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.

Bedford and Biology

Today, I'm turning my attention to our neighboring town over the river, Bedford, MA (not to be confused with New Bedford, MA).   I lived there in an earlier life for longer than I've ever lived anywhere.  And I still spend a lot of time driving through it, shopping, etc.

If you follow the link given, you'll certainly read about Bedford being the home of the oldest flag in the United States.  And a few other interesting tidbits, especially regarding the nation's first narrow-gauge railroad, the remarkably short-lived Billerica and Bedford Railroad.  The kids called it "Deadford" but that's a bit unfair, I think.  It's actually a fantastic town to grow up in (as my two did).

But there is no list of famous sons (or daughters) of Bedford.  No Presidents (or even Vice-Presidents) were born there, no notable politicians, entertainers, sports figures.  At least none that are mentioned, or that I know of.

Meanwhile (I'll connect) ...

Knowing how much I love to read Richard Dawkins books, and how much I love to listen to recordings in the car, my son Will gave me for Christmas a recording of the latest Dawkins volume The Greatest Show on Earth.  In it, he makes the case for evolution according to natural selection, by examining the evidence.  As he admits, his earlier books have all just assumed the fact of evolution.  But there is a growing (yes, growing) number of people in the civilized world who don't believe in evolution.  Forty percent (!!!) in the United States, according to various polls. 

It's scandalous!  Yes, Americans are famous for being bad at mathematics and geography, not to mention spelling, but biology? Well, of course, we know that it's all political.  There are some people who, like the Catholic church for the last two millenia, have tried to pull the wool over our eyes in order to line their own pockets.  I have to admit that it was a smart tactic, at least before old Gutenberg screwed things up.  Keep the masses ignorant and live a nice comfortable life.  There are people here in the U.S. who are spending lots of money (someone else's money, presumably) doing essentially the same thing: try to stop the ordinary people from finding out that we are the result of three and a half billion years of evolution, rather than having been created in a puff of smoke 4,000 years ago.  And they're doing quite a good job of it apparently.  They only have another 60% to go and we'll all be back in the dark ages.

Anyway, Dawkin's book is his answer to these whackos.  He's laying the case out like a detective novel.  The book is great of course, although I'm not 100% sure that switching voices between himself and his wife, Lalla, is really all that helpful to the listener.

In any case, the first chapter has reminded me what a debt we all owe to that great evolutionary biologist, Ernst Mayr.  I admit to being appallingly ignorant of the details of this great man's life.  I didn't know for example that he lived to be 100 years old and certainly didn't know that, get this, he died in Bedford, MA just five years ago.  Who knew?

This discovery reminded me that in researching Igor Stravinsky years ago for the program notes that I write for SPM, I read that he (Stravinsky) had married his wife in, you guessed it, Bedford, MA.

All of which points back to that Wikipedia page.  Someone needs to go in there and add a few famous names.  If there are any, apart from the two I've mentioned who are, admittedly, a little incidental.