Welcome to Another Year

Welcome to the ninth calendar year of essays on this blog, which has been online for about 100 months. As in all previous years, I will focus on scientific issues related primarily to evolution and ecology, and the way evolutionary and ecological concepts help us to understand ourselves better. If I start to rant about politics or religion, I always try to bring it back to evolution and ecology. These are the things, not politics and religion, in which I have expertise.

I wanted to start the year by providing some permalinks to a selected few essays in this blog that those of you (most of you) who were not reading it in fall 2009 might want to look back at. There are so many entries (496 so far) that right now all I can do is highlight a few of them from 2009 and 2010.

• The Evolution of an Evolutionist (How I became an evolutionist)
• St. Charles (Darwin had some saintly characteristics)
• Darwin Says No to the Idea of Inevitable Progress (Amphibians did not evolve because they wanted to invade the land)
• Natural Selection of Fiction (Cultural evolution occurs among pieces of literature)
• Darwin and Death (Why did death evolve?)
• There are Adaptations and There are Adaptations (A brief introduction to exaptations)
• Creationism: Selective Defense of Biblical Literalism (Creationists certainly do not take all of the Bible literally!)
• Welcome to the Republican Climate! (The globally-warmed future will be almost exclusively the product of the Republican Party)
• Cottonwood Investments (Cottonwoods invest their growth differently than oaks, and this is part of their adaptation)
• The Real World (The real world is plants and ecosystems, not the human economy)
• Weedy Religions (The religions that thrive under conditions of disruption will spread, while the wise religions will not.)
• A Lover’s Embrace? (You cannot resolve creation and evolution simply by saying God used evolution. Sorry.)
• The Death of Gonzago (You can find the scientific method in Hamlet)
• Scientific Faith (Scientists have faith in the comprehensibility of the world)
• I Humbly Suggest that Scientists Should Rule the World (Let evidence, not delusion, create our future)
• Fiscal Responsibility in the Evolutionary World (wild organisms cannot use deficit spending)
• Earth is a Lucky Planet: Thank Our Lucky Star (Earth is lucky because our Sun is a stable star)
• Earth is a Lucky Planet: Thank God for Jupiter (Jupiter swept our solar system clear of many asteroids)

Look back at some of these and enjoy them.