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On 17 May 2010 (our son's 35 birthday), I found myself at Chesterfield station in Derbyshire with a little time of my hands. To my surprise I discovered a statue of George Stephenson (supposedly one of our distant relatives) of Rocket fame outside the station entrance. Stephenson died in Chesterfield and is buried in the nearby churchyard at the church with its famous crooked spire. The bronze statue was erected in in 2005 to mark the opening of the new station entrance hall with a man who was so instrumental in the establishment of travel by train. I wandered psychogeographically round the precincts of the station entrance admiring the solid red brick architecture. And the intricacy of the view up Corporation Street from Crow Lane. I also enjoyed the sight and sweetly pungent smell of a flowering dwarf broom hedge (possibly Cytisus x praecox 'Allgold'). Soon though I was speeding through the Derbyshire Dales countryside at its late spring best en rout...

In the Times Literary Supplement for 11 February 2009, Richard Dawkins reviews a book by Professor Jerry Coyne called Why evolution is true published by Oxford University Press.  Dawkins is sufficiently persuasive to have induced me to order a copy, so I might dare to say a bit more after I have read it. While I have been happy since childhood to believe, alongside Professor Coyne, that evolution is true, I often feel that the leaders in the field are suggesting that nothing about the mechanisms of evolution remain unresolved.  It is encouraging therefore to read in a paper by Antónia Monteiro and Ondrej Podlaha (2010) from the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University "There is still much to do in order to fully understand how novel complex traits evolve. ....  it is important to continue exploring the full complement of genes that are shared across multiple traits to identify gene clusters that may be behaving as an integrated and context-insensit...