A mixed week: Anne Coulter's latest book bombed Darwians as "liberals" and evolution as "holey" rather than Holy. Coulter is quite radical and I sometimes enjoy her bombast; she's also a bit impulsive. Darwinians fight a two-front battle: traditions to the left reject the notion of human instinct, those to the right dislike our skepticism about top-down designers. "New Scientist" pointed out this stuff several years ago but Coulter probably doesn't read it. (Robin Smith has an intriguing title: "Lies at the Altar" but is a disappointment, a stack of mottos rather than a structure spun from mate selection research.)

Not to worry!

Nature and Discovery Channels already converted our kids, I think, because of the immediacy and salience of what Uncle David has to tell them about choosing partners. I've also found the highschoolers to react "cool" when they hear I'm an evolutionist and, over the past decade, more adults know the word and I can spin Buss into recommendations intended to soothe marital partnerships.

I've probably lost a couple of chanters, however, and I've compromised: if they hear voices, I don't first reach for my explanations of schizophrenia or tell them that magnetic stimulation to their temporal lobe will keep them in church all the time.

Even the chanters still want the utility of mate selection data.

Even the chanters want both their immediate and future kids to have some breaks.

Even the chanters get into the idea that parents are the best predictor and exploratory system for their offspring...

And their Commandments instantiate evolutionary good sense.

I sometimes feel like Screwtape recruiting Wormwoods and, like CS Lewis's character, I ratchet ahead unless there's a war...

Life is good!

JB