Today’s photo shows a small ‘no-mow’ area in Pearson Park left for the first time this spring and summer and shows what Nature shows which would otherwise have been just an area of mown grass if not left. Glorious display of buttercups and thistles which, although they might seem uninviting, are a magnet for bees and pollinating insects when in flower.
Another recent read was Richard Dawkins ‘The Selfish Gene’ which was published back in the late 1980s. I say read, well I read a bit of it, before scanning a bit , before giving up. But I read enough to realise that the author was supporting Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution but doing it with reference to knowledge of the building blocks of life itself, a field of study that Darwin. and other late-Victorian scholars could not have known about.
Coincidentally, I recently attended a site visit to a masonic lodge in Sutton (an ex-Primitive Methodist chapel), organised by Hull Civic Society. The high officer giving the presentation did a good selling job – lots of money to charities, members law-abiding citizens, multi-cultural now etc. However the first thing he said was something I didn’t know, to pass the entrance ‘ceremony’ you have to believe in an ‘all powerful being’. So atheists and, indeed agnostics, fall at the first fence.
For some reason the name Aldous Huxley came to mind recently, remembered as a ‘philosopher’ on the Brains Trust, BBC black and white tv, 12inch screen, late 1950s (I don’t think we knew any ‘philosophers’, although, on reflection, we knew a few who thought they were. Apparently Mr. Huxley’s grandfather (maybe great-grandfather) had been nicknamed ‘Darwin’s Bulldog’ for his stubborn promotion of Darwin’s ideas on Evolution. It helps to have distinguished ancestors – or does it?