Listen: Gauger on the Limits of Evolutionary Optimization

@Patrick
Of course Darwin has no personal responsibility for death, disease etc. The poem was meant mainly as a joke and the use of the name Darwin was to personify an impersonal process. The use of a person’s name to stand for the system of thought he began is quite common, such as Lysenkoism, Maoism, Trotskyites, Stalinist, Freudian, Orwellian.
However, Darwin does get credit for the idea of natural selection operating on naturally occurring variation in the population. That’s what the poem is about. No need for drift, incomplete lineage sorting, mutational bias etc. So it would be less accurate for the hedgehog to exclaim “Evolution!”

You are right, it is not my style music, but once we got past the intro and she started singing it was fine. The lyrics were good and descriptive of some of the tremendous things we see in life’s history. And it does treat nature with awe. But the wheels seemed out of place.

I found this last night. A little more isolating, but you may like it.

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