Progress [Guest News Poem, by Valerie Valdes, July 21, 2010]
A process unending, as slow as a glacier
receding from valleys left fertile behind it.
So chickens are born from Jurassic ancestors,
a commonplace phoenix with eons-old ashes.
But mankind believed he had already finished
the circular race that each creature is running
in small, ceaseless circles concentrically soaring
up toward that pinnacle: nature’s perfection.
To find human footsteps deflowering virginal
forests instead of revisiting pathways
worn down by familiar forms of a phenotype
reduces exclusive to merely conventional.
As mountains are scaled, each believed to be tallest,
beyond them clouds part to reveal peaks much higher.
* * * * *
Adventures in Very Recent Evolution (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/science/20adapt.html)
"Many have assumed that humans ceased to evolve in the distant past, perhaps when people first learned to protect themselves against cold, famine and other harsh agents of natural selection. But in the last few years, biologists peering into the human genome sequences now available from around the world have found increasing evidence of natural selection at work in the last few thousand years, leading many to assume that human evolution is still in progress.
“I don’t think there is any reason to suppose that the rate has slowed down or decreased,” says Mark Stoneking, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany."
--Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, July 19, 2010
The very talented Valerie Valdes maintains her own site here:
http://candleinsunshine.com/asthemoonclimbs/ and you should read it when you're done here
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