Survival of the fittest

I'm still enjoying listening to the recording of Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth and it is, as is everything by Dawkins, really excellent.  He and his beautiful wife, actress Lalla Ward, share the reading and, in an about-turn of my previous blog comments, I really think that this format enhances the experience.  She has a correspondingly lovely voice, while Dawkins' own voice is also easy to listen to.

One of the most exciting recent developments, and which is covered in some detail, is the 20-plus year experiment of Professor Lenski at Michigan State University (presumably no relation of the Lensky who met such an untimely death at the hands of Eugene Onegin).  Briefly, they have allowed 12 "tribes" of the bacterium E. coli to go through a daily feast and famine cycle for, at this point, almost 22 years.  The results are quite amazing and something of an embarrassment to the creationists, who are now doing everything they can to discredit the results, just as you'd expect.

Dawkins himself has been busy promoting the book and appearing on various TV outlets, even on Al Jezeera where he was, rather surprisingly, very favorably interviewed, given what he says about the Judeo-Christian-Islamic deity in The God Delusion.  There's also an interview (if you can call it that) with Bill O'Reilly where O'Reilly predictably manages to shout louder than Dawkins.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, our boys in blue, the Patriots have set a new NFL record for embarrassing losses.  They changed the script from we go ahead by 17 points in the fourth quarter only to lose it in the last minute to a completely new idea: we allow the opponents to completely outclass us and begin the second quarter down 21 to nothing.  At least they keep us guessing!  In this case, it was the Baltimore Ravens who were fitter and therefore survived.  I must say they seemed to be a fairly complete team: awesome defense, a better running game than I've seen in the NFL for a while, and a moderately decent passing game.  Maybe they will go all the way to the Superbowl.

It's hard to know exactly what went wrong.  Clearly the entire team was in shock after, get this, winning the toss but electing to receive in the second half, then allowing the first play from scrimmage to rumble 90+ yards for a touchdown.  On the subsequent series, Brady was completely at sea.  To what extent that was because Julian Edelman couldn't get open like Wes Welker would have, or whether Brady and the team were just not prepared for the Baltimore defense, it's hard for me to judge.  But I don't really think it was the Welker/Edelman factor.  We still have Randy Moss, and several other competent receivers, for goodness sake!

Unfortunately, my team's efforts in the open knockouts at the most recent bridge tournament, were agonizingly similar to Brady et al's.  The first two boards (of a total of 24) that we played at our table ended up as losses of 20 and 13 imps!  We outplayed our opponents 50-23 on the other 22 boards but it was a question of too little, too late.  Still, we managed to get 3rd (of 20) in the board-a-match the following day so we recovered some self-respect.