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..... [deep sigh] Eva Falk [img]http://www.egafd.com/forum/smileys/idontbelieveit.gif[/img] [img]http://www.egafd.com/forum/smileys/grin.gif[/img]

That would never have occurred to me. In fact she looked a bit like a certain Alaskan former politician. Was that Russia in the background?

Thanks for both IDs. I don't know why I hadn't capped this one before.

alec wrote:
> That would never have occurred to me.
Maybe the specs threw people- although IIRC she used to sport them quite
often back then. The teeth in the last cap are the real giveaway.


> like a certain Alaskan former politician.
Is she 'former'? I thought she was still knocking about on the fringes,
perish the thought..... I always took her main function to be to make Baby
Bush look like an intellectual. Anyway, she's a creationist and thus deserves
to be drowned in her own vomit.
And this is me feeling mellow, after a swordfish steak with steamed new pots,
mangetout, baby sweetcorn and mushrooms, followed by a Wispa ice-cream bar
and good coffee [img]http://www.egafd.com/forum/smileys/yummy.gif[/img], with Euro football on the telly [img]http://www.egafd.com/forum/smileys/football.gif[/img]- so you can
guess the strength of my feeling about history-deniers : -)

jj wrote:

> Anyway, she's a creationist and
> thus deserves
> to be drowned in her own vomit.

Have you noticed that the part of the political spectrum keenest to deny Darwin in biology are keenest to have survival of the fittest in economics, i.e. to give free play to the market red in tooth and claw?

It's another mark of their colossal stupidity [and/or selfishness/greed/
shortsightedness] that they refuse to admit that laisser-faire capitalism
is a busted flush; the planet just can't afford it, ecologically or financially
[and wherein, of course, the Chinese danger lurks].

I imagine Darwin [who was also ahead of his time in social matters] would
have rephrased that, with hindsight [having borrowed it from Herbert Spencer]...
'fitness' in evolutionary usage has of course nothing to do with human affairs.

It's a bit of an a posteriori argument [none the worse for that]: the 'fit'
genes are the ones that are seen to propagate themselves through a population-
and so one could never predict, a priori, those which would be selected- the
millions upon millions of small and large environmental influences that add up
to form 'selection pressure' just can't be pre-calculated. This is the trap
that snared the late great Stephen Jay Gould with his 'theory' of contingency-
and led him to state that, if played again from scratch, the 'tape of life'
would remain essentially the same. As Simon Conway Morris points out, this
is demonstrably false. There is no reason whatever to suppose that, for
example, 'intelligent' life would arise again, even in a [more or less] radically
new shape. No biologist worth his doctorate would argue that intelligence
has as yet a proven survival value- not when comparing the few million years
of hominid evolution with the 200 million of the dinosaurs or the 3.5 BILLION
of unicellular life : -)

In the longevity stakes I'll put my money on the rats and cockroaches ......
but even then only each-way.