EvoLit 2011: Evolution, a process in progress

"I wanted to go the rooftree of Maine to start my trip before turning west.  It seemed to give the journey a design, and everything in the world must have design or the human mind rejects it. But in addition it must have purpose or the human conscience shies away from it."

"In Spanish, there is a word for which I ca't find a counterword in English ... If one is vacilando, he is going somewhere but doesn't greatly care whether or not he gets there, although he has direction .... Let us say we wanted to walk in the streets of Mexico City but not at random.  We would choose some article almost certain not to exist there and then diligently try to find it."

 ...  John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

"There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning."

... Thorton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Evolutionary exuberance ... for better and for worse

How many kinds of orchids?  Why?

How many kinds of plane accidents?  Why?  

Universe in which there is no fixed purpose or design or meaning to be found but one in which there are more possibilities than currently can be enumerated and the potential to bring new ones into being. 

Anne: Adaptation as a way of dealing with the plague?