It’s pretty remarkable that human beings have evolved to be creatures who can stand around a fire conversing about evolution. There’s something delightfully circular about that, like the mind observing the mind, or riding your bike to ride bikes. Natural selection, the “blind watchmaker,” as Richard Dawkins refers to it, sure has done a good job of enabling itself to observe itself, even with those sightless eyes.
Moistra and Softcore were debating, debunking, and splitting tiny hairs on points almost as miniscule as the genes to which they were referring, but the notion that stuck with this layman was the idea of convergent evolution, whereby similar structures evolve in organisms whose last common ancestor didn’t have them--like how wings show up on everything from dragonflies to bald eagles or how so many creatures in the ocean turn out to be streamlined.
The same principle applies to Thursday night rides, of course, as so often, by different pathways, we eventually find ourselves drinking beer and whiskey around a campfire. Westlake Center, then, can be seen as those first amino acids coming together in the primordial soup but then the tree branches off in myriad directions, north, south, west, and as it did last evening, in a sort of easterly direction to first pay brief homage to interred ancestors and then take relatively familiar routes to the fanciest of our hometown’s official wood-burning venues.
Numbers dwindled along the way, but that’s evolution, right? Nature prefers efficiency, but it also seems to adore excess, otherwise, there’s no way there could be peacocks and pandas, not to mention humans on bikes, at firepits, talking about genetic drift among other things.
Or this, from French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."
Moistra and Softcore were debating, debunking, and splitting tiny hairs on points almost as miniscule as the genes to which they were referring, but the notion that stuck with this layman was the idea of convergent evolution, whereby similar structures evolve in organisms whose last common ancestor didn’t have them--like how wings show up on everything from dragonflies to bald eagles or how so many creatures in the ocean turn out to be streamlined.
The same principle applies to Thursday night rides, of course, as so often, by different pathways, we eventually find ourselves drinking beer and whiskey around a campfire. Westlake Center, then, can be seen as those first amino acids coming together in the primordial soup but then the tree branches off in myriad directions, north, south, west, and as it did last evening, in a sort of easterly direction to first pay brief homage to interred ancestors and then take relatively familiar routes to the fanciest of our hometown’s official wood-burning venues.
Numbers dwindled along the way, but that’s evolution, right? Nature prefers efficiency, but it also seems to adore excess, otherwise, there’s no way there could be peacocks and pandas, not to mention humans on bikes, at firepits, talking about genetic drift among other things.
Or this, from French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: “Remain true to yourself, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge."
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