A lazy day

I spent most of the day in my pajamas. It was great. I kept thinking about all the critics of the bloggers during the Dan Rather thing when the Main Stream Media guys kept calling the bloggers "just some guys in their pajamas." The only problem with that is, those guys were actually doing something while wearing pajamas and today, I did absolutley nothing. The weather was fairly warm so I sat out on the neighbor's porch for an hour or so, then it got a little chilly so we went in. A portent of my warm-weather-life; sitting out front watching the world go by. I did have a nice long phone conversation with my sister Lisa today. She's in California just outside of Sacremento in a little town called Roseville. Her husband Rory and son Ryder were off at a skateboard park so she called. Annette had just sent her some photos and she said she'd sent Mom a DVD of photos and we should get one soon. Pretty exciting stuff, eh? Well it's either this or I start lecturing on Neo-Darwinism. OK, you asked for it. I'm writing an essay on Darwinism and here's an exerpt:
The Peppered Moth Story: The story that everybody learns in school. And guess what? It’s a horrible example of Natural Selection! Yet, if you were to ask anybody to give you an example of “Evolution in progress,” they would undoubtedly recite the Peppered Moth Story. You know the one where the moths changed color to adapt to the soot on the trees so the birds couldn’t see them and were therefore fit for survival. Yeah, that one. Thing is, the pictures we all saw in our school books were staged with dead moths pinned to a tree and these moths don’t hang out on the side of trees in the first place. And birds see mostly with ultra-violet light and probably don’t see the colors we see. Yet the moth’s color is directly correlated to the rise and fall of the soot in the air. So what’s going on? Well it seems the moths are changing color because of the soot in the air, but “Natural Selection” has little to do with it. What’s the lesson? Chalk one up for the Neo-Darwinists: Evolutionary change is pushed ahead by many complex things, but Natural Selection is not one of the big ones. And every year that goes by, it drops further down the list.

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