Thursday, September 02, 2010

To India!

One week from today, I'll be part of a team of 10 people from Dow Corning sites around the world traveling to Bangalore, India for a month-long service trip.
I'm very honored to be chosen to represent our company and contribute to improving sustainability in a real way.  My sub-team will be working with Sustaintech to improve their supply chain and quality assurance for cooking products that use less fuel and improve safety and economics for their operators.
I'm very much going to miss my family for the time that I'm away, but we're blessed to have many family, friends, and neighbors that will be looking after them, so I know that they will be well protected and cared for.
Unlike my annual backpacking trips though, I will be in contact with home through blogs, email, skype, etc.  As a matter of fact, the team will have a running blog of our adventures, and I'll plan to link mine to my facebook page so all my FB friends can stay up to date with what I'm up to.
Please pray for our team that we would be well prepared, and that we will have a positive impact in India and in our various home cities when we return.

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Science-Geek

I recently read Richard Dawkins' new book called "The Greatest Show on Earth - The Evidence for Evolution" I've not read Dawkins before, and I was really impressed with his engaging writing style and wit. He starts off by stating that "Evolution is a fact, and this book will demonstrate it." and then goes into great and interesting detail on the subject of natural selection.
I kept expecting the natural selection discussion to build into some sort of proof of evolution, but it never came. Showing that natural selection is true isn't surprising or controversial. As a matter of fact, the key word there is "selection." There must be some pool to select from, which is precisely why in the example of the many thousands of generations of E. Coli didn't evolve into something other than E. Coli. Through natural selection, they selected different attributes that were already present, but they didn't become some new thing.
Toward the end of the book, he's honest enough to admit that there's no evidence for what the first steps were, and he comes to the conclusion that "It must have been whatever it took to get natural selection started." That sounds a lot like creation to me.
Far from proving that evolution from nothing to life as we know it today is a "fact", this book simply points out that somehow self-replicating life was created, and life has been making small adaptations since then.