Rain, exams and the case for chemistry in the kitchen

Ugh, exams... exams and rain. Actually, I don't mind the rain in the slightest - the cool change is lovely, and water on the road tends to muffle the traffic roar to which I've become accustomed. Physiology and Micro midterms done (and they weren't so bad, either); Bichem's on Thursday and Molcular Bio isn't for two weeks, so I'm not too worried.

Worse is my book pile - it teeters at my bedside, threatening to crush me in my sleep. I've not read any more Dawkins, and that's on top of about five half-done novels, two new ones I impulse-bought today (Nick Hornby and Johnathan Safran Foer) and recursively, a book about reading (the auther is just as negligent as me, I'm afraid, so it's not helping in the least). Not to mention the inch of science magazines. Bring on Easter break!

Speaking of Easter, this is me reminding myself: post the awesome recipe for lemon tarts. Hey, it's sort of scientific, cooking is half chemistry, half physics after all. Citric acid and sucrose do nice things to the tongue! And then there's eggs denaturing in the oven... maybe I should turn this into a blog for kitchen chemists.

Cumulative Selection

I'm sick of studying but I haven't much to blog about. Solution? Quote Dr. Dawkins!

"It is amazing that you can still read calculations like my haemoglobin calculation, used as though they constituted arguments against Darwin's theory. The people who do this, often expert in the their own field ... seem sincerely to believe that Darwinism explains living organisation in terms of chance - 'single-step selection' - alone. This belief, that Darwinian evolution is 'random', is not merely false. It is the exact opposite of the truth. Chance is a minor ingredient in the Darwinian recipe, but the most important ingredient is cumulative selection which is quintessentially nonrandom."
~ The Blind Watchmaker, Chapter 3, 1986

As I read this book I keep getting the uncanny feeling Dawkins is reading my thoughts. Early on, he mentions that natural selection is not purposeful, just an inevitable occurrence when you have variation within a population that reproduces and passes on its characteristics. I thought to myself that thinking this is in some way directed is like thinking that a sieve in a river catching large but not small objects is doing it for a purpose. This organisation out of chaos is not for anything, it's just a consequence of how sieves work. Two pages later and he's talking about sieves. I guess it's just a common example.