Lofty Goals and Grandiose Views

As I settle into what will be sadly the last term of my life in WIMWI, life promises to be interesting. I have only 4 courses, one of which is an Independent Project (without any classes obviously). Don't have more than 11 classes in any week. Except for work for Chaos, and the IP, there is precious little to do.

And yet, there is so much to do. The most important goals for the next two months are:

• Learning/improving my German, French, Spanish and Japanese
• Clearing a huge reading backlog

(There is also a job to get, but that will be easy enough, of course :) )

The languages will be taken up next week. The backlog has begun to be tackled. Currently reading Dawkin's "The Ancestor's Tale." He is among my favourite authors, and his books illustrate some of the most interesting facets of the splendid phenomenon of evolution.

Darwin said, "There is a grandeur in this view of life," referring to the theory of evolution by natural selection in his "Origin of Species." I completely agree. One replicating molecule, accidentally created, is the ancestor of every known living organism. What an exciting thought! I almost begin feeling light-headed when reading or thinking about arms races, selfish genes, handicaps as signals (explained in another superb book, "The Handicap Principle" by Amotz and Avishaq Zahavi), etc. Truly grasping the timespans of hundreds of millions of years is beyond me, and the fact that this inability can be explained by appealing to evolutionary arguments about the human brain and thought processes is as lovely as the sea under a starry sky. Heady stuff!