The great evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, scourge of creationists, was attending a conference in America. At the concluding banquet he illustrated what is arguably his greatest contribution to biological science, that natural selection operates at the level of the gene, with a limerick.
An itinerant selfish gene
Said "bodies a-plenty I've seen
You think you're so clever
But I'll live for ever
You're just a survival machine"
When I was at university, studying Zoology as it happens, religious thinking still resisted the concept of natural selection to some extent and tried to find holes in it. It has always struck me as ironic that Darwin was a devout Christian and Mendel an abbot. So to me:
The essence of science is doubt
There's a lot about which we know nowt
Belief is OK
At least in its way
But it stops us from finding things out.
My principal tutor was an authority on snails, as well as carrying the torch for natural selection. I notice from a recent magazine that they are still being studied, some 60 years later.
For years we've been studying snails
They're a lot more convenient than whales
Having only one foot
They mostly stay put
And when moving they leave you some trails
The other everlasting research animal is undoubtedly the fruit fly, about which by now there can hardly be anything wholly mysterious. Apparently we have now got round to investigating its motivation.
Now we know the genome of the fruit fly
We can find out the code that it lives by
Its easy to feed
And willing to breed
So what does it think we could next try
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