Let’s face it. Spend months on a desolate island in the Pacific looking at the beaks of Galapagos finches and before long, you might begin to realize something is going on there. Naturalist Charles Darwin did and it led to the theory of natural selection. Those individuals with heritable traits better suited to the environment will survive.

That’s not the way my father saw things in the natural world. He had his own rules that made you worthy of passing on your genes. Continue reading →