Survival of the stable is the game

The tide came in and I gots out
I chills on the rocks while the predators pout
They was a tiger shark coming at my ass
And Shamu-y tried to woo me like Teddy Pendergrass

An honored assignment

I just wrote a newspaper article on Professor Richard Dawkins, for which I got to meet and interview him. Here's an excerpt:

Me: I was wondering, does evolution occur only in response to changes in the physical environment? The reason why I ask is, assuming humans will evolve, can actual physical change occur in response to memes or culture?

Richard Dawkins: When you say 'does it occur only in response to physical environment,' physical environment can be narrowly interpreted meaning something boring like the weather, tracking ice ages and droughts. Already in talking about arms races I've moved away from that. Evolution is progressive because predators respond to prey, and prey respond to predators, parasites, and so on.

You're talking it one stage further and asking about memes, which is another way of saying cultural evolution. I suppose I could interpret your question by saying there's co-evolution between culture and biological genetic evolution. One drives the other and the other drives the one. This point of view has been made, and I think it is an interesting one.

Genes are being naturally selected in a world which includes culture. Culture is itself evolving in a non-genetic way orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. And so there could be theoretically a co-evolutionary arms race between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.

An example might be the origin of language. Cultural or genetic evolutionary change made language possible. Then language itself evolved by non-genetic cultural means. That created a new environment for genetic evolution in which those individuals who were best at exploiting the culture's language were the ones who reproduced best. That changed the conditions in which cultural evolution could take place. You could imagine a kind of software-hardware co-evolution. So yes, I think so.

The decline of observation

Fewer 'stanis are tearing out their hair. At a lilt they find a light powd'ry florality to the air, air unseeded and almost unnoticeable even were there wind off these ice cream peaks. The climbing time is over. Everything is tilted on the downhill, not for destruction, but for momentum. What has changed is not the cycle of life, nor evolution, not a single culture, but the culture of all. Uncommon tongues like uncommon odors no longer equate to the strange. The chill is the same felt by every underdog partisan who lived. One absorbs their birdsong ululations face to face, the perches discarded, the binoculars trampled on the ground.

Hear ye

GYOZA EPIDEMIC RISING IN PACIFIC WORLD
Bland Meat Pockets Newest Sponge-Like Mistake
Stomachs across nation 'a little dominated'
Ailing kidney machines snake towards horizon on march across verdant veldt, bedpan

Now available to order, San Tropez

My book that was serialized online, There Are No Tropes in San Tropez, is now available to order in print. It's $9.99 through lulu.com, 196 pages, 27 chapters, and very readable with good margins like a Vonnegut paperback.

Also, to celebrate I redesigned my website.

I revised the book too, so this printed version is the definitive version. There are no new chapters, but I went through and made changes and tightened things. It's better now and this is the version I'm happiest with.

It remains a stinger

The hex hurts. Whether cast at the apogee of zest or while stranded at a foreign airport your plane stuck in the snow, it remains a stinger. Just as cupid's arrows e'er prick with love. Yet the context chuffs you on your bum shoulder. It is the act that fancies interpretation. It is the rest that is as it is. A maelstrom makes you smile, when I trace it on your tiny belly.

Dome-sized weighted seafaring net

By the Gulf of Golgotha he will stand down. Down. Down. Oh sure, he'll spaz back and forth a bit like a guppy dodging a net, but we're talking dome-sized weighted seafaring net here, adept at capturing 1000-pound marlins as much as curvy seahorses. It is foregone. But he ain't there yet. He's still got weeks to get full, get empty, get dry, get wet, get up, get tired, get naked, get dressed. There's some nice things to look at while he's doing these things, and some nice things to hear and smell, and maybe some nice things to taste and touch, if he's lucky. And by being here, he is.

My sense of home

Aphids plant their appendages in the invisible pumice holes that dot the outer facade. The tiny nicks cover my home. They have ruined my feeling of comfort. I am inside this egg, suspended and warm, then, wishing for something smooth, and now aware of the appendages playing hopscotch in the holes outside. But I don't need choking clouds of bugspray. I have music. I turn it loud. I regain my sense of home without having to crack this shell and kill them.