Natural Selection

Straying from my usual mutterings tonight. NOVA is profiling Darwin and his theory of Natural Selection tonight. Sure natural selection works at a micro-evolutionary level, but it doesn't lead to new species. The examples being given - different beak shapes for finches and tortoise shell shapes in the Galapagos - don't prove the origin of species. The program itself says that Darwin unwittingly - because they looked so different from each other - had selected something like 17 different different species of finch. Well I gotta ask isn't a finch a finch? I mean yeah we've got different beak shapes or what other physical differences you might find, but are these finches incapable of producing offpsring that can in turn reproduce? If so, are they really different "species"?

It really drives me nuts when they discuss local variation of an animal and chock up different physical appearances to a different "species". And don't even get me started about how nature "selects" blah-blah-blah. Nature selects nothing! It is dumb luck! Their current example is some dumb mouse in Death Valley and wouldn't you guess, the dark ones live on dark rocks, the light colored ones one the desert floor. Well I'm sure Audrey could figure this out and the girl has absolutely no formal education. She does have common sense though. Makes me think of something from the Bible - roughly that man as he glories in his knowledge, is lost in foolishness.

Anyway, I'll move along. Enjoy New Years Eve.

Fat Guy in a Little Coat

How do you unvolunteer yourself from a goodwill action by someone? A family relative recently purchased a new TV and I off-handedly inquired about the "old" TV. Before I knew it, we'd been selected as the new parents of a 45" Hitachi projection TV. The only problem is that it is HUGE in our rather small living room -- a fact we didn't totally realize until it sat down in our living room -- and I don't know how to "tactfully" unvolunteer ourselves.

Planet Hoth

I have quite a bit of sympathy for those poor rebels on Hoth, not being able to get their speeders to work in the cold and whatnot (my wife, incidentally just looked at this post's topic and called me a dork). See, we're having our own problems here at Rustic Woods - like not yet having our parking lot touched by a snow plow - so it's a crapshoot trying to get out of the parking lot. Oh sure, you can back out of your spot or what-have-you, but don't you dare lose momentum or you're more of a sitting duck than the Millenium Falcon sans hyperdrive. Well, on the positive side I didn't have to work today and everything I need for tomorrow was done in anticipation -both planning ahead and excitment-wise - of a snow day today.