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.

Poetry and Science: Fundamentally the Same

An important warning was voiced to me on the act of writing about an author’s intent. When one attempts to do such a thing as actively write about such a thing as the intent of the author, this person should know the intent of the author from the author him/herself. I have no such reference to aide me in knowing the exact intent of the author. I seek merely to claim an assumed intent in all pieces of literature based on the form in which the pieces were published. Since “… difficulty in the evaluation and application of artist’s intent was traced to ambiguity of the term “intent”, (Dykstra) I wish to clarify myself before I begin, by defining some of my terminology as quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary Online:

Fiction-- The species of literature which is concerned with the narration of imaginary events and the portraiture of imaginary characters; fictitious composition. Now usually, prose novels and stories collectively; the composition of works of this class.