Hey, I got a beef with whoever writes the narratives of the PBS series Nature.  It really bugs me when the narrator – and it happens all the time – says stuff like the panther chameleon’s eyes have been engineered  by nature to rotate independently as they stalk their prey.

Panther Chameleon by Robbie Labanowski

Note to the science writers at Nature: check out Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species.  Natural Selection ≠ Engineering.  Natural Selection is a horrifically random process that includes genetic mutations, asteroids colliding with the Earth, etc.  Your use of the word engineering suggests the decrepit teleological intelligent-design argument (as if having an asteroid smack into the planet is an efficient way for an engineer to facilitate the rise of mammals).

I’ll give Robert Frost the last word on this topic:

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth —
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small. 

Now, that’s what I call engineering: a Petrarchan sonnet that through pattern debunks the argument from design!

Hey, what’s all this negativity, mon?  It’s Bloomsday, for Joyce’s sake and Father’s Day to boot, not to mention Sherry Browne’s birthday.

Let’s not squander this day bellyaching.  Why not in honor of the Master spend your day wandering the streets of Folly, breakfasting on Guinness and kidney, writing love letters using a nom de plume, hitting a funeral, lunching in a pub on cucumber sandwiches, visiting a library and then another pub, releasing some tensions at the beach, getting into an altercation with a one-eyed anti-semite, dropping in on a maternity ward and then a brothel, bringing home a troubled young man, peeing together in your garden as you bid him adieu, then crawling into bed with your wife who has fond memories of you in your youth.

O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Hell yes!

Cheers, oh my brothers and sisters! Cheers!

art by Sherry Browne