The Efforts and Rewards of Naturalism

One day I buried myself, prone, in the muck of a muskrat house. While my clothes absorbed local color, my eyes absorbed the lore of the marsh. A hen redhead cruised by with her convoy of ducklings, pink-billed fluffs of greenish-golden down. A Virginia rail nearly brushed my nose. The shadow of a pelican sailed over a pool in which a yellow-leg alighted with warbling whistle; it occurred to me that whereas I write a poem by dint of mighty cerebration, the yellow-leg walks a better one just by...

 Mendelian Genes are All-Or-Nothing

A Mendelian gene is an all-or-nothing entity. When you were conceived, what you received from your father was not a substance, to be mixed with what you received from your mother as if mixing blue paint and red paint to make purple. If this were really how heredity worked (as people vaguely thought in Darwin's time) we'd all be a middling average, halfway between our two parents. In that case, all variation would rapidly disappear from the population (no matter how assiduously you mix purple ...