
The web of life
On Thursday mornings I meet my two students, Greg and Bailey, at 8 AM for a walk in the woods or meadows. They see things my aging eyes are likely to miss. Together, we don’t miss much.
Photo by Caleb Miller on Unsplash
Pontifical science
A little over a week ago [July 7, 2005], an op-ed essay appeared in The New York Times by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, purporting to clarify the position of the Roman Catholic Church on evolution.
A fossilized trilobite preserved in Burgess Shale • Photo by Smith609 (CC BY 2.5)
Accident or destiny?
For the first four billion years of Earth history, life was amebic and microscopic. Then, about 600 million years ago, with surprising swiftness, a myriad of multicellular organisms appear in the fossil record, in what has been called the Cambrian Explosion.