New Photos

By no means an orchid fanatic, it does please me when they rebloom, and only then will I show them here

You’ve seen evolutionary maps before. Even Charles Darwin used the metaphor, envisioning an earlier species that gave rise to new ones, each new species splitting off as a branch of an ever-growing tree.

That's where this piece of ignorant schadenfreude in Wired lost me. To suggest that Darwin was using some old metaphor that was tired in his day is to fundamentally fail to grasp what that little sketch of his did, how profoundly it changed the way we think about life. A different sentence at the very end of the piece doesn't begin to make amends.

OK, so the bun-fight among the cladists can help while away an idle few minutes on the intertubes, but Sheesh.

I far preferred the rumble between evolution-by-jerks and evolution-by-creeps.

Filed under | link |

Webmentions

Webmentions allow conversations across the web, based on a web standard. They are a powerful building block for the decentralized social web.

If you write something on your own site that links to this post, you can send me a Webmention by putting your post's URL in here:

Comments

I very much regret that Russian spammers have made my comment system unusable. If you want to email me a comment, it is easy enough to find the address and I will be happy to do the needful behind the scenes. Webmentions remain available (for now).