I was really worried about my mom’s visit, but we had a really wonderful time. She’s changed a lot – she believes that evolution happens. This is a huge step away from biblical literalism. Her rejection of creationism meant that she could truly enjoy our trip to the Museum of Northern Arizona.
Ammonite Fossils
The museum has an awesome geology exhibit on the Grand Canyon that explores how the land has changed over time. Fossils from different layers are a large component of the exhibit. They’re a lot more interesting when you don’t believe god put them there to test your faith.
There’s a new edition of Berry Go Round up at Foothills Fancies. I particularly liked the Watcher’s posts on spring along an elevational gradient.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Still, except for the rare behavioral conditions approaching total genetic determination, heritabilities are at best risky predictors of personal capacity in existing and future environments. … The message from geneticists to intellectuals and policy-makers is this: Choose the society you want to promote, then prepare to live with its heritabilities. Never favor the reverse, of promoting social policies just to change heritabilities. For best results, cultivate individuals, not groups.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Perhaps God did create all organisms, including human beings, in finished form, in one stroke, and maybe it all happened several thousand years ago. But if that is true, He also salted the earth with false evidence in such endless and exquisite detail, and so thoroughly from pole to pole, as to make us conclude first that life evolved, and second that the process took billions of years. Surely Scripture tells us He would not do that. The Prime Mover of the Old and New Testaments is variously loving, magisterial, denying, thunderously angry, and mysterious, but never tricky.
E.O. Wilson in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
We know that virtually all of human behavior is transmitted by culture. We also know that biology has an important effect on the origin of culture and its transmission. The question remaining is how biology and culture interact, and in particular how they interact across all societies to create the commonalities of human nature. What, in final analysis, joins the deep, mostly genetic history of the species as a whole to the more recent cultural histories of its far-flung societies?
Finals were over in early May, and I was looking forward to long, warm days with time to go to work and cook and dance and read. Unfortunately, it’s been mostly in the 60s with cloudy and sometimes rainy weather nearly every day. Having a migraine every afternoon has made me pretty miserable and kept me from accomplishing much of anything.
My summer work list is a lot more daunting now that I’ve got more than a month less to do it all than I’d planned.
And my mother is coming to visit, which I’m pretty concerned about. My mother is a fundamentalist Christian and chooses to ignore the parts of my life that don’t agree with her beliefs. The person she says she loves and misses doesn’t actually exist. I’m wondering how long she’ll be able to maintain the delusion when directly confronted with the things and people I surround myself with.
Instead of a bunch of links to depressing stories, I’ve got a depressing (but very very lovely) poem for you this Saturday.
Death of a Field
Paula Meehan
The field itself is lost the morning it becomes a site
When the Notice goes up: Fingal County Council – 44 houses
The memory of the field is lost with the loss of its herbs
Though the woodpigeons in the willow
And the finches in what’s left of the hawthorn hedge
And the wagtail in the elder
Sing on their hungry summer song
The magpies sound like flying castanets
And the memory of the field disappears with its flora:
Who can know the yearning of yarrow
Or the plight of the scarlet pimpernel
Whose true colour is orange?
And the end of the field is the end of the hidey holes
Where first smokes, first tokes, first gropes
Were had to the scentless mayweed
The end of the field as we know it is the start of the estate
The site to be planted with houses each two or three bedroom
Nest of sorrow and chemical, cargo of joy
The end of dandelion is the start of Flash
The end of dock is the start of Pledge
The end of teazel is the start of Ariel
The end of primrose is the start of Brillo
The end of thistle is the start of Bounce
The end of sloe is the start of Oxyaction
The end of herb robert is the start of Brasso
The end of eyebright is the start of Fairy
Who amongst us is able to number the end of grasses
To number the losses of each seeding head?
I’ll walk out once
Barefoot under the moon to know the field
Through the soles of my feet to hear
The myriad leaf lives green and singing
The million million cycles of being in wing
That – before the field become solely map memory
In some archive of some architect’s screen
I might possess it or it possess me
Through its night dew, its moon white caul
Its slick and shine and its prolifigacy
In every wingbeat in every beat of time
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