This morning a public works truck pulled up to street lamp in front of our house. A man in an orange vest hopped into a bucket that was raised up to the level of the light to change the bulb. Luke and I rushed to put on shoes and jackets to go watch. The orange-vested man waved to my son who waved back frantically until his little arm was like to pop out of its socket. I think he’s found his destiny. Nothing pleases this child more than going up or turning on lights so hanging out on top of cranes as a caretaker for a city’s worth of street lamps is clearly a dream occupation. His little eyes were as big as his head.
In other what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up news, I was listening to a story on This Week in Science this morning about a group of 10 lizards that were introduced to a Croatian island and left unattended for 30 years. When the scientists got back to the island, they found that these lizards had evolved into a new species... in 3 decades. Speciation at warp speed. How cool is that? Random mutation and a pinch of genetic drift and you have a brand new lizard. Nice. As Justin on TWIS said, to all those creationists out there who say, “Prove to me that evolution exists. I want to watch it,” well, watch this story as they do further study. And funny, it’s not the diabolical scheme that it is often promoted as. It comes down to a bunch of lizards doing what they do: looking for lunch and trying to get laid, much like the rest of us.
Of course these new lizards annihilated the island’s native lizard population, which just goes to show you what happens when humans play god and mess around with ecological systems they don’t understand (i.e. all of them). The people are scratching ‘cause the rabbits have nothing to eat. My favorite example of such is in Hawaii. The sugar cane farmers were having problems with rats in the fields, so some brilliant person says, “Hey, mongooses eat rats.” Do your research, pal. Your rats are nocturnal and mongooses are not. Doh! To this day they have a rat problem and a mongoose problem. Not that they have much in the way of sugar cane farms out in Hawaii any more since everybody buys beet sugar from South America instead.
Speaking of genetic drift, this blog is blowing wildly off course. I’ll end it here before it evolves into a new species of its own.