Word: darwins
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...Thursday morning in March, 2002, John Darwin paddled his red kayak into the unforgiving North Sea near the industrial port of Hartlepool in northeastern England. He never returned home. In short order, an oar from Darwin's kayak washed up on a local beach. A search team of lifeboats, a Royal Navy ship and a Royal Air Force helicopter mobilized for a frantic, 16-hour search. His yellow life vest was found, but no trace of Darwin was discovered. When the splintered remains of his tiny vessel drifted ashore six weeks later, he was presumed drowned...
...More than five years later, Darwin has miraculously re-emerged - under strikingly peculiar circumstances. The 57-year-old former prison guard strolled into a police station on London's fashionable Savile Row Saturday and told officers, "I think I am a missing person." Darwin provided his name, birth date and address, but said he had no idea where he had been since vanishing. He was declared legally dead...
...sure, shown off to friends and rival collectors, but they were also, in their mysterious affinities and variations, clues to the overarching design of Nature, "the plan of the creation itself, the work of an all-wise, all-powerful deity," wrote William the son, who knew and influenced Charles Darwin but disagreed with him about God. Stacey's own long contemplation of the collections made her "constantly think how fantastic Nature is, how symmetrical it is," she says. "It's quite beyond comprehension that everything could be so amazingly attuned." Even if Museum doesn't impel readers up the stairs...
Throughout history, the best minds have struggled to define what music is for. To Pythagoras, it was the sound of mathematical, cosmic harmony reverberating in the human soul; to Darwin, a function of sexual selection; to psychologist Steven Pinker, it is a kind of "auditory cheesecake ... crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties." Like life itself, music is universally experienced yet ultimately eludes explanation...
That would be the same indifference that nature shows for our lives. Neither Darwin nor physics requires closure, foreshadowing or justice. And as anyone who's watched a loved one die knows, biology does not supply sound tracks, convenient timing or highlight reels...