The Lowdown

Alrighty! Well I'm back, and things are starting to take shape. So I picked a definitive theme for this blog thing. let me explain:

First, a question: If you could live the life of any historical figure, who would it be?
My answer is the biblical Abraham. you'll see why later.

For those who don't know, I'm leaving Minnesota to take a conservation internship in the Chihuahuan Desert of Roswell, New Mexico. This will be great for me. For some reason, I've always loved the symbolism of wandering the desert. That, and I'm a complete biological reductionist--hence, the Abraham fixation.

Get a load of this. Genesis is chugging along, we are introduced to Abram, who's at first just sort of a background character. Then, God starts favoring the hell out of him--go stand on this hill & all the land you can see, is yours; your barren wife Sarah (age 90) will start bearing children; your offspring will be as numerous as the stars; they will overtake their enemies' cities, et cetera. Every word dripping with pure genetic fantasy.

Think about it. Every little perk of Abraham's directly acknowledges the ingrained sense that the author (really all men. women too, although they employ much different strategies.) of how to win at natural selection. 1.) Take over all of a scarce resource (land), 2.) fill it with little Abrahams, 3.) Make sure the little Abrahams are rich, powerful men too ("I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you"), and 4.) start pimping the Canaanites. Really, there's no way for this to fail.

Funny thing, Darwin comes along some 3,000 years after this was written to "explain" natural selection to us. But Abraham knew about it all along. You know that Sunday school song that goes "Iiiiii'm a child of Abraham. And so are you. And you. And you, and you, and you!"
Game, set, match --> Abraham.

Also, I feel that wandering the desert is otherwise very symbolic of something. Seeing as how many people reading this blog recently graduated and are out on their own, we'll go with that.