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"Serendip is a gathering place for people who suspect that life's instructions are always ambiguous and incomplete ... an expanding forum and a continually developing set of resources to explore and support intellectual and social change ... in how one makes sense of life" .... Serendip home page

An interesting/satisfying Serendip couple of days ... 

“We see beautiful adaptation everywhere and in every part of the organic world.”

                                                                                    -- Charles Darwin, Origin of Species

My old colleague and friend Eric Raimy posted some interesting thoughts in Facebook recently.   Some excerpts for those who can't get there directly, followed by some thoughts of my own ...

“Of Something Done, I Know Not Where”

Abby Moskowitz

Cool Narrative; Cruel Metaphor?

by Tim Richards

Are Humans Hurting Their Chances of Evolving by Helping One Another?

Good people are bad for evolution. It’s the truth. Good people are out there saving starving children. They are lobbying for their governments to send supplies of food and medicine to places domestic and foreign to help those in need. How dare these people do such things? Or are they actually giving evolution a better chance of occurring within the human race?

"Nowhere is nature more accustomed to display her secret

 mysteries than in cases where she shows traces of her

 workings apart from the beaten path."--William Harvey

In "On The Origin of Species", Darwin presents what he has observed occurring in nature and writes about the theory he has come up with from his observations - the theory of evolution.  In his concluding paragraph, he sums up his story of evolution by saying that all things living today "have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws...being Growth with Reproduction...Variability...and as a consequence to Natural Selection...Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows." (2) What Darwin discusses, then, are the patterns and laws that govern the evolution of animals in a physiological representation of variation.